May 14th, 2009 Posted in ON THE BREADLINE |
Christian, of Brooklyn, was a marketing director at HarperCollins, the book publisher. He was laid off in February.
How do you cope with getting up every morning? What motivates you?
Well, the thing that I miss the most is having a routine, so I’ve created a new routine, which is: Coffee, Good Morning America (I have learned that the door of your refrigerator is the warmest part of the refrigerator, so you should never keep eggs and dairy on the door), and I go to the gym. If I’m going to be laid off, I might as well have a hot body, especially if I have to become a sex worker to support myself.
Likewise, how do you cope with getting to sleep at night, or getting any sleep, period?
A friend told me, “Beware of the no-work insomnia,” where you start staying up later and later in order to avoid going to sleep, in order to avoid having to get up and start an entire day of nothing. For a while I was really bad about watching TV into the night (though I was able to see how both Frasier and Will & Grace ended). But now, I really try and target seven and a half hours of sleep, so I just turn the light off and go to bed. The extra drinking that I’ve been doing helps in getting to sleep.
Give an example of the sort of changes or cutbacks you’ve had to make in the way you live your life.
I’m not one of those “Oh, I stopped getting the New York Times” kind of people, because I actually have time to read it now, and there’s a lot of good stuff in there, I have to say. A lot of the incidental money that I spent going into the city is not being spent now, i.e. lunch every day (which I now eat at home) and stopping off for this and that. I do see much less of the inside of Whole Foods now, but otherwise, I haven’t really denied myself too much in the day-to-day sense, because that would be too depressing. Though I haven’t bought clothes in a while.
Share with us some of your recession gallows humor.
Well, there are silver linings to every cloud. Now, I don’t feel compelled to stop for the “Save the Children” or “Save the Rhesus Monkey’ people on the street, because a swift “I just got laid off, so not today” totally gets you a pass from them, and you don’t feel like a dick afterwards.Plus, you can start drinking much earlier in the day. “It’s 5 o’clock somewhere” totally rings true.
What, if anything, gives you hope that the future holds better things?
Everything in life is cyclical, so I can’t imagine that this is a permanent situation, and it really allows you to think about what you do and don’t want to do. I’ll be fine.
Like the Chester’s Fried Chicken mascot who merrily cheers his own impending doom (inset), the reporter who doggedly chronicles the lives of the unemployed seems grimly fated to join the unemployed. Last month, Lou Carlozo, who wrote the very good “Recession Diaries” series for the Chicago Tribune, was canned from his job and not even given the opportunity to post a final column about his own situation. Now comes word from reporter Penni Crabtree of the San Diego Union-Tribune, who mentioned this very site in an article last Sunday about recession gallows humor, that she, too, has fallen victim to the ax. “The punch line here is that three days before [the article] ran on the Sunday cover of the Business section, I was notified that I will be among the 192 San Diego Union-Tribune employees who will be laid off July 6,” Crabtree tells us. “Oh well. Look forward to filling out the Breadline Questionnaire. And the reruns of Law & Order.”
