Part 8

Post date: Dec 07, 2011 4:2:16 PM

I’m glad I’m single with no kids. Otherwise, I would have had to make different decisions for my life. I would have had to do so even if I was planning to go the family route – which, thanks be to God, I’m not. Could you imagine?

I have my moments where I wonder if anyone truly gives a shit. That’s the funny thing about unemployment. You go from empowered one day to depressed the next day and then introspective the day after that. Sometimes that happens all in one day. I’ve had that happen to me over the course of an hour. That was a fun party.

It’s my pleasure to write. I’d do it for free – clearly. But I can’t do it for free forever because there isn’t anything else I particularly want to do. I think about working at a restaurant, a bar or anyplace that doesn’t require my sitting at a desk for eight, nine or ten hours each day unless that desk is in my apartment.

I was talking to my therapist about how I felt I was stacking the odds up against myself with my refusal to go back into advertising and ever-lengthening list of other things I am not going to do.

His response was that, on the contrary, I am creating opportunity for myself. It was an unexpected response and I haven’t exactly figured out how but since I don’t pay him to just make me feel better, there’s probably some truth what he said.

In the grand scheme of things, I don’t know what’s good. My work could be shit (it's not). Or it could constitute an entirely new way of expressing oneself. One person could say that I’m the greatest thing since Creation, while the next person could say that I should be sent to the electric chair for putting readers through 160 Erick Davidson stories.

I see what goes viral – some of it is awesome, a lot of it makes me wonder why some people even exist in the first place. I see people’s success in a variety of fields, including my own. I came across the LinkedIn profile of a high school classmate. He’s the Editor-in-Chief of an online magazine. I wanted to cry. It's not that I'm jealous. I just want that for my life but I have no idea how he got to that position (I don't want to ask) and I only have a vague idea as to how I can make that happen for myself.

Some people’s success is inspiring. Other people’s success makes me want to pull the covers over my head only to emerge when they cart me off to the morgue on a stretcher.

It’s all a crapshoot. You can only prepare so much and then the rest of it is out of your hands. I knew I was being laid off and I repeat -- I’m still happy about it.

But it’s amazing even the most local of publications don’t respond to inquiries, submissions or pitches. It’s unprofessional and rude. It’s a sad state of affairs this has become acceptable and commonplace.

MossCorp will not be run that way.