Girl on the Brink: Surviving Desperate Times with Desperate Measures

Day 65 — Up Yours, Keep the F—

ANN’S NOTE: Guilt, even in blogging. Been without Internet access and now at my gym to post today’s entry. If a picture is worth a thousand words, what is an audio clip worth? I say it is also worth a thousand words. This clip, which I’ll refrain from describing, serves as a metaphor for my [...]

Day 62 — How Not to Make a Living

I do have work today, so I will get to work after I finish this entry, though I’d much rather eat some cereal and milk. I haven’t had breakfast, and I’m hungry. But all I have in the refrigerator is boxed milk with a prolonged shelf life, the highly pasteurized kind that doesn’t need to [...]

Day 62 — Finding Your Match

Speaking of love, as I love to do, brings me to another trick of the trade in finding a job. While the two are as unrelated as bread and chocolate, they still go together. I have surges during the day where I fervently re-visit job boards and apply for freelance work, checking my email every [...]

Day 61 — Food Stamp Fandango

I couldn’t use my food stamps at the grocery store today. I was wearing my leather jacket, and Ted was at the checkout. In more prosperous days and when I was married, Ted once asked me if I knew of any girls he could date. He also checked me in at the polls on Election [...]

Day 60 — Zip Code Dating, Job Hunting

I’ve read that I should not limit my job search to the geographic area I live in, that having a job, any job, is better than not having one, even if it is someplace else. I agree with that advice. But I’m not going to move to Fort Wayne, Indiana, or any place I’d have to [...]

Day 59 — Amateur Burlesque Fantasy

Oh, boy. I found a new confidence builder: amateur burlesque. Read this one in The Washington Post. Anything, I say, to get noticed builds my confidence. When I’m the center of attention, I feel like a man—in control. Mind you, I don’t think I’d ever have the nerve to do it, take off my clothes. [...]

Day 58 — Strange Thoughts

When you’ve been as unemployed for as long as me, you have time to think about things, food being one of them, because I do get hungry and phantom sex only goes so far. So it should come as no surprise when I reached into a box of crackers, the same kind of crackers I’d been [...]

Day 57 — Creditors to Keep Happy

Job hunting is a full-time job. So is keeping creditors at bay. The two creditors you don’t want outside your door are the IRS, the District of Columbia or any state that collects taxes. I stay a good doobie for these two creditors, even if I have to pay a late fee. I don’t imagine customer [...]

Day 56 — Protecting Your Ass-ets

There are two items that would devastate my job search if something happened to them: my Blackberry and my laptop. I don’t remember the last time I printed out a resume, licked a stamp and sent it through the regular mail. In today’s competitive job market, I want to be ready to accept calls at any [...]

Day 55 — Two Dimensional Interviews

With the economy the way it is, companies are calling for phone rather than in-person interviews. It’s a cheaper way to screen prospective job candidates and takes less time. I’ve noticed that cash-pressed guys are also using this approach when they contact me through Match.com to make the preliminary screening before actually having to spend [...]