ten pros and cons of non-employment

PROS

1. wearing the same clothes for two or more days in a row (not including sox and undies! those get changed daily, thankyouverymuch)
2. don’t have to shell out $2/hour to park in front of work
3. don’t have to pick up coffee and treat on way to work
4. don’t have to get ready for work whilst also getting children ready for school
5. don’t have to pack the children’s lunches since I can’t afford for them to stay and eat lunch at school
6. have the whole day to bake and make food for my family
7. can take the children to the library or other places after school since I pick them up at noon
8. don’t have to shower as much as when I go to work
9. back doesn’t hurt so much when I’m not sitting in front of the computer all day
10. two longish driving trips are erased when I’m not driving to work after driving the children to school, then picking them up on my way back from work again

CONS

1. wearing the same clothes for two or more days in a row
2. have the whole day to bake and make food for my family
3. don’t have to shower as much as when I go to work
4. no money when I’m not working
5. no autonomy when I’m not working
6. my work is all emotion and physicality for no money, instead of four or five hours of pure cerebral problem solving for money, then all emotion and physicality
7. no grown-up joking around and simple banter with office workers
8. my work is cleaning up the house, doing laundry and breaking up fights
9. my hour and a half of peace while the girls are at school in the mornings is filled with manic job searching, finding nothing, then feeling like I did nothing with the hour and a half I had of quiet
10. panic that I am unqualified to complete even the simplest tasks, despite large quantities of web experience

Like it or not, gainful employment is preferable to non-employment, at least for the moment. I have barely worked in the past four or five weeks. Maybe things will pick up at the place I’ve been part-time/contracting it for this fall as is rumored, or maybe it will continue to be slow for contract production work, and I’ll be shit out of luck. Who knows, right? Who knows how things will play out? I would very much like to be earning money again. There are many bills to pay, and me with an empty bank account makes me feel powerless. I don’t want to feel that way. But duh, who does?

While the girls color on the kitchen table, I’ve started bringing out my own special art project, coloring and drawing, too. Like the cool kids. I’m diggin’ graphite again, y’alls. Someone told me recently that the moon has graphite on it. So do my drawings. The ladies prefer colored pencils and crayon for word and letter writing as well as drawing people. Mainly Beenie is doing this, though Mimi was rocking C-A-T this evening. She likes the letter C, I can tell. I gotta get some of the great art and writing my little four year olds are producing lately. If only I could locate my scanner under the piles of paper on my desk…