Insomnia is the new 401(k). Middle of the night Twittering will be our downfall. Kara Thrace is the harbinger of doom.

Another sleepless night and a early morning mental debate of “whether to put the coffee on” or lie here for another three or four hours. On my Twitter feed, @Mr_Darling (another recent insomniac) tells the world he’s headed to his local Safeway. It is 6:08am. Since I was going to go to the store sometime today anyway, I decide to do the same. I get dressed and head out, whether the morning rush is already in swing but the sun hasn’t crested the cloud-laden horizon yet. I take my sunglasses just in case I will want them on the walk back.

Of course, the Safeway is devoid of customers. I think there were only a handful of us in there; most of the cars in the parking lot were undoubtedly employee-owned. Restocking of shelves and buffing of floors, however, is in full swing.

I grab my usual basketful of groceries and head home, passing people who are headed the opposite direction towards the Metro on their way to work. I get home around the same time that, three months ago, I would have been catching the bus outside and undoubtedly already complaining about my commute.

But now I have milk for my morning coffee, and after breffus I’m going to start making sauce. Crushing garlic and chopping onions before 8:00am, why not?

Purchase: $33.54
EBT Card Balance: $156.21
Club Card Savings: $11.00 (25% of purchase)

It’s now been three months since I was laid off from my job. In these last 90 days I’ve dealt with city and state bureaucracy, shame at the grocery store and extensive amounts of utter boredom. I’ve taken walks halfway across town, sometimes to accomplish errands but sometimes because there was nothing better to do. I’ve seen the sun come up on Wednesday mornings, and not because I’m getting up while it’s still dark, as I did when I was employed. I’ve often stared out of my front door during wet, cold weather, watching traffic and the occasional D6 fly by. I’ve walked to the Metro and back during evening rush hours just to get a sense of what everybody else’s world is still like. I’ve gone to the corner store, without showering for a day or two, at 11:00 in the morning, wondering if they’re wondering why I’m there at that hour.

I know what this experience is like now, becoming accustomed to an unwanted routine. I wonder what the next 90 days are going to hold for me, as I see unemployment benefits terminating, and what happens next? At what point do I start putting furniture and other material goods up for sale on craigslist? At what point do I stand out front during the morning car commute avenue and hold a cardboard sign saying “will blog for food” or “websites while you wait for the red light, $14.95″? At what point do I give everything up and stay with each friend for a night or two and how long can that be sustained? At what point do I (shudder the thought) move in with my Dad? At what point do I abandon everything, seeing how far I can work my way across the country, doing menial jobs without being tracked by a credit card?

Currently, I still have not received this month’s food stamp ration, and while I’m not starving, I’m still hesitant to spend any cash on groceries, hoping everything will be rectified and my deposit that was supposed to he made eleven days ago will go through. I think if it does, I’m going to have a meal that forgoes my usual “buy only what’s on sale and make a meal out of it” mantra and buy some scallops or a porterhouse steak.

Because of some vacation days I had previously scheduled, the last day I was actually employed and in the studio was my birthday. That day we had planned to visit a homeless shelter and cook food for the residents there. I thoroughly enjoyed it. I was in charge of frying up the grilled cheese sandwiches; we had decided a hot meal was in order, so we supplied tomato soup and a vegetable soup too. It was a total group effort from the six or seven of us that participated that day. It felt so great serving the residents and they seemed genuinely appreciative.

Now, I wonder if I’m closer to the receiving end of this process than I am to the giving end. Working in a creative field in a non-creative town, it’s hard to see any kind of upswing anytime soon. People I know who work in other fields are still going like gangbusters—DC is weird that way, often recessions/housing markets don’t hit us quite so hard because the government is still going to employ people, and those people need places to live. So those markets never dry up. Providing smart, unique messaging systems for them and the businesses that rely on them, however, is something that is frequently (and often, stupidly) cut from budgets.

So where does this halfway point leave me? Maybe thinking it’s time to stop looking for a comparable job to my experience and take a position that earns half the salary I’m used to making? Doing someone’s crappy temp work on Powerpoint? Waiting tables? Being one of those rubber-gloved guys cleaning out Metro trash cans during rush hour? Coffeeshop barista? Or maybe it’s *really* time to become the joke job of my 2nd year architecture professor: court reporter. Certainly I’ve seen enough late-night commercials where I can earn that degree in 6-8 weeks.

leprosy over utah
the dinosaur’s favorite sauce
when chickens go crazy
people tell me i haven’t changed at all but i don’t feel the same
no service
my cliches have become so obscure
a113
i know blogging’s dead but i’m going to continue doing it
4n¢
6)retro
creating better artists since 1914
cut 1933–1972 died young
you are not connected to the internet.
vault door diagram
it’s not far to never-never land
game/set/match
in case you failed to notice
in case you failed to see
warm. warmer. disco.

Spotted on JMG.

Web 2.0? I’m still waiting for a pedestrian definition of this term so that I can understand it. Is it a Facebook community? Is it constant web connection through our phones? Is it free wifi connections at coffeeshops? Who knows. Maybe I’ll need to wait for the 3.0 upgrade to figure it out.

What I’d like to go back to is Web 1.0, or maybe even 0.5, back when pages were basic, easy to use (and load. read: no flash) and the page real estate wasn’t occupied with 85% advertising. To do this, I’ve discovered a wonderful site that runs a javascript (actually I think it’s CSS) that will script strip away all that crap that you don’t want to see: the dancing baby promoting credit card debt consolidation, the whirlwind of yearbook photos of people you don’t want to communicate with ever again and the chicks being “surprised” by the camera as they dance in their cubicles. How stupid do these advertisers think we are, that anything in motion will catch our eyes? I digress. Deep breath.

Arc90 has a site that deletes all that crap. Here’s what you do: set your prefs, drag that button icon to your browsers links and then when you go to a site or article you can click on that link in your browser and it will strip away all the crap and give you only the words you need. Simple. Beautiful. Fuck you advertisers!

In a similar vain, to ease viewing and making it cohesive to view on iPhones, I’ve installed a plug-in on futurejunkie that will change viewing from a fully-rendered page to more simplistic, easier to navigate panels. It goes from this to this , breaking each entry into its own panel. (This will affect the 0.00001% of you that have stumbled here on an iPhone.)  There is a dropdown that gives you a preview and a link to fully expand it. You can review and leave comments. Simple.

I guess the honeymoon is over with all my unemployment crap being processed efficiently. My monthly food stamp ration was supposed to be deposited on the fourth but hasn’t gone in yet. This means I’m using the remaining balance from last month, down to $36.30.

I’ve been calling DHS (Dept of Human Services, not HomeSec) and if your call is answered, its directed to a machine where you are forced to leave a desperate message that will be returned “within 24 hours”. I’ve been leaving these daily messages since last Friday. I hope I don’t have to go down there just to get this resolved.

At the store today I really needed to keep track of my budget instead of simply filling up my basket and then checking out. I didn’t need much, I still have lots of goods in the pantry & freezer, but wanted to get some items to supplement what I have already. Prepping/cooking for these weekend: garden salad, broccoli salad, hamburgers and a pot of sauce. These are for separate meals, of course.

Purchase: $22.55
EBT Card Balance: $13.75
Club Card Savings: $8.46 (27% of purchase)

I now have participated in my first ever drag show.

The Academy of Washington’s Miss Gaye Zodiac 2009 finals were held Sunday at the newly re-opened Zeigfeld’s in Southwest. I was not a contestant but Miss Veronica Blake, a friend of mine, was and asked for friend recruits to assist her in the Talent portion of the competition. I said I would do it if everybody else did, and the next thing we knew we were all on board.

There were two portions to the Zodiac show: Self-expression and Talent. For Self-expression contestants has to choose an animated character from a film; Ms. Blake chose Queen Grimhilde, the evil queen from Snow White. This was the solo part of the show and Ms. Blake really killed while on stage, getting lots of cheering from the audience. She was more composed and professional then the other competitors and the concept was flawlessly executed.

For the Talent portion of the show, contestants were allowed up to four supporting people to join them on stage, where they had to recreate a human non-animated character from a film (Veronica, is this correct?). Ms. Blake chose the Bride of Frankenstein. I was cast as Dr. Frankenstein, Goldy and Funbags as zombie back up singers and Don-a-thon cast as The Monster. Becker provided stage manager support.

Little did I know that the rehearsal blocking would entail me to be on stage the entire six minutes. Actually, I was the one that opened the set, because Ms. Blake was still behind gauze on the operating table. The music for the set starts a little early, before we have the strobe going so I have to jump out on stage and start my machinations. There is no time to be nervous now.

After The Bride’s unveiling and me lip-syncing the classic line “She’s Alive, ALIVE!!!!”, she and I go through our first number, Lesley Gore’s “You Don’t Own Me”, a tongue-in-cheek number as The Bride pronounces her independence from me, The Dr. An audio lighting/chain-dragging interlude and then The Bride launches into “My Boyfriend’s Back” where The Monster comes crashing through and slowly (stomp. stomp. stomp.) chases me around the stage. At this time the backup zombies reveal themselves and start shoop-shoop-shooping the “Hey-La” backup lyrics. Eventually I’m told to take a “permanent vacation” where I head down the stage’s runway, cowering, followed by The Bride & Monster, and end scene.

It was a hit from the get-go. The audience cheering, launching, screaming in support and apparently we got three standing ovations during the set. Those stage lights, they’re so bright, I couldn’t see what was going on in the audience. Probably a good thing though, to keep focused on my role.

At the end of the evening the buzz around the audience was that Ms. Blake was a shoo-in as crown winner, but it’s never final until it’s final. But when it came down the announcements, Ms. Blake was indeed crowned with the Zodiac 2009 title! It was fun to be on stage, being silly, and able to help out a friend.

The photos are taken from our pre-show, as once we needed to get into gear no one really had time to take any pictures. I’m waiting for a video of the set to be posted somewhere or on YouTube and I’ll update this once it’s live. If you have it, please post it!

WASHINGTON (AP)—The nation’s unemployment rate bolted to 8.1 percent in February, the highest since late 1983, as cost-cutting employers slashed 651,000 jobs amid a deepening recession.

Both figures were worse than analysts expected and the Labor Department’s report shows America’s workers being clobbered by a wave of layoffs unlikely to ease in the coming months.

“There is no light at the end of the tunnel with these numbers,” said Nigel Gault, economist at IHS Global Insight. “Job losses were everywhere and there’s no hope for a turnaround any time soon.”

February’s net job loss came after even deeper payroll reductions in the prior two months, according to revised figures released Friday. The economy lost 681,000 jobs in December and another 655,000 in January.

Employers are shrinking their work forces and turning to other ways to slash costs—including trimming workers’ hours, freezing wages or cutting pay—because the recession has eaten into their sales and profits. Customers at home and abroad are cutting back as other countries cope with their own economic problems.

Since the recession began in December 2007, the economy has lost 4.4 million jobs, more than half of which occurred in the past four months.

With employers showing no appetite to hire, the unemployment jumped half a percentage point from 7.6 percent in January. That was the highest since December 1983, when the jobless rate was 8.3 percent.

All told, the number of unemployed people climbed to 12.5 million. In addition, the number of people forced to work part time for “economic reasons” rose by a sharp 787,000 to 8.6 million. That’s people who would like to work full time but whose hours were cut back or were unable to find full-time work.

If part-time, discouraged workers and others are factored in, the unemployment rate would have been 14.8 percent in February, the highest on record.

The pain hit blue- and white-collar workers, those without a high-school diploma and those highly educated. The jobless rate for people with a bachelor’s degree or higher jumped to 4.1 percent last month from 3.8 percent in January. That’s the highest on records dating to 1992.

Job losses were widespread last month. Disappearing jobs and evaporating wealth from tanking home values, 401(k)s and other investments have forced consumers to retrench, driving companies to lay off workers. It’s a vicious cycle in which all the economy’s negative problems feed on each other, worsening the downward spiral.

A new wave of layoffs hit this week. The country is getting bloodied by fallout from the housing, credit and financial crises- the worst since the 1930s. And there’s no easy fix for a quick turnaround, economists said.

President Barack Obama is counting on a multipronged assault to lift the country out of recession: a $787 billion stimulus package of increased federal spending and tax cuts; a revamped, multibillion-dollar bailout program for the nation’s troubled banks; and a $75 billion effort to stem home foreclosures.

Even in the best-case scenario that the relief efforts work and the recession ends later in 2009, the unemployment rate is expected to keep climbing, hitting 9 percent or higher this year. In fact, the Federal Reserve thinks the unemployment rate will stay elevated into 2011. Economists say the job market may not get back to normal—meaning a 5 percent unemployment rate—until 2013.

Businesses won’t be inclined to ramp up hiring until they are sure any economic recovery has staying power. The economy contracted at a staggering 6.2 percent in the final three months of 2008, the worst showing in a quarter-century, and it will probably continue to shrink during the first six months of this year.