On the (Cleveland)-Plus Side

It's now been a week since I got laid off. I've been measuring it in these terms, just like I remember measuring time elapsed after a devastating breakup -- e.g., "at this time last month, everything was fine...."

So I'm going to try and end this week on an upbeat note. In the spirit of Clare's Three Beautiful Things (Clare is, coincidentally, also out of work right now), here are some advantages to my situation:

1. I now know what time the mailman comes, as well as the garbage truck. Added bonus: I've gotten a feel for who's home on my street during the day, based on whether or not they've brought their garbage cans back in. Turns out there are a lot of folks around, which is always a good thing.

2. Whenever they ask me for money, I always tell panhandlers "Sorry, I can't help you. I just lost my job." Now, I'm not lying to them. (Everyone knows it's bad luck to lie to bums and hobos.)

3. I can start to systematically go through the list I used to keep on my desk titled, "Things I would be doing if I wasn't at work." One of those things is to explore each floor of the Cleveland Public Library downtown, particularly Foreign Language, so I can do some comforting left-brain stuff like boning up on a few of the many languages I can read marginally, like German, Italian, Russian, and Dutch.

4. I am going to be doing some pro bono work with the Cleveland Memory Project. This is, essentially, crossing enemy lines. But frankly, my vision for connecting Cleveland to its past (and thus, enabling it to reach its future) is much, much more in line with Bill Barrow's than with the methods of my former employer. And I've just got to use what I've got to do right by Cleveland.

5. I can bake bread every day, if I want to. When I feel untethered, this is what I always go back to. Because jobs come and go, but bread is forever.

Unemployment, Part I

I spent over an hour on the phone with the unemployment office today. Most of that was spent on hold, of course, but the stressful part came with the actual human interaction, which kind of took me by surprise.

I have a crap ton of sympathy for public servants, particularly those who are dealing with people in the midst of crisis. Often, in the public library, I dealt with people who had been shuttled back and forth between various agencies and saw the library as their last resort, the one place where they couldn't be turned away. You can imagine, then, what state they were in by the time they got to me. Barely coherent, stoppered with rage, foaming at the mouth, frustrated and angry and ready to unleash all of it on some poor unsuspecting cog in the bureaucratic machine.

I only exaggerate a little.

So obviously I try not to be one of those people. I try to be nice and act grateful and apologize, even when it's not strictly necessary.

When I applied for unemployment last week, there wasn't even a little part of me that was ashamed. I chalked this one up to fate, bad luck, and the lousy economy. I shrugged a typical Gen-X shrug and forged ahead.

Today, though, I felt ashamed. It was something about holding the actual letter from ODJFS in my hands. Even the acronym -- ODJFS -- makes me feel like someone who's "in the system," someone who has failed.

It's really disconcerting for me to realize just how much of my identity had been wrapped up in my pay stub. As ridiculous as it sounds, I was cleaning the kitchen today and happened across a a stack of Jim's old pay stubs. And I actually got kind of choked up.

But if I'm really honest with myself, underlying that is a simple unwillingness to acknowledge my identity as a writer, a profession that requires you to rely on uncertainty, that asks you to do work based on speculation and not on actual hours logged. Writers can't rely on safe, practical totems like time sheets and monthly reports. You've got to be a risk-taker, and frankly, my elementary school report cards always showed an "N" for "Needs improvement" in that category.

At any rate, I'd made a few errors on my application that needed to be corrected. I made the errors because the process is terribly convoluted and confusing. particularly to someone who's not in their right frame of mind because they've just been given the ax. And this is coming from someone who's relatively educated and articulate -- i.e., I know how to ask the appropriate questions. I have an adequate vocabulary to express my needs and uncertainties.

The person I talked to was understanding about errors 1 and 2, but error 3 involved me entering the wrong date of eligibility. (I put June 30 when I should've put July 1 -- or vice versa, I can't remember which.) At this point, her entire personality and attitude towards me changed, and I could tell that she thought I was trying to scam the system out of a few extra bucks.

That was the worst part. The most humiliating part.

The second-worst part was when I got off the phone, and started thinking about how much worse I would've felt if I hadn't formerly been a public servant. If I had thought that she meant it personally. If I hadn't been smart enough and experienced enough to know what was going on.

It was a very, very draining day. Welcome to America in the 21st century.

Ground Rules

Today is my first day of being unemployed. Based on what I learned the last time I was out of work, I've set down some ground rules:

Ground rules for being unemployed

1. No television between 9 am and 5 pm. I may watch 2 hours of television on Friday afternoon if I have completed everything on my agenda for that week. I may watch films and documentaries from Netflix or the library in the name of fiction research, but only one per day.

2. I must take a shower as soon as I get up, or at least shortly after eating breakfast.

3. I must eat breakfast.

4. Every Sunday evening, I will write up a daily schedule for the upcoming week.

5. Things that MUST get taken care of every week: sending writing goals to my writing buddy, revising Novel 2, researching and writing Novel 3, researching and writing Would-Be Magnum Opus, looking for and applying for jobs, professional development, work on the house.

6. I will shop for groceries at the West Side Market every Monday or Friday, and I will make large batches of things from scratch to freeze.

7. I will volunteer one day per week, preferably at the Cleveland Memory Project.

8. I will blog every day.

9. I will get out of the house and use my bus pass every day, Monday-Friday.

10. There will be no tears or despair. I have over the years become as tough as a mummified old boot. This is an opportunity to write, one that I have thrown away time and time again. I might not get a fifth chance.

11. I must write fiction for 2 hours every day. This does not include blogging, revisions, or research.

12. No drinking during the day, except during the course of a business lunch. I may drink during the day on Friday while watching Judge Judy, however, provided that I have accomplished everything on my agenda for the week.

13. I must not “let myself go.” I’m not allowed to wear anything that I wouldn’t wear to work (except for when I’m mowing the lawn. My former coworkers thought it was hilarious to watch me operate a pallet jack; they should see me with the lawnmower). I must keep getting regular haircuts, or a the very least, avoid looking like a crazy old hobo.

Check Back for Updates, or, Welcome!

I'm starting to put a few irons in the fire, so if you've reached this site by googling me, welcome. I'll be revamping the site a bit in the next few weeks, particularly by updating my resume and such. In the meantime, please be assured that I'm a top-notch researcher and a dedicated employee. And most of all, I'm 100% committed to seeing Cleveland succeed.

Laid Off, Part II

I realized with some bemusement today that it's not the dread of staying home all day and doing nothing that's making me feel so bad about getting laid off. It's not losing the paycheck, it's not feeling useless or unwanted.

What's making me feel bad is that I genuinely like the people I work with, and I'll miss them. I liked the work I was doing, and I'll miss that, too, because I was good at it. And I feel really sad that I'll never be a person of influence in my institution because if I may be so bold, I had an awful lot of good ideas for the place.

But most of all, I feel terribly disappointed that my institution has been doing so badly for so long. I really worry about its future.

In Which Christine is Made Redundant, Or, It Happened to Me!

I got laid off today.

This came as a complete surprise. Although I had been assured for months that there was grant money to cover my projects, it turned out that was a bit optimistic.

Once again, I remind you that none of Cleveland's important cultural institutions are too big to fail.

I'm not mad. I'm having some trouble figuring out just what I am. Filled with dread at the prospect of having nothing to do all day, mostly. The last time I was out of work, when we moved back to Cleveland from New York, I felt worthless and demoralized. It was surprising to realize that I had wrapped up so much of my self-worth in my paycheck.

One of the many reasons I haven't become a famous author by now is that I am not good at structuring my own time outside of the workplace. I like having a place to go every morning. I like knowing that I have to wake up by a certain time, leave by a certain time, and go to lunch at a certain time. Like Rain Man.

I also like feeling like I'm part of an institution. I like knowing that I am a cog in the machine of human civilization. Even though I've always been kind of a lone wolf, I like the camaraderie that comes with having a bunch of coworkers who are all in the same boat. I like having people to talk to all day.

This was a particularly awful weekend for this to happen, to boot, because Jim's brother is coming up and they are dragging me to an Indians game. (I hate baseball, Little Red Sambo, Slider, and people who look like they are having fun.) To add insult to injury, Jim's brother is always going on about how much he hates his (well-paying, stable) job, how he threatens to quit but then his boss sweet talks him back on board with money and perks. Oh, and he tends to cast a judgmental eye on the beer or wineglass in my hand -- kind of like being at church camp, minus the religion.

Anyway, I might have to face the fact, ultimately, that the Universe is going to keep kicking me in the ass until I stop thinking about wanting to write books, and just write books.

It's the best I can tell myself, at this point.

A Librarians' Call to Arms

If you've been paying attention, you've noticed that libraries are a big issue in Ohio this week.

I am a librarian, an information professional, and I believe that all librarians have a specific civic responsibility to dispel rumors with facts, correct untruths with statistics, and always (of course) cite our sources.

This is why I am urging librarians to take up arms against ignorance and to participate in the comments of their local news sites. Not just on the library issue, but about everything. All the time.

A while back, I encouraged my friends and neighbors to take the cleveland.com challenge. Since then, I've been told by many people that I'm fighting a losing battle. Here's what I've got to say about that.

When we flee to our own corners of the Internet, where we only talk to those people who think like us, we are doing something terrible that (particularly in Cleveland) we should do better to avoid -- i.e., we are committing a sin analagous to suburban flight. We are taking our intellectual tax base out to the edges, and leaving our core community to crumble.

You may say that trying to engage these people is a waste of time, that it makes us look foolish to even try. I disagree. Because when you participate in these discussions, your larger purpose is not to engage the "trolls," but to send a vital message to all of those people who read but DON'T comment, those people whose outlook is routinely poisoned by unalloyed ignorance and unconstructive negativity. The people who read and think, "there isn't a single reasonable person left in Cleveland. Everyone in Cleveland is ignorant. What an AWFUL place Cleveland is."

In terms of the suburban flight analogy, it's easy to see what's next on the agenda for these people.

The key to participating in these discussions, however, is that YOU have to be reasonable. And sometimes that's hard. You have to act professional, like you are at the reference desk. You would never shout at a patron (although we all want to shout at the patrons sometimes), so don't TYPE IN ALL CAPS, EVER. Don't fight with people. Don't put them down. Never act elitist, never say things like, "you would know that if you ever bothered to pick up a book."

You have to be succinct. Businesslike. Address specific points. Don't respond to insults. Don't take bait. Never, ever use the I-word ("idiot") or the S-word ("stupid.") Refute misconceptions and again, cite your sources. Disclose what is your opinion and what is fact, and most importantly: claim your expertise. Use these moments as teachable moments, where you can show these people how to find out more information for themselves.

Because information, as we librarians know, is power, and I suspect a lot of the complainers feel pretty powerless.