Unemployment v. 2.0--Day 1

In the comments below, Elfi (:::waves::: Hi Elfi!) asked me how I’m doing today. At the risk of causing perplexity and confusion in almost everybody else by transferring from my normal writing style to American LOLCat:

I iz feelin full of lose.

It was weird—like waking up from a bad dream this morning, then discovering “Oh, hey, oops—not a dream.” It wasn’t a good feeling. So I went back to sleep for a while, and when I woke up again: still not a dream. Only now, it was a non-dream with a noisy, hungry cat who really wanted his breakfast. (That’s the problem of not free-feeding kibble anymore—breakfast time is now an urgent alarm, not a casual “they’ve been grazing all night, they’ll be fine” kind of thing.) So I went downstairs, chopped up a chicken leg to share three ways, listened to chomping from the older two cats, and received the dirty look from Snickers that said “oh hai, I don think I will be eatin of yr swill--pleez 2 be feeding me sum REEL catfuud…kthxbai.” Which I ignored, as it was rendered in cat, not in English. I’m currently thawing the meat to make their real food; hopefully Snickers will eat that. I’m optimistic, if his demeanor toward the treat I’ve introduced him to is any indication. (I don’t even wanna talk about them, but I will. It’s very hard for me to feed my cat something called “dehydrated bunny ears”—and even more so when you consider that that is EXACTLY what they are. They have fur. You can see where they were attached to the original bunny. And they CRUNCH. They gross me out, and Tim as well, but Snick thinks they’re the best thing since climbable curtains.)

Anyway, what with the feeding of the cats, the fine folks over at I Can Has Cheezburger? and the subsequent discovery of a song that turned both Tim’s and my minds into slush*, we got through the day. I didn’t do anything about a job, or unemployment, or anything else—I foresee a big problem with the Unemployment folks anyhow, since I got fired again AND the Department of Employment seems to think I tried to pull a fast one on them. Apparently I claimed my first week of employment by mistake, thinking the form I’d filled out had sufficed to let them know that I was no longer eligible, and when I got the check I just figured they knew what they were doing and cashed it without thinking. Well, a week later I got a threatening letter accusing me of possible fraud; upon reading what they claimed I’d done, I realized the mistake and wrote them a check for the full week’s benefits, but it hasn’t cleared yet and now I’m going back to them. Red tape being what it is, I am HIGHLY pessimistic.

More later, perhaps….


*If you’ve got LimeWire or Gnutella or any of those, look for “Burger Dance” by DJ Otzi. You should also be able to find it by typing “Pizza Hut” into the search box—but make sure you get the DJ Otzi version, because only that version will bring home the true meaning of “earworm”. It’s in German, but the choruses are in completely comprehensible English, and it will lodge itself in your ear canal and gnaw into your brains, sucking out your life-force in its insane and insatiable need to keep up its own levels of horrifying suckitude.