A Socialist's Dilemma

I've been cut off from unemployment insurance benefits. I thought they'd skipped a week due to a faulty computer connection, but when I laboriously made it through the thousands of distracting choices and endlessly long on-hold wait periods of the New York State Labor Dept. phone line, today, an impatient woman told me I had come to the end of my benefits year and I would have to file a new claim.

I know someone else this happened to. When she filed her new claim, she was denied because she hadn't worked enough to qualify for unemployment.

What a racket! What's the point of extensions if it's impossible to qualify for them?

But I have to admit this is the second time I've experienced strange flickers of relief when I've thought I was cut off. It might force me into action -- and I really hate action -- but I also hate this floating nothingness I've been living in. Somewhere deep down, I do believe I could get some kind of work, but I also suspect it will be poorly paid counter work, like Starbucks or worse. Still, it might be preferable to floating in the noxious brew of my own ideas and possibilities, the limitlessness of which is a guarantee for mental strain and emotional deterioration.

I'm too exhausted from trying to deal with this today. Tomorrow, I'll try yet again to get a human being on the phone to help me. For now I'm just going to try to write my personal statements for my grad school apps. But I did that yesterday and I ended up exhausting myself doing that-- this is what I mean about the noxious brew of my possibilities. I can hardly understand my own path so far -- trying to explain it to others is like pulling teeth, and trying to locate a true, solid, quiet, unchanging ambition or belief in my core is also like pulling teeth. And tomorrow i have to go to the dentist and ask him to pull my tooth -- unrelated except by metonymy.

In short, I'm driving myself crazy. It might be better to make lattes for a while.