On a personal note, I thought you’d all be relieved to know that I finally have a job again. Yes, you can get off of your pins and needles now. I got a job as a freelance web designer with Mayo (the clinic, not the condiment).

Hard to believe it was the end of July when I was laid off. I’d just seen “Superman Returns” and was gearing up for a major review of it on Monitor Duty, and then losing my job took the wind out of my sails. I think I’ve actually posted much less frequently when I didn’t have a job because when you’re unemployed you have to use all your time productively, either looking for a job, making money in other ways or doing chores around the house so you don’t feel totally useless.

My first thought when I was laid off was that I’d finally have time to write intensively and get Metro Med’s script finished up. Instead, I never even touched the script in those five months (due to, as I said, the need to job hunt and be productive, and writing a script for something that may never turn a profit is not “productive”). That turned out to be okay because in the end Phil Meadows found that he no longer had time to devote to being a comic book artist and Shooting Star Comics folded up shop. No, the project’s not dead, not at all…but I think the name for what’s happening now would be “re-tooling”. I have to find a new art team and a new comic company, and I have to find out if I’m doing a mini, an ongoing, a graphic novel, etc., before I can get the script completed.

The odd thing is that I can fill up a day with chores being a house husband. I spend a full day doing dishes, shopping, running errands… and doing a lot of organizing that never got done before. I got my comic book web site redesigned, fully cataloged and my collection storage space moved from haphazardly-stacked boxes to an organized shelf system. And I’ve been studying Flash animation in an attempt to beef up my resume and improve my web sites. Oh, and I learned to make chicken jerky and dehydrated apples with my dehydrator, and canned lots of homemade ketchup and salsa from my garden.

It’s hard to believe I ever got anything done when I had a job, because without a job I still managed to stay super-busy. And yet I keep running into people who think I’m laying about. When I went to my local job center for a meeting, they emphasized that we should be constantly out looking for a job and not “lying around on the couch.” When I went into work for the first time this week, I mentioned to someone that I’d been unemployed and she said, “So you have just been sitting around all these months?”

I just figured out why she said that. She must think I gained weight from sitting around. Hate to break it to her that my weight is due to a decade of having jobs where I’m sitting all day long, then I go home to work on the computer all night. It’s odd…I’ve been fat for over a decade, but I keep forgetting that that’s the first thing people take away from meeting me. Huh. Anyway…

Now that this huge weight is off my shoulders (the joblessness, I mean, not the extra pounds I’m carrying), I can finally start goofing around with some frivolities because I now have “work time” and “spare time”. I may actually be posting more!