(Originally published on HubPages Sept. 2011 under the pseudonym Jean Valone) 

Team Unemployed: ‘Rough Justice’ in the Real World of the Recession

It’s afternoon on a Wednesday in late January. I’m waking up at my usual time. Most days my goal is to get up before one o’clock so I can watch “People’s Court.” If I stay up past 4 a.m. surfing the internet or go out to a bar the night before, I might even wake up too late for the show. I’m unemployed and just out of grad school, this is the sort of small thing that dominates my life without any sort of outside structure.

Sometimes I look myself in the mirror and mouth the words, “Jean, you’ll have a job soon.”

I’ve been unemployed for most of the last year. I think I’ve been without a job longer than I’ve had one over the past three years. It’s not uncommon I guess with the economy the way it is, I see stuff on TV all the time about people who are doing worse. Don't tell anyone who's unemployed that the recession is over. We know better. The news says this many people haven’t been unemployed since the Great Depression. That doesn’t make it any easier; it’s just nice to pretend I’m keeping perspective on the situation.

I haven’t had a job since the end of September when my car was parked on the street and totaled by a stolen vehicle; the six-pack of Busch left in the abandoned vehicle was little consolation. With no plan and no source of income, I was forced to quit my job delivering pizzas. The upside is that I have to ride a bike everywhere which is good exercise even if I have to towel myself off in the men's bathroom before class. I've lost a few pounds and I’ve been eating less fast food because it’s almost impossible to drive-thru without a car. The down side is, well…obvious.

Now there’s seven inches of snow on the ground and I’m stuck at home with a Master’s degree in creative writing to keep me warm. I’m not sure which part of my story is comical or depressing. I’m a twenty-eight year old who’s over or under-qualified for almost every job I apply for. Most days I file it all under unfortunate but depressingly funny. It gets me through episodes of the People’s Court when Judge Milian is in a bad mood. Her Cuban axioms and witty references to “rough justice” keep me waking up on time no matter what the drink special was the night before.

The term resonates with me as something more relevant than poetic justice. The world has offered a bit of rough justice to me in its own way. Destroying the vehicle of a delivery driver seems ironic in that Alanis Morrisette kind-of-way but I’m guessing it isn’t. Someone with two English degrees not being able to figure out what is or isn’t ironic sounds like more rough justice…or maybe poetic justice.

People look at me strange when I tell them what I studied in school. Usually I get one of two responses.

“Creative what? Writing? What’s that?” or the more likely response, “What are you gonna do with that? Teach?” I tell them yes I’d like to teach and move on. No I don’t have any teaching experience. Yes, I understand the beginning of a new year during a recession is a bad time to look for a job. I fake a smile and move on.

In keeping with this state of mind, I avoid conversations with relatives about what I’m doing now that I’m out of school. The holidays are rampant with these kinds of conversations, but I eat a lot of food and act preoccupied when they finally ask.

“Well, where are you looking for a job at?” As if somehow their expert advice will propel me into a lucrative career path. Maybe someday I’ll thank them when I’m rich and happy.

Every time I see him, my grandpa tries to convince me that working at Quik Trip or Kinko’s (or "Ginko’s" in his words) is the way to go. I tell him I have a Master’s degree in English and that really isn’t what I’m looking for. He never respected my delivery jobs even though I got through most of my undergrad and grad school on them. My year long stint at the eyeglass store grinding lenses was something he understood a little bit better.

As January rolls on the snow continues to pile up and I continue applying online for adjunct teaching positions, getting mostly no response. Earlier in the month I heard back from my alma mater and they told me they were interested in interviewing me later in the year for some possible fall classes. It was exciting but not totally reassuring news. I wonder sometimes if I could get by that long without a job.

Most days I try to survive the best I can. I sell things I don’t need anymore on Craigslist or eBay: guitar pedals I don’t use anymore (what the heck does a Flanger do anyways?), Xbox games I can’t play any longer because my Xbox 360 quit working not long before I did. Other days my girlfriend gives me a ride to the closest Wal-Mart and I return things that are still in the package from birthdays and Christmases past. One week three pairs of long underwear nets me a nineteen dollar gift-card which I spend mostly on boxes of Totino’s Pizza. She laughs at me while I eat a dollar cherry pie from Wal-Mart in the car. I read the package and inform her it contains both regular corn syrup and the much preferred high-fructose variety. Ideal nutrition for the man out of work.

It’s been a rough year but I keep my head up. There are always more jobs to apply for and be turned down.

Earlier in the year, before I was delivering pizzas, I went on unemployment for a few months. The three-hundred and fifty I got a month wasn’t much but looks pretty substantial in retrospect.

My savings from grad school are slowly dwindling each time I eat out or pay the bills. The money I got from family on my birthday and at graduation keeps me afloat into the new year even though I feel pressure to take a job within walking distance as a waiter (sorry, “server”).

Earlier in the month I’d gottten excited about the one interview I’ve had post-grad school. My hope dissipated when the owner told me he “couldn’t afford to pay me a regular salary for my work on his journal,” but he did teach me how to make money online doing freelance writing. Looking back it seems pretty cool of him even though I declined his non-paying offer. The first thing he told me was that I was overqualified for the position.

Eventually I found a way to make a few bucks online using the recommendations he’d given me. It’s reassuring to make any money these days, even if I have to write stupid How-To articles for the next six months. I’m currently at work on one I’m probably not qualified to write: How To Get the Job of Your Dreams.

I’ve gotten skilled at locating career and job information on the web, as in where to find it and what to look for. Maybe I should be a career counselor; definitely falling in the under-qualified category on that one. I’ve found that most career websites are hidden platforms for advertising. They email me jobs that have nothing to do with what I studied. I put in writing as a search term and it brings up janitorial positions that require high school level writing for reasons I’m unaware of. I would put in the creative aspect, but I’m afraid the website will laugh at me or ask me what I’m talking about.

It’s not the work I miss, rather just having something to do. That’s the worst part about being unemployed, the lack of activity can really hurt morale. It’s not hard to imagine I could get another job, it’s just hard to believe it.

It’s more rough justice for a year filled with what I described earlier as “depressing comedy.” I’m the star of my own reality show/sitcom and I don’t even get paid or have a laugh track. Cue the audience.

UPDATE: I got a part-time teaching gig in August. I still do freelance work in my off-time. I have a car now and I don’t eat dollar cherry pies anymore

(This piece previously existed as two separate articles for an unnamed and recently defunct content website. Both were rejected.)

Workshop Response, or Portrait of the Fartist as a Young Grad Student (First in a Retrospective Series)

    I’m not really sure what to say about this one.  I’ve surely never been this shocked by a workshop story.  It’s not a positive shock though, it’s certainly a disgusted and surprised kind.  This story left me wondering why anyone would go about forming this plot.  A lot of the writing wasn’t bad but everything was overwhelmed by the events of the story. 

    Specifically, I have no issue with reading about men having relations with each other; so the idea that I don’t like the story because I’m a homophobe can quickly be dispelled.  The handling of the material is entirely offensive and this is from a person who’s not easily offended.  The narrator’s choice of words and ways of describing things lead the reader to believe that none of the subject matter was taken seriously.  A few examples include: “grabbing his manhood and taking in a mouthful of gratification for them both,” “his boxers instantaneously soaked in greasy fluids from a throbbing member.”  I could go on but I won’t.  This sounds like something out of Penthouse Letters (yes I’ve read Penthouse Letters before).

    The writer seems to have a real problem with tone also.  Several bits of dialogue are punctuated oddly with exclamations or question marks where they clearly don’t belong.  For example, “Is this what you want!”  People don’t yell at each other when they are having foreplay, nor do they yell when asking a question. 

    The ending of this piece just flabbergasted me.  Not only did he have sex with his fiancé’s father but he got HIV from him?  In what world do symptoms of HIV occur immediately?  And I won’t even mention the toilet scene.  There’s so many things wrong with this story that I’m going to have to stop here.  My suggestions would be either to tone down the language or just change the subject matter all together. 

I Am The Cosmos

This song means everything to me right now, specifically the first lines containing the titular phrase. Chris Bell, the founder of Big Star and former vocalist/guitarist for the group, finds the perfect middle ground between hazy guitar chords and melancholy vocals/lyrics. I'll admit that for me his vocal work in Big Star (#1 Record) was always overshadowed by Alex Chilton, despite the fact that Bell actually founded the early 70s Memphis pop-rock group. Of course, Alex was already famous from being in the Box Tops when he joined Bell in Big Star and the unrealized potential of the group combined with inner tensions to cause Bell's exit from his own band. As Alex became the sole front man and birthed the classic Radio City album, Chris Bell wandered from his home in Memphis to travel/record in Europe, all the while experimenting with drugs, religion and at different points his own sexuality. "I Am the Cosmos" is the most fully realized product of that era, and it marries the post-British invasion aspirations of Bell's former group to more ethereal and atmospheric pop. Bell juxtaposes his larger spiritual beliefs and connections to the earth with his human and more base desires of loss and longing. Although his ethos may be in line, clearly he wants someone he can no longer have.

(For more info on Bell and Big Star, check out the music doc Big Star: Nothing Can Hurt Me)

Over the weekend I found a Star Wars trucker hat at the Savers on Noland Rd. in Independence. But it didn't fit.

Long Day of Childhood

I guess there's a reason I'm just now learning about this failed ad campaign from Ragu.



First off, I'm wondering why you would try and market Ragu to children. Although I guess it's not explicitly being sold to young people. It plays on common awkward situations children go through, so anyone could identify or at least laugh at them. Still, the adolescent boy (who incidentally has the same face that I used to...FACE OFF!) is the protagonist and is obviously supposed to be a sympathetic figure. But who the hell would want to eat shitty pasta sauce after seeing your parents mid-bone? And that song! It sounds like third rate Alan Jackson or Randy Travis...so basically most of what's on country radio currently. Carry on.

Miley Cyrus as Postmodern Icon and Symbol of Late Millenial and iGeneration Culture: Towards A Theory of Popular Culture Under Late-Stage Capitalism (A Work In Progress)

Understanding What Miley Represents: Deconstructing A Decentered Culture

Miley Cyrus as a cultural symbol stands for nothing, substantiates nothing and ultimately means nothing. In this manner, she is the most representative of any pop star yet created and nurtured by late stage capitalist American culture.  

She has no defining qualities: (as with some of the most successful pop-stars) her capricious looks and stated beliefs change with marketing ploys, new albums and commercial campaigns, but she even lacks some of the traditional physical qualities that have been focal selling points for more recent female pop stars (think Britney Spears, Katy Perry etc. who often rely on their physical attributes and socialized feminine appearance). Hence, Cyrus's need to so strangely and emphatically create some sort of a public image and extreme but empty representation of herself. If Michael Jackson was the transitional high modernist to post-modernist realization of a pop celebrity, then Cyrus is its complete fruition and apotheosis. She is our culture’s Destiny.

Un-tethered to any of the modernist values that moralized and justified a belief system based on once fixed rules, or reacting in direct relation to or against such a moral belief system (a la punk rock and generally, counter culture), she represents the first generation raised entirely in the age of the internet. The constancy previously represented/broadcast by such institutions as the church, the state and even the traditional, grounded world of the corporation has had little to no effect on the Millenials. Yes they are vaguely aware of much of it, and they may even purport to have religion or a codified and constant center. 

What spiritual or constant self could one have, when pushed and pulled at every angle by advertisements for products, belief systems and even outward appearances to try on? If identity in a late-stage capitalist post-modern dominated society is shaped, purchased and created through owning and displaying products, what “self” can there be? The decentered self testing the spacial qualities of its world rather than the metaphysical ones is what we’re left with.

Cyrus is the decentered and ever shifting celebrity self (without a self), raised by corporate trends, Hollywood handlers, and agents, and steeped and encouraged in her narcissism, self-absorption and fame. Her behavior has always been cultured and developed behind the scenes in a lab, always with the public eye in mind. Every move is coordinated and cross-checked for the marketplace. 

She’s the fruition of the post-modern progression of popular culture that values nothing other than instant gratification, brought on by capitalist ideology. To say she’s nihilist or apathetic misses the point. Pop culture itself is not equivalent to nihilism or apathy; it holds few things sacred, outside of its own referentiallity, self importance, self perpetuation, money/ownership and the aforementioned impulse to gratify. In a sense then, these are the new values. Our popular culture, driven by corporate supply and artificially altered public demand, firmly believes in these as its core qualities. Those that do not own enough or the right things, are described as “poor”;this is in an economic sense of course, but also implies poor in spirit,potential, and of course poor in social standing. To own things is to exist and represents active participation in late-stage capitalism, which is the only way imaginable for those raised within it. 

Transposing and Defining the “I” for the iGeneration

The Millennials lack self because the antiquated notion of a fixed self ceases to exist in the ultimate gestations of post-modern culture. The creation of, perpetuation of, and ultimate belief in a progression of the concept of self, begun in and around the age of Enlightenment, has now reached its own mirrored-apex in the era of the Millenials and popularly in Miley Cyrus.

The Enlightenment first conceived of and publicized the self, as it “sang of [it]self and celebrat[ed] [it]self.” It created laws to protect and perpetuate the notion of the self (See the Magna Carta, the Bill of Rights and the French Revolution etc.). In part, this was because the individual self as entity is essential to ownership of personal and private property which had only recently been borne and fully propagated. The Romantics waxed poetic about the multitudes held within the soul, or the core and fixed representation of being, the entity which possesses, profits, creates and owns. In other words, the entity that is necessary to take part in the capitalist marketplace.

On this same trajectory, Modernism was the next realization of the self, the next step on the evolutionary ladder. The self became a distorted and often hazy proposition, a twisted and distorted refraction of the centered-self dreamed of by Enlightenment era philosophers and thinkers, but was still based on a center of gravity, a “winding wheel” to rap oneself around, a comparison point/mile marker with which to judge the permutations of the different selves of the world. Modernist and high-modernist art often focused on the fragmentation of the self as related to forms of expression, mental illness and the impressionistic qualities of the self and the surrounding world.  

In the post-modern era we've seen the end of self, or at least the dissipation of the traditional concept of self. Personal identity is not a fixed proposition or singular belief that comes from an inner being or soul, it's an ever-shifting amalgam of images, socialized concepts, products and other ephemera. Self is now created and distributed for the masses, as a social product that is transmitted electronically.

Come See the Wheels of the Machine Twerk On: "If a body catch a body coming through the iPhone..."

“We Can’t Stop, We Won’t Stop” then, is the indirect mantra of the helpless and self-lacking (not to be confused with “selfless”) Millenial culture as it comes of age and takes possession of its own being. It comes in the language of the addict, mixed with the belief system of the capitalist. A mélange of apathy and a pastiche of empty meaning.

In traditional terms, the “coming of age” represented when one took responsibility (nee “ownership,” conceptually related to owning property) for one’s actions, and conceived of a future for the self. But once again, as in the creation of the concept of the self by the Enlightenment and its relation to property ownership, the realization and expression of the self is done in the terms of capitalism, that being one predicated on purchasing and owning property. Because Millennials have been socialized to own more and at a younger age by corporate advertisers and society at large, their grabs at self-actualization only seem more feeble and meaningless. If one already owns property at a young age, then a transition from adolescence to adulthood represents nothing more than ownership/control of one’s immediate flesh and blood, or perhaps gaining more property.

However, one with no self cannot take responsibility for its own actions. It can only take ownership of products, items and in the case of the adolescent, one’s own body. Hence the emphasis on the body as a representation of freedom in young women: what previously had been controlled and directed by the family, the rules/laws of society (for the under-age), and the hegemony of men, now comes into its own in a rite of spring. To fetishize (display and celebrate) one’s own body and act in accordance to one’s own sexuality for late millennial and iGeneration  women is virtually all that is left of the expression of the self. Much of western society teaches and raises women as sex objects, early on ones that are controlled and directed by others, so it only makes sense that the act of having sex or even the open display of sexual qualities for the first time is a statement of selfhood and control. 

The common Millienial and iGeneration women, those who Miley Cyrus is selling products to and in theory representative of, do not believe in feminism. The language and focus of feminism, under its post-structural third wave have become abstruse and disconnected from the lion’s share of the middle-class female populace at large. All that remains is the primal and base cry of the more extreme and reactionary wing of the second-wave feminists as it relates to sexual control/selfhood and reproductive rights: the right to choose to have sex, and in be in power of one’s own sovereign body. With no real form of self-expression outside of owning products, both young men and young women will opt for sex and the physical body as the closest thing to expressing and defining a now distant concept of “selfhood” and being.

“We Can’t Stop, We Won’t Stop” is the rallying cry of a now warped and empty transition to adulthood inside late-stage capitalism. “It’s our party” as in we own and control this scenario. We are members of the capitalist marketplace, if only because we can schlep our body around in ever stranger ways, which then creates a very base concept of self: the self is my physical body and what I choose to do with it.

In the face of a baby boomer controlled culture that has worshiped and capitalized on youth in order to sell products, we see the progeny is the shallow but self-absorbed iGeneration. Their entire lives they’ve been coddled and given whatever they want, so that the only thing that hasn’t been given to them, can’t be taken away and can’t be fully controlled is their own body. 

Sadly, Miley Cyrus is our child: collectively the culture’s. We’ve raised, nurtured and encouraged her to be what she is today. We watched her grow on Hannah Montana as a fictional pop-star with multiple personalities, then morph into a real one. She is a product with no actual being to speak of, and her public persona represents nothing in particular. Her wild gesticulations and tongue wagging, are nothing more than an inert replica of the modernist culture that challenged the status quo and the prevailing rules and conservancies of religion, government and the family which held actual meaning in a not-too-distant past world still based on the concept of a centered reality. (Those pangs of guilt towards our freak-child easily confused as a phantom ringtone and then brushed aside.) Our decentered culture represents nothing in particular or of note outside of an affirmation of capitalism and the dissolution of the self, and Miley is its final embodiment.

That special feeling/That confusing feeling

It's an unnerving feeling to realize you're high but you don't know why.