I am many things – handsome, smart, an expert on women and by all measures that matter an extremely successful lawyer. But one thing I am not is a millionaire.  The reason I am not a millionaire is because I’d have to save more of my $400,000 + salary working as a lobbyist in DC.  One would think this is feasible since I don’t pay rent and cheat on my taxes.  I also get absurd bonuses. Not law firm style bonuses which are more like tips, though still unfortunately nothing like a financier’s bonus – but then again my job is essentially to go to parties and be a gofer for a senile old man that doesn’t trust computers.
And I don’t want to be a millionaire. I wouldn’t mind being a billionaire but I am not going to bed a higher class of girl just because the sum total of my bank accounts and investments equals one million dollars.  Especially in a town like DC.  In DC, and in a lot of businesses currency isn’t money, currency is freedom and I have plenty of it. What I lack is an associate, or associates rather, folks who are worthy of spending time in my presence. I am not quite at the point where I am willing to pay for it, but I shouldn’t be spending all my free time watching “It’s Always Sunny” on Netflix.
Read on to read why I actually sort of miss Benito…and real skanks.
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I’ve been going to therapy lately.  There is this exercise where I imagine an executive in his late 40’s to early 50’s.  He has middle school children, served in the military, paid for school himself and has worked 60 hour weeks for thirty years.  He has strayed in his marriage and is separated from his wife.  His parents are dead.  He has a crappy apartment where he stays most of the time and still pays for most of the expenses of his former household where he pretends his children don’t know that divorce is on the horizon as soon as an amicable financial arrangement can be worked out.  I bump into him at a bar where I am eating lunch and he instantly knows what I am. Who is unshaven, not dressed for work, and clearly eating lunch at 4 pm? One of those live at home unemployed hipsters that elected Obama. And he hates me.  Why? Because we are essentially the same. The people we love most don’t respect us.  It is painful to even be around them.  We are in a lot of debt which we are never getting out of and its inevitable we will fail to meet our perceived responsibilities.  But I spent my afternoon at the library reading biographies of obscure Civil War generals and I won’t have to sell my mother’s home to pay for college for my gaggle of children.Children who will not be there at their deathbed and resent the visits toward the end. Will they check their email in the hospital room? Did you?

Anyway, that exercise helps me. But the question at hand is what to do when my hypothetical person sits next to you at the bar during an empty happy hour and the bartender tells him you are a…whatever you went to school to become. In this situation you must quickly do several things.  1) acknowledge that you were say, a baker once upon a time 2) say you are pursuing a second career as say an astronaut 3) acknowledge barriers to re-entry into your former field and shrug it off by saying you have no plans for re-entry at the present time.

Read on if you want the lies in the above statement spelled out for you and to find out what the likely response is
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It’s been about a month since the Boston Marathon Bombers struck.  We’ve got 20 or so months until the mid-term elections.  The President has stopped trying to kick the football Congress always pulls away at the last second. So here we are discussing a routine attack on our embassies overseas from six months ago when we were attacked here recently, an assault on reporters where nobody went or is going to jail, unlike the wiki leaks scandals and…taxes? Really? Taxes haven’t been interesting since Al Capone got arrested.  Wesley Snipes if you are into action movies. I still love “Money Train.”

Look, I get it. You figured out the President doesn’t really care about gun control and his heart won’t be broken on immigration.  Besides, the GOP is digging it’s own grave on that front.  He’s outmaneuvered you on the sequester. So you feel you have to do something.  But this? Come on guys, you are just going to start looking like the boy who cried wolf.  And here’s the best part: you’re doing it because you’re scared.

Read on as I break it down for you

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So I was going to respond in more detail to a post I commented on on ATL where the author asks why black people don’t join the NRA in larger numbers, but then Benito said something about I should write more about things that are helpful to the wretched masses of unemployed or underemployed student debtors. I told Benito to go fuck himself, that he could write Friday’s post, and that I was going to watch TV with some buddies.  Notice I didn’t say friends.
Forty minutes later I have a beer in my hand I am watching Rocky 6.  It’s the part where Rocky is talking to his kid after his kid (quite reasonably) asks him not to go through with a promotional fight.  He gives a little speech.  It’s filler until the training montage. I was trying to get buzzed before the montage began and I would have until someone was like “yeah, Rocky you tell ‘em! I am tired of unemployed minorities with ivy-league degrees blaming Republicans because they’re not where they want to be!” I had never noticed it before (because who the fuck watches Rocky and analyzes the things that actually come out of Rocky’s mouth) but Rocky 6 can actually be used as a piece of Republican propaganda.

Relevancy check: It’s important for you, the unemployed debtor to always be aware that the rest of society views you as 1) a failure 2) a coward and 3) someone who is generally of low moral turpitude.  That’s actually one of the messages of Rocky 6.

Read on for my response
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Hopefully I have explained to you oh ye indebted wretch, that you are no longer a lawyer, computer scientist, engineer, junior executive or whatever it was that was your vocation during your last stint with employment even though you have kept the credentials current and still retain the degrees earned in school. This can be difficult to accept, but should be somewhat intuitive.  In the eyes of the rest of the world you are not good enough at what you do to earn money at it, despite jumping through all society’s hoops to in theory be employed doing it. If you can’t accept that please don’t read on.  If you have it’s time for the next step, and that is that you are LOWER than someone who never went down this path. By that I mean you are held in lower esteem by your former colleagues, are less employable both generally and in your current profession, and also are in a worse place in life.

Unfortunately this is not really intuitive.  In theory you should be better suited for a job requiring the training that you have versus someone who does not have it.  There are plenty of folks who have your training who aren’t necessarily employed doing what you’ve trained to do.  They have retired or started families or have moved on to something more lucrative and they aren’t treated like something you wouldn’t want to step in. But it’s true, and accepting and more importantly UNDERSTANDING why this is true is a crucial step in moving on.

Read on for the specific breakdown.
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Life is so, so sweet.  It’s nice out so I left the office to grab a drink with a buddy of mine who is a defense contractor for one of the countless government contractors that pepper the Washington, DC beltway.  He was ecstatic about the Boston Marathon Bombing.  I thought it was because we were both high when the news broke, or maybe because he was Pakistani and hates this country but does what he does because he has three kids and it beats running a falafel stand…but it turns out it was because terrorist attacks are particularly good for business. And he hates this country. That’s why he bleeds our treasury selling the government idiots to warm seats because their own red tape prevents them from hiring the personnel they need.  He laughed when he saw my expression, saying part of the beauty of his job is everyone assumes it’s patriotic.

So anyway, when Benito said he was going to write about the Boston Marathon bombing I told him the above.  At first Benito didn’t believe me. He said there was no WAY someone with the background I described who casually admitted to hating this country would ever be permitted to hold the necessary clearances. So of course I explained to him that the trick to getting a clearance is to marry the whitest person you could find and have as many children as possible as fast as possible. Then Benito got all huffy, and then I said hey, slow down, I said he hates this country, and puts his own monetary interests above it, but that doesn’t mean he’s putting bombs in backpacks and attacking the 1% of Americans who try and stay in decent shape. Why couldn’t they bomb a fat clinic?  If anyone resembles the Boston Marathon Bombers it’s…Benito!

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This isn’t the sort of thing I would post about if it wasn’t for an unfortunate movie that inadvertently puts our sad business out in the street for all to see. I can’t even remember the exact title, something like “John, Who Lives at Home.” In it a 30 year-old unemployed pot head takes everyday occurrences as signs pointing towards his destiny and at the end of the movie his misadventures put him at the right place at the right time to prevent a horrible tragedy thereby giving meaning to his life, though not resulting in a job.
Ok, Confession time: although there were a number of stereotypes about us that are certainly untrue (pot head, could get a job if only they really applied themselves etc.) one of them hits the nail right on the head- we all dream about being a hero, particularly in some sort of way that validates a need for the meandering existence we’ve had on the fringes of society since we got laid off or graduated into unemployment, and with the next class of lemmings, economic uselessness.
So with that lengthy introduction read on if you want to know the universal reaction to the Boston tragedy by wretches such as myself.
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So I volunteer at a homeless shelter mostly because it’s a way to pass time without having to interact with people socially.  I fall into a familiar pattern: I nod at the mentally disturbed, chat up the addicts and avert my eyes for those together enough to feel shame.  After all, I’m homeless except I’m lucky enough to have family and value my own basic physical needs over my dignity. So when I avert my eyes it’s really for the same reason they do.  Every now and then one of them understands.

So then I made the mistake of talking to someone. Naturally they wanted something. It was a simple request really, call some people and ask for some donations. I had nothing else to do.  So, against my better judgment I agreed. Seven minutes later I was on the phone with a lawyer. I spoke a certain way, I used certain vocabulary.  He asked the question three times and the third time I admitted to being a lawyer.

Read on to find out what happened

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By now I hope you know how to effectively deal with alumni from your school. It’s a mixture of getting your story straight and behaving appropriately for the right context. Now you have just one person, a random alum, whose successful handling is the only thing that separates you from the next world where you will learn how to deal with folks in your former line of work.

Think of the alum like spider-man: there is a huge difference dealing with him in downtown Manhattan versus the middle of nowhere Montana.  With your random alum, someone you know well enough for facial recognition but not someone who respects your humanity like a roommate…your freshman roommate. Anyway, there are three contexts 1) completely random, say a hardware store 2) a place where you have some anticipation – a wedding or a funeral 3) a reunion.

In the first scenario your basic story for a stranger should work but do a quick mental check for any bullshit the alum might be particularly suited to smell out. MOST importantly though you need to follow up your life update with a question, usually about some mutual acquaintance, preferably of the opposite sex. No matter how comfortable you are end the interaction as soon as possible.

Read on for the other two scenarios
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Hopefully I have convinced you to not actively destroy whatever positive memories you might have of your college experience, prepare for the chance encounter with fellow of alums of wherever the hell you graduated from and avoid these encounters at all costs, particularly in the form of reunions and the like. Before moving on I have one more warning: don’t take comfort in the company of a similarly situated person, particularly an alum from your college or graduate school.  There is no honor amongst failures. Get used to being lonely.  Eventually you’ll work up the courage to chat up strangers at the dive bar you frequent and not feel so dirty about watching porn four times a day.

First, there is the practical. Hanging out with losers is a waste of time. You have dug yourself a deep hole and you need to focus on clawing your way out of it. If you had real friends someone who have lent you a hand by now. If you couldn’t make real friends when you had potential, what do you think your chances are of doing that now?

Second, there is the psychological.  Two people in the same leaky boat tend to spend exponentially more time blaming the shipbuilder for the leak than looking for a way to bail out the boat.  Eventually, they create a fantasy world and romanticize their struggle to be something other than losers as if there aren’t hundreds of thousands just like them. Think about anyone you’ve ever known who has started a band with their best friend.

Read on to learn the best reason why this is a bad idea

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