hey pretty

Susie Homemaker

As any of you who have ever been without employment know, coping with your situation can be a major challenge. Sure, the life of carefree leisure sounds great to anyone stuck in a loveless job, but not having one, and having to fill your days for an indefinite period of time can be a daunting endeavor. There are after all, only so many hours one can spend searching WaPo for a new job.

I have found over the past year or so that I have become quite bad about occupying myself. I think my party-girl schedule of constant evening socializing distracted me from ever having to spend much time alone. And now that I've abandoned that lifestyle, I'm reminded of the challenge of having to entertain myself. While I love being alone, I sometimes have a hard time with it when its imposed upon me.

Today was no different. I overslept and awoke to my cell ringing, with 47 calling to ask how last night's yoga class was. After a conversation with him that resembled more of a series of grunts on my end (I am not a morning person) he got the hint that I wasn't ready to banter and let me go. Finally awake, I thought about what I was going to do today and suddenly felt very glum.

After kicking about the house for an hour or two I realized that I've been very grumpy for the past several days and that this mood was beginning to resemble depression. Since I'm prone to annual bouts of SAD, it's hard to know if my mood was situational or seasonal, but I didn't really care. I just wanted to do something about it. Luckily for me, half the battle of depression is recognizing it. I've never been one for real pharmies, but I do like to dabble in herbals, and I suddenly remembered a half full (notice how i didn't writer "half empty") bottle of 5 HTP in my medicine chest. After downing two along with a mug of green tea, my mission for the day was instantly clear: How had I not noticed all the fun activities waiting for me inside my own house? It was time to play homemaker. I felt instantly better.

So far today, I have cleaned the kitchen and have done two loads of laundry. I am also cooking. There is currently a large bowl of milk, sugar and butter cooling on my counter where it will soon meet with several packets of yeast, all in preparation for my ultimate gastronomic specialty: challah bread. I learned how to make it in batches of 50 when I was a cook at a co-op in college. Its rare that I break out those skills anymore simply because I normally don't like being tethered to the kitchen. But today is dreary and cold and I have nowhere else to go, so why not whip up several loaves of the best bread ever invented?

Unemployment is slowly reminding me of the simply joys of domesticity. Sure, it's still great to go out and eat great food at hip new restaurants and visit my favorite dive bars, but I am slowly accepting that this slower lifestyle is a good one for me. While laundry and cleaning doesn't sound glamorous, few things make me quite as happy as the site of a clean counter and a stack of warm fluffy bed linens. If I can have a fat slice of challah to eat as I climb into a well-made bed at the end of the day, so much the better.

You must excuse me now, my yeast collection beckons.

Happy Holidays, You Get a Pink Slip

I suppose the writing was on the wall and that I was simply ignoring it. Late afternoon Friday I was called into an impromptu meeting with my managers and HR. Knowing that's never a good sign, my stomach immediately lurched into my ovaries. They sat me down and started blah blahing about funding cuts to my contract, a lack of available work in other parts of our company, two week's notice, crappy severance package, COBRA, and the like. Apparently, it had nothing to do with my performance, it was merely a matter of money. Too stunned to efficiently process the information being presented to me, I blurted out some nonsensical first impressions of the situation. They asked me if I had any questions. I paused for a moment and asked if I could go home early. They all stifled a laugh and said that would be okay.

That was three days ago and I've been vacillating between several contrasting emotional states ever since. To be honest, I sort of hated my job anyway and was only hanging in there due to the fact that I wanted to see if my pet website project would ever get off the ground. I had applied for a couple of jobs a few weeks ago but had since discovered a new sense of loyalty towards that project and thought it might be something worth sticking around for. Now I'm just a little mad that I let the website project distract me from what I apparently should have been doing all along--conducting a balls to the wall search for new employment. I've noticed recently that I haven't been nearly as funny or as entertaining as I have been in the past, and I'm almost positive that it's a result of working in a boring office with very low employee morale. Yesterday I spent the day with 47 and a friend of his from out of town. Freed from thoughts of the oppressiveness of my job, I found myself saying things that were downright hilarious. So hopefully this trend will continue and my sense of humor will manage to climb out from underneath the rubble that is my mindnumbingly dull (soon to be ex) job.

I've been laid off before and it's something that I'm actually pretty good at. The last time it happened I was a complete mess leading up to my final day in the office, but I managed the actual fact of being jobless with a considerable measure of elan. This time around, I intend to use my unemployment as an opportunity to find a job that I actually like, that pays a better salary than the one I currently have, that provides me with an office with a door, and that is actually located within the District of Columbia rather than a crappy suburb that requires me to commute 45 minutes on the metro. I also intend to go to the gym every weekday morning and volunteer. I expect this experience to reward me with a fatter paycheck, a more engaging job, a better body and some interesting new friends and experiences.

While I've been told a million times over the past several days that this is actually a good thing, and while I know this to be true, my actual emotions are having a hard time catching up and accepting this fact. I'm happy to be leaving a situation that I was unhappy in, and grateful for the unemployment insurance that I get to collect. But I'm pissed off at the timing. Hello? Christmas is right around the corner. What sort of grinchy company lays somebody off in mid-November? Why not rename us as The Consulting Firm That Stole Christmas? While I have some funds in savings, I dread the prospect of having to find a flight to Boston as well as the prospect of buying Christmas gifts. I know that Christmas isn't about presents, but I feel bad that I won't be able to afford the usual tokens of appreciation that I lavish upon my mother this time of year. I hope she likes the macaroni necklace I'm going to have to give her.

What If Watching Football Was What It Took To Conceive?

Having found myself recently in my first monogamous relationship in quite some time, I am oddly obsessed with contraception and conceiving. As a woman of childbearing years who has no interest in having kids anytime soon, but who regularly engages in the very activity invented to give you children, it's an important subject to me these days. For many people, getting knocked up is pretty easy. Not all women choose to go on hormonal birth control for various reasons (like it makes us fat and crazy) and barrier methods aren't 100% reliable. Sponges and diaphragms slide out of place, condoms break and slip off. Because I am in no way interested in having children now, or perhaps ever, I am really beginning to resent the fact that sex is what makes you pregnant. And don't even get me started on the issue of pregnancy scares...

I really consider it a cruel trick on the part of Mother Nature that sex was designed to be so much fun that it would encourage us to propagate our respective species. Couldn't nature have found something I was less interested in to serve as the process through which living things reproduce? As I see it, there are plenty of activities out there that I have zero or little interest in participating in, many of which would be fine processes to designate as "the thing that gets you pregnant."

1.) Watching sports. I have little desire to do this most of the time and would be perfectly happy if I never had to watch a sporting event again in the future. In fact, if I had the built in excuse that I didn't want to because I wasn't ready to be a mom, that would be even better.

2.) Eating brussel sprouts. Thanks but no thanks, I simply don't care for these suckers. If later in life, I decided I did want kids, I could probably stomach a few brussel sprouts, but in general I could avoid them on a daily basis and be good to go.

3.) Going to church. This is something I never do nor do I have any desire to do. But since religious folks are so oddly obsesses with premarital sex, I think it would be hilarious if attended services was actually the thing that knocked you up. I mean, hey, what *would* Jesus do?

In the comments section tell me what activity you would most like to substitute for sex as the thing that gets you pregnant.

Why I Am Officially Over Astrology

The gospel according to Cafe Astrology.com:

All month, the Sun illuminates your sector of friends, groups, and dreams coming true. It's a sociable sector of your chart, and that's exactly how you are feeling--happy, lighthearted, and social. Group affiliations capture your attention. Connections can be made now and networking pays off. Being part of a community or circle of friends and building your social network is important to you at this time. This is a rather happy, goal-oriented cycle. A lively agenda is promised, you're attracting quite a bit of interest, and your energy for making contact with others is high. A stronger sense of community is with you during this cycle. Relationships take on a fun, if impersonal, tone now.

Nothing could be further from the truth right now.