Headbands and Coffee Shops: Perks of the Jobless

There are many upsides to being unemployed: Ample time to do crafts, plan dinners, daydream, find interesting sites on the Web, stalk unbeknownst friends on Facebook, stare at walls, and other such community value-adding activities.

 However, unemployment also has its obvious downsides. Such as, the feeling of despair that the universe and obscure HR departments are vehemently against you. Or the seemingly complete annihilation of any self pride once one or more rejection letters start coming. It’s a brutal time in life. Sort of like not being asked to prom or getting cut from the football team repeatedly in a bad dream, a job quest can be heartbreaking.  

 Using myself as an example, I have been unemployed for a couple of months now and I have gone through waves of emotions. Happy emotions that I can finally fill my day with activities that a 9 to 5 would never allow, sad emotions of feeling worthless, creative emotions when I suddenly feel inspired, jealous emotions when I see working women out wearing their cute work outfits, and thankful emotions when I realize it could be so much worse. I could be back in my old job traveling for months losing my sanity whilst my creativity and passion is slowly eroded by the second. Or, my husband could be unemployed. Or, there could be no Internet to continue the refinement of my people-stalking skills. Gasp!

 So, I am seizing this beautiful day of unemployment and I encourage the rest of you job seekers to do the same. While the working world sits in meetings chugging down coffee to keep them quasi-awake, we the job-seekers of America are outside enjoying the last days of stunning fall.

 Right now, I sit at one of my favorite coffee shops wearing a headband that I made in a crafting flurry and am taking in the coffee-shop culture that I would never know if I was employed. If I were sitting at a desk in an office building, I wouldn't be wearing this headband and I wouldn’t be able to report that there is a strange man standing in front of me stretching his arms as if he were in a Yoga studio. Or I wouldn’t be able to witness the awkward collision of friends to the table to the right of me as they try to surface-talk their way out of any meaningful conversation. Or I might not be able to notice all the other Mac-mesmerized, foggy-eyed people sitting around me seemingly hating their lives.

 Perhaps they are job-searching as well.

 Perhaps we should start a support group.

Despite all the jokes, I am learning that one’s employment does not and should not dictate quality and stature in life. We are designed and destined for more: Passion, creativity, making beauty from chaos, enjoying life, and savoring time at coffee shops. Lucky for me, for the first time since age 16, I can finally relish in this time to listen and find out how I can make great use of a vocation instead of having my vocation dictate me.

 And that, loyal readers, is just another of the aforementioned upsides of being an unemployed, housewife-in-training. 

Adam and Eve and Their Correlation With the Theology of Office Space

There are many reasons to be upset at Adam and Eve.

I’m not one to point fingers, but really, did they just have to eat the fruit from that ONE tree? Well apparently they did, and with one sweet bite of the succulent fruit, they single-handedly bequeathed the entire human race with such lovely inheritances such as: weeds, pain, suffering, mosquitoes, awful childbearing, sibling strife, Starbucks coffee, and a cursed earth just to name a few.

Just think: Today, right now, you and I could be playing in a beautiful garden, chasing around lions, tigers, and bears in a friendly game of tag whilst eating the bounty of an all-organic fresh garden. However, thanks to Adam and Eve, we are all either chasing around our children in a not-so friendly game of tag or traversing the maze of our dead-end cubicle lives … or some variation of the two.

Ok, so I’m making this sound really bad. (That’s what bloggers do, we embellish.) Many of us live happy lives including myself. However, all I’m saying is that living in the garden in a perfect earth with a perfect relationship with God wouldn’t be so bad either. In fact, it would be light years better than the lives we lead now. So, where am I going with this? Why in the world am I talking about the curses Adam and Eve bestowed upon us? For the purpose of this rant, I’ve been thinking about this statement in particular made by God when He was essentially giving our BFFs Adam and Eve the boot from the garden:

“By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground, since from it you were taken; for dust you are and to dust you will return.”

So, I’ve really been thinking about this; is “work” as we know it today inherently doomed to be miserable because of this “curse”?

Now, the reason for this pondering is as of tomorrow, I will be entering into month two of marital bliss. And honestly, despite the being ticked at Adam and Eve ho-hum thing, I am having the time of my life! I’ll leave out all the sappy details – for now – but in quick fast-forward Tivo-like mode, life couldn’t be any better. However, since I quit my job and have been recovering from an odd sickness, I am also on month two of unemployment (or “FUNemployment” as my roommate once coined). Thus, I have had much time to really analyze what kind of work I want to break into and what is “work” as we know it today.

As I’ve been looking for jobs on those awful job boards and job search engines (totally worthless by the way), I find myself applying to jobs that I know three months down the road, I’m probably going to be back on the same miserable job boards panting like a fresh puppy after bacon for a new job. It’s an awful cycle. I’m 25 years old and I’ve repeated it far too often. And I know I'm not the only one. Why do you think "work" and "job" carry such a negative connotation? T.G.I.F. wasn't a term coined just for fun. People really do hate their jobs!

 So, my question is, is it supposed to be like this? Is “work”, the “9 to 5”, “the daily grind”, etc. supposed to be such drudgery?

The answer, I believe, is no.

We weren’t designed to sit in cubicles and run around like rats. We weren’t designed to live the Peter Gibbon’s life and think that everyday is the worst day of our lives because of our jobs. (Thank you “Office Space” creators/geniuses, you have changed my life. Forever.) Yes, we will “sweat our brows” in order to make a salary to feed ourselves, however, I have come to the sound conclusion that we should not hate our jobs. Afterall, we spend the majority of our time awake in the world at our jobs. On the contrary, we should actually enjoy them, using our God-given talents to perform work. It is a choice.

So, in the time it has taken me to write this, I have decided that hating the activity you do eight to ten hours of your day is NOT normal. It is not part of the curse. Yes, work is work and it requires effort, but that doesn’t mean we have to be out-of-our-minds bored, suicidal, apathetic, asleep, and/or all the above while working. This means, obnoxiously pining after that 15 minute break down to gulp the hideous acid-tasting Starbucks coffee to make it through the day just to get away from the dismal desk work we have is not a way to live! (Yes, that was a run-on sentence. It had to be said.)

In essence, I’m writing this “memo” to myself. Yes, Adam and Eve put us all on a fast-track ticket to death (that looks awful when I write it – Ha!), but we are a redeemed people and we have talents to use in the meantime. As Donald Miller says in his new book “A Million Miles in a Thousand Years,” we can all “live a better story.” For me, that means reviving my outlook on work and choosing to not live eight hours of drudgery everyday.

Now, just wait a couple months … If I’m working at the Gap selling plain T-shirts I may be singing a different tune.

Thanks Adam and Eve.