A Means To No End

I don’t know when it started, but somewhere along this journey to unemployment I developed a love. Ever since I can remember, I have loved shopping. Many of you may be thinking, “what girl doesn’t love shopping?” and I am here to tell you, there are quite a few of these people; I am not one of them. The beautiful thing about shopping is there are so many different forms of it.

I love clothes and although my drawers and closets may be overflowing and bursting at the seams, I can never have enough. There’s something about that feeling of euphoria that I get when I have found that perfect top. It’s a high that cannot be explained. With so much free time on my hands I have been lucky enough to frequent malls, boutiques, and discounted fashion stores. When I cannot leave to go peak into these stores, I make time to check store websites and put items into my cart that I most likely will never buy. Some of you may be wondering why I am writing about my love for shopping and what it has to do with being unemployed and looking for work. The problem with unemployment is a lack of funds. When I was in college my parents gave me a weekly allowance which was to be used for entertaining myself and food. My problem was that if I found a piece of clothing I truly loved (which happened often) I would forgo food shopping and instead put my money somewhere I could actually see it: my closet.

After racking of credit card bills from Nordstrom, Urban Outfitters, Bloomingdales, etc., I think my parents started to gain insight into this addiction. Unfortunately they are no longer willing to support my passion and I am stuck scrounging for money and buying items I really cannot afford.

My love for shopping does not stop at clothing. Recently my friend and I have decided to become roommates in Washington D.C. Our plans are great and our dreams are vast, but our wallets are thin and continuing to get thinner. While I’ve been spending my money on unnecessary additions to my closet and road trips to whatever gets me away for the weekend, she’s been spending her money gallivanting through Europe without a care in the world. Clearly this is not the ideal situation for apartment hunting, but we seem to think it will work. My niche in shopping has now shifting from clothing to apartments. As I sit on my computer searching for the ideal two bedroom two bathroom apartment with walk-in closets, a gourmet kitchen, and balconies, (all for less than $2,000 in the heart of D.C.) my mind starts to wander to what comes next.

My focus doesn’t stay in one place for long before I am on furniture websites, picking out each and every detail to our apartment. Look M, this tiny side table would be perfect for our living room! Its only $400 obviously we will have to have it. Now I’ve found us the perfect sofa, it’s small, but amazing. We’ll need two so we can each lounge; another $1600. Within 30 minutes we had our ideal living room and dining room picked out for a cool cost of approximately $4,000 without ever thinking about bedroom furniture or kitchen appliances.

When I get something in my head I obsess over it until I make it happen. Moving out and getting my own apartment is not an option so much as a necessity for my sanity. My family is crazy and they don’t seem to understand or appreciate the things I love to do. These days my parents have taken the joy out shopping by telling me I cannot afford it anymore and I have enough. Rather than feeling happy about my purchases, I just feel guilty and instead sneak my clothing into the house rather than show it off.

I want to move out of my house. I want to be able to wake up when I see fit, not when I hear my stepmother screaming for the dog to come back in the house at 7:30 in the morning. I want to be able to go food shopping and buy exactly what I want, not go into a food store and have my father tell me I can pick two things for myself. I want to come home at 5 o’clock in the morning and not have my parents demand to know where I am in the middle of the night. But most importantly, I just want to leave. So maybe I don’t have a job and maybe I don’t have money, but if getting an apartment is anything like getting that $500 pair of boots that I had to have, I will certainly make it happen.

A Question Unanswered

Some people are not supportive of the lifestyles of the broke and unemployed. Waking up to my friend sending me a link to listen to the song “Get a Job” is not ideal, especially after waking up to my father chewing in my ear as a means of retaliation from the last post. To all my friends and acquaintances that choose to associate themselves with me, please note: I do not yet have a job, I do not liked to be asked about it, and no the job search is NOT going well.

I had lunch with a friend of mine who graduated from Maryland the year before me and she is very supportive of my sedentary lifestyle. We lived together for a year so she is quite understanding of how I choose to live and knows that food is the way to get me out of my house. We chose Chipotle because for some reason it has that sort of sense of nostalgia to college life; it could be because there was one month where we basically ate there every day. Every time I see this friend she tells me that she understands how difficult it is and reminds me that it took her a year before she was able to move to Washington. A year living where I do seems more like an eternity and I refuse to believe that it will take me this long. She then, like most people I see these days, asked me how the job search is going. I guess she could see the look in my eye when she asked me this because she quickly apologized and said “I know its not going well because if it was you would have a job.” This is not a friend who will lie to spare your feelings, she recently told another friend that she didn’t like her new highlights, they were not new and they were not fake. In any case, I respect her for her honesty and enjoy spending time with her because of the sheer nonsense that comes out of her mouth.

The rest of our conversation turned from jobs to just catching up, but once I left I got to thinking about this one question “how is the job search going?” On a daily basis I am probably asked this question about 10 times, whether it’s by a friend, one of my parents, a sibling, it comes up more than I would like. My dad will come into the office where I am diligently working to make moves in my life and stare at me for about five minutes before asking “any leads today?” I understand someone who I never speak to asking me if I have a job, but the people I speak to everyday do not have an excuse. Don’t you think if someone handed me a job I would at least tell the people that are closest to me, let alone my own father? To the people that graduated before me, I would like to take this opportunity to apologize from the bottom of my heart if I ever asked you this thoughtless and utterly inappropriate question. I can now relate to the rage you feel inside when you know someone is about to ask you that question and you just want to stop them mid sentence so that you don’t have to respond with “it’s not going well, thanks for asking!”

Being unemployed is not the easiest lifestyle in the world. At least if I had a job there would be a wider range of annoying questions that people would ask me on a daily basis. I know some people may be thinking that I have it pretty good if all I am worried about is someone asking me a simple question, but this is not the case. I am not the world’s most tolerant person and if you are going to ask me something that you can answer yourself, don’t bother. It’s like the phrase “if you have nothing nice to say, don’t say it;” “if you have nothing useful to say, don’t say it.”

A Bitter-Sweet Taste of Home

I’m just going to be blunt and say it: it was never my intention for my four years of undergrad to expire. If I could, I would have stayed at school and been supported by my parents forever. Moving back to your parents’ house is not an ideal situation for anyone who has been gone for four years, regardless of what they may tell you. There are, however, some perks to moving home, ones that I know I will miss if I ever leave.

My days are spent figuring out what exactly I am going to do next. What friends will I see this week? Where will I go this weekend? What jobs should I apply to? Of all of the things that I think about in a day, there is one that is constant: what meals are going to be provided for me? This is the biggest luxury of moving home and one of the few things that I can think of that I actually enjoy. When I wake up in the morning I am greeted by my sister who has most likely been sitting on Gmail waiting for me to speak to her for hours. The first thing without a doubt that she will ask me is “what are you going to eat today?” A majority of the time I respond with a simple “I don’t know,” but once this question is asked, my mind goes into a frenzy of all of the options.

I love food and I come from a family of food lovers. My sister has a blog about food (Greedy Girl Blog), my mother is a baker, and my dad chews food so loudly that you can only hope he is thoroughly enjoying it. All someone has to do is put some food in front of me and I will tolerate almost anything that person may say to me. The dinner conversation in my house is normally revolving around my step mother who is the only person to work out of the house; my father and I both “work” from home. Once she completes updating us on her day, I sometimes try to get a word in, but am quickly met with the response “get a job” before turning my attention back to the food and the horrifying noises coming from my father’s mouth.

Wednesdays are a different sort of night. We go out to dinner with my grandma who gets in the car and immediately asks what is new. Every time she asks me I say nothing, because what could be new in the life of someone who goes nowhere and sees nothing? Normally after this response she gives me a look and will direct her attention to the front seat of the car, but tonight was different. When I told her nothing was new, she then asked me if there was any news as far as a job goes. I explained that finding a job is very difficult and there was no news to report. “No news is good news,” her favorite line to say to me did not follow as it normally would. Instead my grandmother went into her plastic bag of junk mail that she brings my father every week and pulled out a newspaper that was most likely three weeks old. She explained that I should look in the wanted ads of this newspaper and see what I can find. In these ads I found “BLUE JEAN JOB!!” and “FREE PROGRAM on How to Get Rich.” It was clear that my grandmother didn’t really review the options; she just thought she would save a trip to the recycling by giving me her disposable goods. I explained to my grandma that I appreciate her help, but am not interested in remaining in the Baltimore area and am certainly not interested in being scammed into a class on how to get rich.

I love my family but I cannot say they are an easy bunch to deal with, and I know for fact they would say the same of me. What I do know, and I’m quite certain they could agree with me on this, is that I put up with their nonsense and overwhelming personalities for the sake of a free meal. Being away at school you realize all of the great meals you are missing at home; homemade dinners, Baltimore crabs, Wednesday night dinners out of the house. Once you arrive back home it’s one of the few pleasant things to look forward to each week. Don’t get me wrong, I love spending time with my grandma, and I can probably tolerate her the most out of anyone in my family, but when we sit down at the dinner table and she asks once again “so Gabriella, what’s new?” that’s when I start to lose it.

My grandmother and I at one of our crab feasts, my father is in the background smiling after winning the award for "most obnoxious eater."

A Future Unknown

“What do you want to be when you grow up?” A common question every parent or teacher asks their eager children. Some kids want to be an astronaut, some want to be a doctor, some want to be a lawyer, the list goes on. When my parents asked what I wanted to be when I grew up, I gave this idea some thought. If I could be anything in the world, I told them, I would want to be a book on a shelf. My sister claims that I said I wanted to be a book and a shelf, but I think at the age of three I knew I couldn’t be two things at once, so I’m sticking with my story of a book on a shelf. Yes, 19 years later, I do realize this dream will never become a reality, but now looking back I can’t help but think how good that lifestyle could be. The only worry I would have is when is someone going to dust me or read me instead of when is someone going to hire me and let me move out of my parents’ house?

If I could have it my way I would be sitting in a foreign country writing about the experiences I am having fulfilling my dream job. I would tell all of my readers all about my world travels and would finally follow through on the deal I made with each of my friends to pick a place to travel with me. Instead I am sitting in my parents office in the house I grew up in. I am still in the clothes I wore to sleep and have no intentions of changing as I have no intentions of moving locations. My college roommate will most definitely be reading this while thinking, that girl is a useless mongrel; she would be correct.

It is not by any means my goal to live this lifestyle, despite what my parents may think. While I am quite happy having my meals cooked for me, a roof over my head, and some occasional spending money, I am not by any means comfortable. Comfortable is walking down the hall of your apartment building (where your parents do not live) and seeing what your friends are cooking. Comfortable is having a bad night and crawling into bed with your roommate so she can give you some sort of ridiculous pick-me-up that most likely has no bearing on your life. Comfortable is NOT your father slamming your door open at 9 a.m. telling you to wake up because people are pounding down the door to hire you; and yes this happens on a daily basis.

I cannot say exactly what the focus of this blog will be as I do not know what tomorrow will bring me. My passion in life is writing and having graduated from College, I am doing less and less of it. This is my way of bringing a little bit of entertainment into everyone’s lives by giving insight into the lifestyle of an unemployed college graduate. My goal is to one day become a travel journalist so if I happen to travel somewhere exotic like New York or Washington, DC (the only vacations I can afford at the moment), I hope to update my readers on these adventures. Fortunately for me, about 90 percent of my friends are unemployed and their stories are just as entertaining, if not more. My blog is essentially an overview of what it is like to leave our little college bubble and why we all wish we had failed senior year.

Anthony Bourdain once said, "I, a product of the New Frontier and Great Society, honestly believed that the world pretty much owed me a living; all I had to do was wait around in order to live better than my parents." This is my inspiration, and this is who I aspire to become. While I may not believe that the world owes me, I do hope that my dream job will fall into my lap, and until then, I will be here waiting for a reason to change out of last night's clothes.