Today has been Flashback to Wilco Day. First was a call from Unemployment, telling me that they’d talked to my old boss this morning and he pretty much said I sucked. History of underperformance. Odd, since I’d only had one write-up in a year for underperformance, and it was a week before I got fired.

Anyway, I chatted with the lovely Jessica for a while, and after I was done with that I made that pretty picture seen above, intending to use it in a blog post (this one, in fact).

Something changed though – as I was posting, I got an email from an employee at the place I was employed at – the bossman that fired me? He just got fired by HIS bossman.

I want to say, damn near instant karma. He badmouthed me to unemployment, now he’s going to have to convince them that HE deserves it. HA.

Now, this leaves me in a position where I’m not sure what to do. I had said that I’d love to go back to my job there, if only bossman and tweety weren’t there – now bossman is gone. Tweety has my job though.

So I’m thinking…maybe I’ll write an email to the bossman’s bossman. How to say it though…”now that the cause of my termination has been eliminated, howsabout I come back and try to repair whatever damage has been done since I left?”

I’d better think on this.

I’m sitting here this morning trying to figure out what to be when I grow up, or something. Actually it’s more like, what should I be today?

I’m currently unemployed, have a teen-aged daughter, 7 chickens, a bunny, and 4 cats (one of which just had kittens. Add to that a roommate with 2 dogs. Oh, and did I mention that he lost his job shortly before I did? Yeah.

I have had a whopping one interview so far. Didn’t get it.

So today, I’m trying to think of something productive to do while staying within eye-shot of my new-mom cat (she gets nervous when she can’t see me and starts dragging kittens around). I thought, I should make something to sell on SL. So I start googling for ideas. Ornamental window bars. Sure, why not. I open up Photoshop, start fiddling around with some pictures and decide to start from scratch rather than using pictures as a base. Fine. I decide I need some music, because I have this stuck in my head.

The first song that comes on is Days and Days, by Concrete Blonde. It’s sorta fast-paced, so you just catch flashes of lyrics if you aren’t paying a lot of attention. The only lines I hear clearly:

But every morning, when the light
comes creeping in around my eyes
another future falls behind
the one I had I mind

Cheery thought. The song ends. Another starts. It’s an 80′s flashback! Talk Talk – It’s My Life.
It’s not so much the lyrics there, but the mood it sets. Le Sigh. As I write this, The Massacre by Ennio Morricone. Happy thoughts!

I’m having trouble getting motivated. I could be building an inside hutch for Dustbunny, or fixing the fence around the chicken yard. I could clean the living room, do the dishes, laundry, start “pounding the pavement” as they say, looking for work. I could be scouring every job-search website, responding to every ad that looks even slightly promising.

But I’m not – I’m sitting here fiddling around in photoshop, when I know damn well that the last two projects I’ve done for SL are still sitting in a file folder, un-uploaded. It’s almost like I’ve decided that I’d rather sit here and see what happens rather than make anything happen.

Probably not a great way to work things, given the plethora of people/animals dependant on me in some way, huh.

Funny, no one is beating on my door asking me to come to work for them for millions of $$! Isn’t how it normally works?

Guess not.

Problem with being a job-looker right now, aside from the obvious “ain’t no jobs” part, is that it’s too damn hot to go out and pound the pavement, like they tell you to do. That leaves a lot of time for online job searching, which leads to a lot of online time wasting.

Part of my own problem is that I don’t know what to be now. Do I go back to office work, do I stay with inventory-related stuff? Do I downgrade, back to floor work if I do? I’d love to be one of those people who travel around for vendors, setting up displays and doing ordering and all that. Usually requires a vehicle though, and that’s not in the cards any time soon. Where once I couldn’t imagine living without a car, now I can’t imagine living with one. Although I did see the cutest scooter the other day, the lady at Baskin Robbins had one. But no…probably not gonna happen.

So I have a lot to sort out. I can’t really take the time to do that though, since there are things like rent and zoo food to take care of. I wish there was a definitive test, showing what your aptitudes really are, and what you’d be happy and proficient at. I’d pay like, $10 to take that test.

In the unemployment world, this is called the “waiting week”.  It’s the week they won’t pay you for after you lose a job.  It’s the week I suppose they are hoping you will use to get a new job, and so won’t need to cash in your unemployment insurance.

No such luck.

Here’s what I did do:

I bought sheets.  I played with chickens & bunny.  I watched Twinkles grow and grow.  I played Big Fish games.  I refreshed craigslist.  About every half-hour.  I drank coffee.  I updated my resume.  I went to lunch with a Jen to catch up on old-job gossip.  I applied for a couple jobs (no response yet).  I’m sure I did more, but dammit, it’s been hot and mostly I just wanted to nap.

Now is the time when I wish I knew what I wanted to be.  Actually, I wish I knew what I would be really good at.  I still have no idea.  Lots of ideas float through, but nothing sticks very long.

Maybe I’ll start a chicken blog.  A daily annoyance for anyone who cares.  Won’t make any money, but at least I won’t be clogging this blog with chicken shit.

I don’t know.  Maybe I can distract myself by designing a blog layout that would be fun for that.  By “designing” I mean modifying an existing layout with my own graphics…I’m no coder.

So mostly I’ve had this one song stuck in my head, it goes like this:

(scroll down to “nothing on my mind”)

(sorry, couldn’t figure out how to get just the one song)