The world is my oyster, but I hate shellfish.

The reason BigRed has exploded onto the cyber scene is that I have very little else to do with my life. I am in a blissful state of unemployment where I can stumble onto a street in downtown Boston at noon on a Wednesday, still half asleep, look at all the damn suits taking their lunch breaks and wonder why the hell they are awake so early and why they all look so friggin miserable. They aren't the ones who were belting out Natalie Imbruglia's "Torn" on the stage at Sissy K's at 2 am while trying to chug enough Jaegermeister to make the hippopotamus I was performing a duet with at least look like an elephant, what reason do they have to feel awful at noon on Wednesday?

I figured out the answer to that question sometime between the time when my buddy Ralph the Welshman, was lifting my spirits humming the rocky theme song as we walked through Copley Square and 5 minutes later when I had to jump off the T to puke my brains out at Fenway station because the stupid trolley was shaking my Ph imbalanced stomach like 007's martini. These people were all depressed because they failed to embrace the process of unemployment, instead only focusing on the goal of finding a job. They have thus realized that the journey was actually more important than the destination, because the destination, taking it in your cornhole from the man, flat out sucks. I have thus decided to enjoy the process of finding a job and attempt to drag that process out as long as possible.

This process so far has taken me on quite a few epic adventures. Last weekend I went up to New Hampshire to fish, think about life (an integral part of the unemployment process) and find myself. Unfortunately, the only place I found myself was trapped in a Wooly Woofta named Jonathan's boathouse at 3 am with 18 Children of the Corn who were trying to decide whether it would be best to scalp, skin, or string me and a couple buddies up by our fingernails while we snuck out the backdoor before they could put anything in ours. This part of the process taught me not to live in a town of less than 500 where the children's eyes are all blood red.

The next step of the process was to forget finding myself, that proved way too dangerous, and try to find an actual job. This part of the process is actually a very fulfilling one. I put my resume together, sent out a few emails to some well connected dudes, called some people after hours to make sure I could leave a voicemail instead of having to actually to talk to anyone, patted myself on the back and basked in the idea that I was being a go-getter without going anywhere or getting anything. I am currently excited that there are an infinite amount of new and exciting jobs out there that are just dying to hire me. It is a very similar dynamic to the first week of school when there appears to be an infinite number of new hot freshmen girls running around everywhere…before you realize you go to an Ivy League school in New Jersey and that these girls will evolve into salamanders (the spotted kind) by the second day of classes. (Girl friends, I'm not talking about you, I'm talking about everyone else that we went to school with, trust me.) The promise is always more exciting than the actual reality. Anyways, I’ve yet to encounter the spotted salamanders of the job world because I am still focusing on the process and not the actual goal.

This anticipation is the beauty of unemployment. Right now, the world truly is my oyster and I can open it whenever and wherever I damn well please. The depressing turn in the story is that once I open that oyster, I'm going to find a slimy mollusk that almost certainly will not contain a pearl. I am going to end up with a job, and that job almost certainly will not excite me if the way that the prospect of finding a job can. I don't want to be like my buddy Earthden who is refusing to look for a job because he views it as the only way to avoid opening the oyster, he is missing out on the whole rush that the anticipation of finding a job gives a job seeker. However, I really don't want to find a job and have the process of unemployment end. I am balancing a difficult tightrope walk between being proactive enough that I feel good about myself and being just passive enough that I don't risk getting tied down with an actual job. Its very similar to the dynamic I had to deal with the last couple months of senior year of college. In order to hook up with someone, swampmonsters and smokeshows alike, you have to make them believe your interested in them for something more than some fleeting physical relationship. However, you can't show so much interest that you risk becoming involved in an actual relationship where you will lose your swinging single senior stud status. So that’s where I stand, I'm trying to screw the job world, but I need to be able to leave it with no strings attached in the morning. I've done this by doing things like putting my resume on Monster.com, but claiming to only be interested in the aerospace defense industry. I'm out there, I'm searching, its just I'm only searching for a job as an anti-alien fighterpilot. Maybe outer space is where I will find myself.