Life of The Unemployed

My first three weeks in Palo Alto I had no job. And while that would have been a dream come true in any other part of my life, I was too stressed about finding a job to truly enjoy my time off.  I also find little joy in doing things alone, so I didn’t do anything very exciting. I would have loved to walk around Stanford campus, and explore San Francisco but it didn’t sound fun if I was going to be alone. So what did I do to pass the time??

1. Rewatched the entire series of Parks and Rec.  Seven seasons in three weeks. I regret nothing.

2. Once, I went to Ikea just for something to do.  I literally went to Ikea to walk around. I was somewhat lost once I hit the ground section, but it didn’t worry me a bit. I was glad that my excursion was going to take me longer than expected. Then I took the “long way” back to my house.  People. Ikea is exactly .6 miles away from my house, so the long way pretty much consists of purposefully driving past my street down the road for a while, and the looping back around to go back home. Clearly, this was a cry for help. A sign of desperation.  At this point I really started to question my creativity skills. Was this seriously the best way I could entertain myself?? Apparently. 

3.  I welcomed traffic like an old friend. There is traffic? Great, something to take up my time before I go home and watch more Parks and Rec.  Once I found myself in school pick up traffic in East Palo Alto (aka EPA, aka the ghetto, aka where I live) and it was great. Traffic is usually mind numbingly boring, but this was like watching an episode of TV. People were yelling at each other from their cars, some rules of the road became optional, and people of all ages were walking everywhere. I got to make up in my head what was going on because no one was speaking English. It was great.

4. I would grocery shop 2-3 items at a time. Buy bread and cereal on Monday, new phone charger on Tuesday, apples and oranges on Wednesday (but only about 3 or so, so I had an excuse to go to the store for more fruit on Saturday), walk around Target (buy nothing) on Thursday, and so on.  I had the system down. 

5. Read young adult fiction found on weird websites online. It works, and it’s free. 

*repeat.

I won’t lie to you, it was boring. Hence the lack of photos in this blog post, I wasn't doing anything worth documenting. Thankfully there were more things to do on the weekends, like roller skating in the city, going to trampoline gyms, and learning to play poker. Of course I eventually got a job and the life of absolute freedom was behind me. I miss it now that I have to wake up to an alarm. 

RIP unemployment life. RIP.