Unemployment: Month Three

As time marches on, I spend fewer sleepless nights worrying about myself and more sleepless nights (like this one) worrying about the other jobless people out there -- the ones who have debt and kids and no health insurance, who have an unemployed, underemployed, or disabled spouse, who may have only had three months' worth of savings if they were lucky. What is happening to them at this point in the game? One night I lay there staring at the ceiling, teeth clenched and shuddering about what might happen to a friend of mine, who has a chronic, lifelong congenital condition, if he lost his job and his health insurance. Could he go on his wife's health insurance? Would her company suddenly notice how expensive she'd become, and find a reason to quietly give her the axe?

During the third month of my unemployment, we acquired a washer and dryer. Second to the house, it was the most expensive purchase we'd ever made. We felt every penny of it leaving our bank account in horror-movie slow motion. But after four months' worth of plunking our quarters into the chronically out-of-order machines at the laundromat, this seemed like a good investment. I feel grateful for these darn things every day. That I still have not started to take the Greatest Innovation of 1908 for granted ... well, I feel that somehow, this means I'm on the right track in life.

Plus, I do a lot of laundry, which keeps me busy.

Otherwise, I've been following the example of a young PhD student who, two weeks after the stock market crash of 1929, returned from Europe to find no work and no hope of work. So he retired to Woodstock, where his sister lived in artists' colony, to do nothing but read for the next five years. Now I hope it's not going to take me five years to find another job, but at the same time I can't forget that after five years of intensive immersion in the books and stories that captivated him, this young man became Joseph Campbell.