The funny thing about being unemployed while still being employed is that its still not that fun.

When I attended a seminar on change management, the person leading the seminar showed a picture of a man, woman, and child walking down a road, toward the camera. The man and woman looked grim, eyebrows furrowed, and with a decidedly downcast aspect to their mouths. The child, on the other hand, was looking straight at the camera and appeared to be skipping. The backstory to the photo is that the three were walking away from what used to be their house, which had been blown away by a tornado. The tornado blew away much of their town, too.  And the takeaway from the story is that the tornado is just an event. What people do afterwards is the change management.

I am managing the change. I read Gawker to self-satisfy that its probably not about me, but rather a blown-up, over-generalized sad state of affairs in all regards. I dutifully put in my time, comparing the list of my occupational handinesses to varying lists of workplace demands. I keep my chin elevated, my interview shoes shined, my three-minute elevator speech at the ready. I spend a good amount of time thanking various entities that I still have income. I spend other time in repose, thinking about the legions of farmers and salespeople and streetfolk who have never known income security, even if they attain professional status in their class and work as hard as they can. I wonder about the length of the shadow this time of our lives will have – I seemingly came into the world with a Depression-era mentality, but for others, I imagine the thick slurry of the unemployed and the small holes of the want ads is a deeply de-stabling envisage.

Its Friday night, and as with all evenings nowadays, I am looking for work or thinking about how I should be looking for work. That seems to be a full-time job in itself.