The Internet Trashbin

So here it is, the exciting new upgrade to my blogging lifestyle! After a ridiculously long time on the sidelines, from losing my job to getting bored with Myspace and subsequently confused by Facebook, I've decided to start writing blogs again, this time on the sort of neutral blogspot.com. What to expect? I don't know, a lot more randomness I guess. Between my obligations to my retarded Tuesday movie nights in New Jersey and my band in Brooklyn (ugh, how the name deflates the sentence!) these things will be popping out with the usual "whenever I feel like it" regularity. I'll let y'all know when something new is forged on the social networking outposts.

To sum up what's new with me, basically I'm unemployed, popping out 10-20 resumes a day, and hearing back from about 2% of the places I send to. I guess submitting to jobs online is basically like the old monorail episode of the Simpsons where at the end of the episode Marge's narration tells of how the monorail fiasco taught the citizens of Springfield to not support the whims of any song-and-dance man who steps into their town hall, except for the wooden skyscraper and escalator to nowhere that were later built. In a lot of ways I should be learning my lesson when I send out a resume/cover letter and get no response from most of these places. The proverbial "inbox to nowhere" basically, and forget about the private information trap that is Monster. If I hear from one more life insurance place trying to get me to shell out friends and family phone numbers I'm going to go ballistic. I'm even signed up on my old employer Yahoo! hotjobs and haven't reaped any rewards yet. Should I be surprised?

The prevalent thought of any office drone is the awesome things they could be doing with their time, especially awesome things they could be getting paid for. I should be taking trips, unloading more shit, finishing one of those unfinished written projects, but instead I'm opting for spending more time on the computer and hey, making music! It's not so bad, but man, if only I could hear back from more than 1 potential job a week, because ultimately the paycheck would be nice. Then again, what bullshit would occupy my precious hours not in the office? Dinner, maybe a movie or TV, some reading, and sleep I guess. It's such a double-edged sword, it's nice that at least this time being unemployed doesn't seem as much like a lazy abnormality as it did 2 years ago when I was last in this situation. I'm doing stuff, really free stuff though. Oh, how the computer can provide with the free.

One thing that I've noticed in my job searching is how so many jobs are throwing only the slightest of bones out there for the ravenous unemployed dogs. "Part-time, $10 an hour" for a Midtown Manhattan job? Where are the cheap apartments and tax breaks to accompany this maybe $300 a week trophy? When I got out of college almost 7 years ago $10 an hour part-time jobs were the norm for Ulster County, where an apartment for $400 a month or less was commonplace. Here we are in 2009 and not too much has changed, except now I'm talking about the Manhattan area where you're lucky to pay below a grand a month.

There's always ebay though, from what I noticed when I recently attended the NY Comic Con (my first Comic Book Convention) is that there is no shortage of geeks ready to shell out for action figures that are specifically for the "adult collector", as mentioned on the packaging. More on that some other time, for now I've got to throw at least five more resume/cover letters into the internet trashbin.