Wednesday, January 15, 2014

Musings on unemployment

It's getting to the pointy end of January. The double-digit dates, when you can't really pretend it's holidays anymore, and it's time to get stuck back into the PhD. And yet, here I am, patently NOT reading texts on methodology, but meditating on all the ways I am still enjoying being unemployed.

Because I no longer come home from work late needing to quickly produce something for dinner, I have abandoned the weekly meal plan, an organisational device that I'd been using for at least three years, and am once again enjoying being creative in the kitchen, using seasonal produce.

Because I don't have any pressures on my time that I have not chosen for myself, I can bring myself to do chores that I once resented - washing dishes, doing laundry, even hanging up my clothes so I'm not just dressing out of the clean laundry basket the whole week.

Because I no longer have to deal with assholes on a daily basis, I have the emotional energy now to enjoy leaving the house in the evenings for social occasions or extra-curricular activities, instead of spending all my non-working hours on the couch, numbing my brain with episodes of CSI.

In fact, aside from the obvious no-disposable-income thing, the only down side to not having a job thus far is that when it's FORTY FUCKING DEGREES outside there's no air-conditioned workplace that I can escape to, but all things considered that's a pretty minor issue. After all, I could go to the library - any library, but the National Library is just down the road, and it has many useful resources I could be using to write my essay on research methodology. OR, I could just sit in my warm little house and enjoy not having to do anything for just a little bit longer.

Happy New Year!