I Am So Popular: Relax (Don't Do It)

Okay, no it wasn’t. Reality check: the dogs were still peeing in the house, there were no job offers, and it remained unclear how I might—with my recent status of mostly unemployed—pay my bills. Last month I was able to take a loan out to cover expenses, albeit a loan with a sharkish interest rate. That option exercised, maxing me out credit-wise, I was hard pressed to come up with the next Save My Ass strategy.

Now, I knew, way back in December, that this would be the case. The weeks would roll by, no work would come in, and come the end of the month I’d be left sweating. On the other hand, at least I had the knowledge that, come February, a tiny book advance, a little royalty check, and money from a teaching gig would materialize and that, if I returned to the Ramen Lifestyle, I might eke by at least til summer with this little windfall.

So I, Spike “Anxiety Riddled Most of the Time” Gillespie, decided what the hell, I’m going to pretend all is well and just take the month of January to myself and quit panicking. Because in December I had done just that and my sudden lay off had prompted irrational behavior. I’d pore over the precious few online ads for writing gigs, reconfigure my resume to match each one, and fire off hopefully not-too-desperate cover letters to HR departments trying to convince them and myself that I really did want that gig writing blog posts, at ten dollars a pop, extolling the virtues of a particular brand of dog food or the new product brainchild of some delusional startup’s seventeen year-old CEO.

Each time I sent one of those, the very moment I hit send, I then did a mental double take. Convinced I’d be offered one, or maybe all of these gigs, I realized how very much I did not want them. So I’d compose a second letter to HR—in my head— preparing responses for the job offers that surely would come rolling in. In that letter I would explain—thanks but no thanks—something had already come up.

The imagination is a powerful thing, no? Of course none of the jobs materialized, no doubt because the companies offering them were deluged with tens of thousands of thinly veiled pleas for work from all the other suddenly unemployed folks out there. Rather than feel motivated by rejection to beg harder (sadly my m.o. too often in the past), I said Fuck It and decided to take a cue from my friend Raz.

I met Raz last spring when he came for a month long vacation from London. Raz is an amazing creature, full of wonderful tales. One he told me that stuck involved the time he had a job that paid an obscene amount of money. Noting that no one seemed to monitor his work much, he made a little bet with himself. He wanted to see if he could show up at the office and do absolutely nothing for a full month without any sort of fallout. And so he did, continuing to be paid handsomely, none of his colleagues any the wiser.

Despite my lack of employment, my January calendar revealed an awful lot of appointments for lunches, knitting group gatherings, public performances, Hula Hoop classes, yoga classes, a trip to the beach, and numerous parties. Okay, okay, to be honest there were about six little one hour teaching gigs lined up, but I can do those in my sleep, so I didn’t count those as actual work.

Thus I would be totally hedonistic. Austin is the perfect city for this sort of thing—recall this is the town that made “slacking” an admirable goal. Bolstered by this prevailing attitude I vowed that, to the best of my abilities, I would not worry about the lack of work and I set about relaxing.

By the time Saturday—the final day of this month— rolls around, I’ll have attended about 75 lunches in some of Austin’s best restaurants, completed the entire back of a sweater (which required around two to three hours of dedicated knitting per day), be halfway through the audio version of Oliver Sacks’ latest book, have performed in four Dick Monologues shows, emceed three events at BookPeople, attended nine fun classes, listened to nearly every installment of Fresh Air while hooping, and cooked any number of very delicious, somewhat labor intensive meals at home.

So what’s all this relaxing been like? Well, first of all, I’ve gained weight. This is inevitable when one is so popular that one has lunch and dinner dates for thirty-one consecutive days. The daily hooping, designated to stave off the muffin top, is not helping apparently. Soon enough, as in seventh grade, I will have to lie down on the bed and tug very hard to get the old Levis zippered.

Beyond that, I’ve adopted the habit of sleeping in, by which I mean lolling about in bed until 7 a.m., instead of popping up at 6ish, as I usually do, hoping to get a jump on the never ending To Do list and also get the dogs outside before the indoor poop sculpture competition begins.

I also took time to read the news often (full disclosure: technically I do this anyway) and to watch about thirty movies, two of them in the theater. (The downside of this news and movie intake is that I was reminded, vividly, of not just one but both of my ex-husbands. The ghost of the former came to me in the form of the psychotic governor of Illinois who, like that ex, is fond of being a big blowhard, quoting long passages of old literature and trying to take credit for that writing. The ghost of the latter arrived in the form of Mickey Rourke’s character in The Wrestler, a narcissistic has-been who can’t let go of the belief that any minute now he’ll be discovered and exalted.)

In the end, while I’m glad to have Raz-ified my life in the name of experimentation, I have to say I’m starting to develop something like envy for all those shovel-wielding child prisoners in the young adult novel, Holes. Because, much like my dogs, when I do not have a specific job to do I get restless and frustrated and set out to make work for myself, work that ultimately isn’t productive. (For instance Rebound, my incredibly stupid but wildly cute Boston Terrier, takes it upon herself to shred any item left in the backyard for more than thirty seconds.)

And so, too much of a good thing has led me to a radical resolution. Beginning in February, I am taking the work I do have coming in—namely researching a massive tome on the history of quilting around the world—and I am applying myself with vigor. I am instituting an across-the-board No More Lunch Dates in 2009 policy to save time, money, and rolls of fat around my middle.

I will become the diligent worker bee even in these times of limited pollen availability. I might just cancel my NetFlix account. And I’m drafting a breakup letter to Terry Gross. Because as much as I—like the next guy— like to complain about having to work for a living, a month of just about none at all has made me miss that necessary evil terribly.

Spike Gillespie is very sorry she can’t meet you for lunch until 2010. She blogs at spikeg.com. And you can catch her in The Dick Monologues this Saturday at the Blue Theater at 4:15. In fact, the first five people who email her at spike@spikeg.com and can tell her what color shirt John Aeilli is wearing will get a pair of tickets to the show.