Author’s note: I really enjoy this opportunity to share my thoughts with you. I have a journal (that I’m not very good at keeping, to be honest) but this is a good outlet for me. Thank you for reading it.
I am unemployed. A day job provides a reliable routine, around which one can construct a life that suits them, and I have decided that I am one of those people who needs a routine. Without it, I am set adrift. My mind becomes a Raft of the Medusa, which is terrifying to consider but also startlingly accurate: my thoughts feel like they’re eating each other and I am paralyzed.
This is leading me to a tangent so skip to the part where I say it’s over if you just want to read about me.
This is a tangent about art
The image I used, above, is not a photograph of the famous painting by Théodore Géricault, which would have been the obvious choice. Instead, I used a photograph of people re-enacting the photograph for a video project in 2009. Rather than restate what is on the artist’s website I’m just going to paste it:
In late 2008 Adad Hannah received a telephone call from an old friend in British Columbia. Gus Horn, a rancher, community activist, and art collector, wanted to stage a version of Théodore Géricault’s monumental painting The Raft of the Medusa (1818-1819) in 100 Mile House, a community of 2000 people in central BC. Although Hannah initially tried to talk Horn out of pursuing the project, explaining that it would be difficult and expensive, the details for remounting this tragic scene were finally worked out in early 2009 and Hannah flew to BC to get started on the project.
The full details are at the above link, but it boils down to this: the whole dang community got together to make sure this project happened. It sounds like a Christopher Guest movie. They posed in front of an audience, in front of a painted backdrop, with props they all created, staying mostly still for up to ten minutes at a time. Snippets of the video are at the link.
The original painting was a representation of an actual event: the tragedy of a ship called the Medusa. 150 survivors from the wrecked ship piled onto a raft and, two weeks later, 15 people were left. Cannibalism happened, along with other assorted horrors.
Géricault painted the Raft of the Medusa right after the actual event, and he did a ton of research, even going as far as viewing bodies of dead people to get the colors right and interviewing two of the survivors. Although the work has been interpreted as a contemporary critique of the people in charge (the wreck of the Medusa was likely the fault of the captain of the vessel, who was a political appointee and apparently incompetent), I’m more inclined to see it as the 19th century version of a True Crime podcast.
Here’s why: Géricault painted it at the age of 27, and it is enormous, clocking in at 16 by 23 feet. He debuted it at the Paris Salon, a vastly popular show of art where every inch of wall space at the Louvre was covered with art. Young Géricault intentionally painted a well-known and salacious tragedy in an unconventional style as big as he could make it in the biggest art show in the world, to attract the most attention possible. He knew exactly what he was doing, and it worked. The painting was a smashing success for Géricault, who nevertheless died only a few years later of tuberculosis. The story of the painting of the Raft of the Medusa is a saga itself, involving insane asylums, severed heads stored on roofs, rotting limbs nicked from hospitals, and other assorted misadventures.
How is Géricault painting the Raft of the Medusa like a true crime podcast? Ask Sarah Koenig.
Back to the image of the video of the recreation of the painting of the Raft of the Medusa: I have no idea why they did it, but that’s the great thing about art. Who needs a reason? The point of art is only itself. It doesn’t serve a purpose, though it can. It doesn’t have to be useful, but sometimes it is. It doesn’t even have to be pretty.
End of digression
I have developed a roughshod routine that serves me well, most of the time. It is vulnerable to the joyful vicissitudes of life with a kindergartener and his mother, the love of my life, but it serves me nonetheless.
I begin each morning in the morning, which is important. As a person who lives with depression, I could easily spend an entire morning and most of an afternoon in bed, should the mood strike me. Part of the purpose of this routine is to keep such moods as far away as possible, and routines are good for that.
What time I get out of bed differs, but it’s always around 9, which is the best possible time for me to get out of bed. Being unemployed means I’m not making any money, but it also means I get to stay in bed exactly as long as I want.
Shyloh, the previously mentioned love of my life, has usually already risen and made coffee. Sometimes she is still there, sometimes she is not. Sometimes her son is there, sometimes he is not. What I do next is wholly predictable and is unaffected by who might still be around: I drink coffee.
The joy I derive from coffee cannot be overstated. I like my roasts light and my coffee black. I relish each of the two or three mugs I drink over the course of the remainder of the morning. It clears my mind and gets it moving, so I can do the next things as well as possible, because they are important.
I spend a portion of each morning on the job hunt, usually while drinking coffee. Sometimes this can take the whole day, sometimes it only takes a few minutes — it depends entirely on the opportunities available to apply to. A good opportunity isn’t posted every day, but I’m highly prepared for ones that are. This is a task that historically generates the most anxiety of anything else in my experience, so I address it each day immediately and with verve.
Let me be clear: applying to a job I am perfectly appropriate for is the most stressful activity in my life. This is not a sensible thing to be anxious about! I have spent hours dissecting this anxiety with my therapist, so I have a pretty good idea where it comes from. As such, I know how to navigate it. What’s funny about this process is that the actual things that make people the most anxious in job searches generates little to no anxiety in me at all. Interviews are fun! I love talking to people. I love being the center of attention. I love talking about things that interest me (and, luckily, what I do for work is extremely interesting to me). In fact, the ease with which I slide into interview mode is a hard point upon which I attach a rare piton of self-confidence (navigating anxiety is often as simple as finding enough things to attach good feelings to and using them to swing through the hard parts).
What happens after the coffee and job search activity is highly variable (see vicissitudes, above). Some days, I drive somewhere to get things or to get people, or take things to people, or take people to things. There are destinations and objects and people and they are always configured in different and exciting ways. This makes me feel that I have purpose, which is also good for staving off the unwanted moods.
Usually before or after the above, I use the energy derived from successfully conquering my anxiety by completing job search activities and drinking two to three mugs of coffee to do house work. This can be laundry, dishes, dusting, cleaning up after the cat, cleaning up after the kindergartener, cleaning up after myself, etc. It is work that must be done and it, like the transportation I provide, makes me feel useful, and without a job to give me the daily affirmation of purpose, I like doing it. That’s not true. I don’t enjoy doing the laundry, but I very much enjoy having done the laundry.
As the day draws to a close, I usually make dinner. We have been using services like Sun Basket, which ship a week’s worth of ingredients and instructions and I do the requisite tasks to turn them into edible food. I also find myself enjoying this far more than I ever expected, though I also equally enjoy not having done it, so it’s not like I would, given the choice, cook a meal every day instead of having the meal made for me. I am not insane! I like cooking, but I also like it when someone else cooks. On days that nobody quite feels like making food, we order food from a place that will, with unpredictable levels of accuracy, bring ready-made food of our choice to our door.
above: an actual photo of food being cooked by me
One thing missing from the above list that might jump out at you is this: writing. I gotta do it, and I do it every day. Sometimes I do it at great length, sometimes I only have time for a little. Sometimes I don’t feel like writing at all, which is when I make sure to write something, even if it’s just a few sentences. I don’t know if my favorite things to write, book-length things, will ever be read or distributed to wide audiences, but I’m trying! That’s all I can ever do.
If you read the last issue, you know that’s a step in the right direction for me!
A final digression about writers
Writers are a good source of historical information because they tend to write things down. Writers are people just like any other, so it’s a good bet that their favorite subject will be themselves. Because of this, there’s a lot of information about their routines, just as I’ve provided information about my own.
One commonality in nearly all of them is that they spend some portion of their day writing. Another one is the ungodly early hour that they ply their trade (writing). I mean, it’s ridiculous. Hemmingway always started “before dawn” so that’s kind of a moving target. Maya Angelou began around 7. W.H. Auden started at 6am. Kurt Vonnegut started writing at 5:30am. Haruki Murakami and Barbara Kingsolver start at 4! FOUR! What insanity!
I need my sleep, man. I don’t think I have it in me to get up at 4. Neither did Hunter S. Thompson, who woke up at 3 and immediately started doing cocaine, drinking Chivas, and wrote for 8 hours starting around midnight. I don’t like drugs, so that’s out. I guess I’ll stick to my own routine of writing when I can, as often as I can.
This is the last digression, I’m serious
My friend Elicia died between me starting this and now, over the weekend. It was sudden and unexpected and accidental. I hate it when people post about somebody dying and don’t mention how they died, but in this case it’s very boring and medical, so it doesn’t merit details. Everybody is still stunned. It’s a weird thing that happens when someone young dies suddenly. You know that scene where Obi-Wan has to sit down because Alderaan exploded and he felt it through the force? It’s like that. You get whacked by the news and and then you keep going and rescue the princess anyway because life is like that. Life keeps going and that person is back from where you just came from. If time is a river, they dropped anchor and waved goodbye as you went around the bend. She’s gone, now. She’s back there.
I’m only mentioning her here because she was a big fan of this dumb little newsletter, and she would have hated me mentioning her. She was always encouraging me to write in general and this specifically. Steinbeck’s writing advice included the encouragement that I’ve taken to heart for years: you can’t write for everyone — that is a paralyzing thought. Instead, imagine one person and write to them. Elicia is the person I wrote for. This one’s for her.
Elicia Parkinson was the best of us. She will live forever in my heart, and I will always be thankful that I got to know her.
Here’s proof that she would also hate me sharing:
That’s it. I’m done for now. Thank you for reading!