Unemployment Diaries
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Day 1
It’s a beautiful day!! I’ve decided to keep this daily journal to record this time in my life—such a gift, to be given free time in this way. The layoff was yesterday. I shall record it here for posterity.
The CEO of my company, a man named Quilch Wheedler, had been acting awfully skittish in various Zoom meetings leading up to the fateful invite—an all-hands town-hall company-wide old-fashioned yuk-em-up brouhaha. He began by talking about “market conditions,” a term which he admitted he didn’t understand. He digressed into a story about his geemaw giving him his first whoopin’, he quoted the Percy Jackson and The Sea Of Monsters movie (“Never give up!”), he cried for 30 minutes, heaving sobs with no escape. We sat there through it all, knowing that this was just his process. He said, in the last minute of the meeting, that he was “so fucked up” to have to let “his family go” and that we’d always have a place in his home… So all in all, it was a really good layoff. They made my computer explode right after I got the email, so I’m currently in the hospital with shards of lithium-ion battery in my gut. I heard that Quilch made the investors so happy that they took him to Disney World. It’s cool—I didn’t even want to go and see the new Tron Lightcycle/Run ride.
Unemployment is such a gift. I’m going to spend this time developing my creative voice and exploring opportunities that I hadn’t considered. Time to catch up on literature too—I’m hearing amazing things about this Tolstoy man. I’m not worried. Everything’s going to be okay.
Day 112
Okay, so I forgot to write in this journal until now. I realized on Day 2 that I’ll never understand human behavior deeply enough to be an artist, and that I’m just not keenly observational and I don’t have the capacity for abstract thought or analysis, and also that I don’t have the ability to focus on anything or commit to anything, and also that I’ve wasted my entire life doing exactly what was expected of me, so I continued to do all of that and have mostly just been in bed watching Seinfeld. I found a potential new job—haven’t applied yet but it’s for CEO of Google so I think I have a pretty good shot and the work sounds really interesting and intellectually engaging? So that’s been keeping me going, I think. I have this stupid blog that I write every other week, but it’s been harder and harder to think of original ideas as I feel my creativity slowly being drained by worry, so that’s been bothering me too, and I end up doing it last minute every time.
Well, that’s just a couple days in the life of me, a fictional character named Slooby Poofargen!!!
Nabeel’s Footnote
Good lord