Life is a "game" of numbers to me. The first important one to this blog is 25. $13.25 was the amount I just paid to send the severance agreement back to my former employer via traceable mail. And $725 was the amount I just paid my landlady to continue living inside for the rest of the month of January (and through the first week or two of February since I've never been a deadbeat).
I mention these two numbers since they're the largest sums of money I've spent since I was laid off on Tuesday of last week. But more on that in another post. I want to use this one just to introduce why I'm blogging.
January 4, 2011 was, my last day at a job I held for 11 years. I won't say that I particularly liked the job, but the benefits were good. One of these benefits was money with my severance package. This makes the layoff not so bad, but, in the end, I'm still unemployed.
"Big deal," someone reading this might say. "9.6% of the population of the United States is currently unemployed. What makes you so special? I mean it sucks, but they're not making blogs about it."
Well, here's why I'm different than most of the population and why reading this blog might be interesting:
1) I'm in the "We Live In Public" (great movie, by the way) school of thought. That means, besides anything that might violate my severance agreement, I'm an open book. I think we're all being data mined constantly anyway, so I will put anything out there. Where I am, what I'm spending, pretty much everything. It's not like this is a secret if I don't.
2) I'm an experienced blogger and reviewer dating back to high school (which was about 20 years ago). I've been on the internet since BBSes. And, I'm a social media junkie. Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare (my personal favorite), I'm on all of them. And, again, I'm an open book. I'm not going to hide some activity for fear of its consequences. You'll be able to see the money I spend and if it's worthwhile.
I've had lots of friends go through the same things. And I wondered what they did all day. How did they stay sane knowing there wasn't much money coming in? Well, for all those who might be unemployed in the future, here's your possible answer.
On the day that I lost my job, a lot of people used the old adage, "this is the first day of the rest of your life." Well, I'm up in the air on what that means. But more on that later. For now, I'm going to enjoy a bit of weekend. This is still considered the weekend for me, right?
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