I honestly didn’t mean to go into such a lengthy monologue about my mom in the last post. It really was supposed to be about the slightly paradoxical feeling of being overly busy despite being unemployed.

Of course, an obvious explanation for feeling like one has too much to do would be engagement in a fevered job search, writing and sending of dozens of applications every day, calling all contacts at all hours, devising ever-more refined searches on the job board, and so on and so forth. But this doesn’t apply to me at the moment. I have moved through the panic phase that immediately follows being laid off. I did keep that up for awhile, but I had certainly started to feel the futility of frenzied days fighting to reenter the work force. Perhaps I also had a vague intuition of broader issues raised by the periodic dumping of American jobs, whether they go overseas or simply into the trash heap of social progress.

Friends and acquaintances started helping me bring a different view of my situation into focus. It started with Rebecca pointing me to The Brazen Careerist’s post on 5 things to do when you are unemployed. The list did not include job hunting. A couple weeks later, through networking with a friend and colleague, I met a java programmer who recently received her MBA in sustainable business. She took the opportunity of unemployment to build a great Web site called neighborhoodfruit.com that’s devoted to helping backyard gardeners share and trade the fruit and vegetables they grow. We had a great conversation about the current employment climate, sustainability, and what I want to do next. Then tonight, a received an email from a prominent local businessman with whom I had an interesting conversation after running into him late the other night at the Hotsy Totsy. It simply contained a link to an interesting article entitled Use Jobless Time to Build Better World. And with that as a goal, you can see how even the current legions of jobless workers could be working overtime.