I bring this up because, as you know dear reader, I have been unemployed for more than a year.  When this topic of conversation came up with my career counselor she pointed out in a positive manner that this may not be the case with me because of all of my volunteer activities and blogging.  She suggested — and I took a crack at it — revising my resume so that the volunteer and blogging stuff would be the first things on my resume, rather than starting with my last job.  It’s a way of showing that I haven’t been sitting on my, er, blog for the last year or so.

I’ve been using many of my skills — especially writing — as part of my volunteering.  It’s what I do.  In fact, I’m even building on my skills by writing and managing a grant application.  And I’ll keep doing it so someone in a human resources department doesn’t get a whiff of that milk container in the company fridge that no one seems to want to throw out.

MY LIFE AS A STEERING COMMITTEE MEMBER

I’ve been a member of the PAWW Steering Committee for just about a year, just about as long as PAWW as been around, and just a little longer than I’ve been unemployed.

I ran into Dave Ninehouser at a meeting and then a rally about health care — around the time that the current Pennsylvania governor decided that the working poor didn’t need coverage.  Dave invited me to come to a meeting of the steering committee and I offered to help out as a writer.  The writing stuff didn’t happen until much later — until we came up with the idea of putting out a monthly newsletter — but I was thrown in as soon as I showed up to plan our first resource fair.

I’ve been unemployed for a little over 15 months now and being part of the PAWW Steering Committee every week has made sure I got out on a regular basis and that I dealt with labor council and other professionals who respected my ideas and skills as a writer.  Those are important things when you’re unemployed:  many of the unemployed feel that they have nothing to offer and nave no voice in their situation once they’re lost their jobs.

Those are the reasons we’ve worked so hard to provide information, resources, and activities to the jobless.  In the last year I’ve helped plan and been part of two resource fairs; a volunteer day of action at the Greater Pittsburgh Community Food Bank; actions around the city to bring visibility to issues such as crumbling bridges, threats to unemployment insurance, drastic state budget cuts, and the need for corporations to pay their fair share; and wrote articles for the monthly newsletter that provides the unemployed and our other supporters with information about our activities, news on unemployment insurance at the state and local level, and upcoming events.

Pennsylvania Wants to Work works because we know that being unemployed does not been mean that a person no longer has value.  Borrowing Billy Bragg’s mixture of “pop and politics,” Dave N, Joe, Rod, Catherine, Tony, Dave V, and I meet each week to reach out to the jobless at this crucial time for their families and the country at large.  At a time when hundreds of people are lining up for a single job and thousands are lining up for job fairs, it’s more important than ever that Pennsylvania Wants to Work and our sister cities in the America Wants to Work program, rally those who have been harmed the most — both financially and emotionally — from the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression that they had no part in causing.  The only way to turn things around will be for the millions of unemployed and underemployed to have good paying jobs that will allow them to provide for their families, send their kids to college, and save for a comfortable retirement.  Anything less will not — and should not — be accepted.

For those of you who are not aware, the book of a musical is the play part of the show — it’s the part of the show between the songs.  I’m a big fan of the book musicals of the golden age of Broadway musicals in the late 1950s and early 1960s, shows like “How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying,”  “My Fair Lady,”  “West Side Story,” and, most of all, “Gypsy.”  I happen to think that “Gypsy” is the best musical ever (it doesn’t hurt that I saw it on Broadway with Angela Lansbury as Mama Rose).  The show has music by Jule Styne, lyrics by Stephen Sondheim, and a book by the late, great Arthur Laurents — a book that is so strong it could stand on its own as a play.

I thought of my dream job earlier this week when I was waiting to watch the series premiere of Smash, a new program about the creation of a Broadway musical.  It’s not as if I don’t know how people put together a musical.  A little over 150 years ago I wrote the book for a one-act musical that was produced Off-Off-Off Broadway (that’s where the NY Times said it was — we got a listing in the Sunday Arts & Leisure section the weekend before we opened).  And for years since then I’ve been carrying around an idea for another musical but haven’t been able to find anyone to write the songs (I’ve also written a couple of plays since then).

But back to Smash.   This post isn’t meant to promote the show or review it (although I get awfully close to that in the following sentences).  The only thing — the main thing — I was interested in was how the show – both book and songs – was written.  I didn’t think that was too much to ask — from the commercials it looked like two of the main characters were the composer and lyricist team (Debra Messing is one of them — the division of duties wasn’t made clear in the pilot).  By the end of the hour, they had three songs and what was considered by everyone involved to be a rough book.  My problem was that you never saw them working on the songs and you never saw them writing the book — and it wasn’t clear (to me at least) that perhaps they weren’t even writing the book.  Is there a phantom book writer that will be revealed in a future episode?

All I’m saying is that my dream job is to do what this show seems to have removed from the creative mix.  Even the Tonys now give out the award for Best Book in a separate ceremony before the broadcast.  But book writers are an essential part of any Broadway musical.  How about a little respect here — and making a young(ish) man’s dream come true?

Unfortunately, the majority party in Harrisburg has not been willing to increase these payments as part of the solution to the trust fund issue but continues to find ways to make life more difficult for the thousands of current and future unemployed Pennsylvanians.

- Henry Lipput

I haven’t done any of those things but, being unemployed, I’ve often considered how I might make some money off of my blog.  And I think I’ve come up with a genius idea:  naming rights.

Imagine you have a lot of money and don’t know what to do with it but you want to make sure your name or brand are kept out there.  Let’s say you’re a rich guy who has great hair.  Let’s say your name is something like Ronald Stump.  Why wouldn’t you want your name on my blog?  Why wouldn’t you want to come to the WordPress site and visit RONALD STUMP’S BEING UNEMPLOYED IS LITERALLY NOT WORKING FOR ME?  Your name and brand would be seen by an average of four readers a day!  Isn’t that worth a butt load of money?

So give me a call or send me an email.  All of this can be yours.

Well, it’s not true.  The unemployment number for January came out this morning and it’s 8.3%, down — very slightly but still down — from 8.5% in December.  According to a short article in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette this morning jobs in health care and manufacturing saw a nice bump.  Health care, for lots of reasons, is always a growth industry but it’s nice to see manufacturing doing well.

But how accurate is the number this month?  The unemployment numbers are never completely accurate — they’re based on estimates.  And even though it’s estimated that companies added 243,000 jobs in January, it’s also estimated that the economy lost 2,689,000 jobs that month.  Remember in last month’s First Friday post when I wrote that I thought the unemployment number would be worse today because all of the people who had been hired for the holidays would be let go?  It seems that the folks who put together the monthly unemployment report take them out of the mix — it’s expected that those workers would no longer have a job and so the numbers are “seasonally adjusted.”  Hmmmm…

Here’s a seasonally adjusted greeting to all of you.  And to all a good night.

What have we learned from this incident?  Well, I’ve learned not to take anything for granted.  It’s certainly not as if I stopped sending out resumes or reaching out or volunteering.  I kept doing all of those things but I really thought that my experience and contact would at least get my resume and writing samples a look-see and an interview.  Is that so wrong?  Apparently yes.

But I should not have counted so much on something happening.  And that’s why I felt so let down.  You don’t have an interview until you have an interview and you don’t have a job until you have a job.  Lesson learned.  Until the next time, of course.

As I was pushing the button to publish last week’s Wednesday post, it occurred to me that it’s been a whole year since I started this blog.  I’m not counting the initial post, which was written to apply for a job, but the first real and true Being Unemployed Is Literally Not Working For Me post.  And there have been 140 posts since then.

There are both good and bad things about doing this blog for a year.  The good thing is that I’ve been able to put together all of those posts and feel good about the ideas, writing, and cartoons that were in almost all of them.  The bad thing is that I’m still writing posts and drawing cartoons for this blog — which means that I still don’t have a job.

So happy birthday — a bit belated — to the blog.  I guess I should have given it the day off but that would be a lame excuse for not writing 200 or so words.  Let’s just hope it doesn’t go on strike.

Speaking of going on strike, I realize that there have been times when new posts didn’t show up for days at a time.  Sometimes I’ve explained that — like when I went elsewhere to visit my family and had to rely on my young nephew’s very slow and overloaded computer that barely allowed me to check emails – and other times I haven’t.   I haven’t because I got a tip at one of the sessions at Podcamp last fall that if you don’t feel like blogging or don’t have anything to say — then don’t.  And don’t apologize for it — which is what happened a few weeks ago when there were no posts at all.  Because being unemployed is not — as you may imagine — all sunshine and unicorns, at least not for me.  Sometimes I’ve been able to tell you about that without the post turning all grim and oh-woe-is-me and when it even approaches that level I try to add something to the post that’s just a little bit uplifting.  When I can’t do that — and I don’t have a new cartoon to put in its place — then I don’t post.  It’s not a big deal in the scheme of things but I don’t want to feel guilty about it.

Now, with that out of the way, let’s move on to year two.