This is the view outside my apartment at noon today. That’s my car there.

It’s spring!

It’s my 23rd birthday today. Yup, I’m 23, unemployed and living with my mom. I also don’t have a girlfriend, which is for the best because I couldn’t afford one.

But all this free time is good because it’s given me a chance to catch up on watching TV. There’s this show I really like on AMC called Mad Men. It started airing this summer. It’s about an advertising agency in 1960 New York and showcases the kind of attitudes of the era, the racism and sexism and stuff like that. It really makes me feel nostalgic for that time period. It’s also the slowest moving show in the history of television. I’ve watched all nine episodes they’ve made so far and I still can’t say that anything has actually happened. If someone was to ask me if he should watch Mad Men, I would say yes. If they asked me what happens in the show the only thing I could say is, “Not much. They mostly sit around the office and talk about how they don’t like Jews.”

I have also been watching every episode of Dr. Katz, Professional Therapist. I didn’t buy the DVD, because the only DVDs of Dr. Katz you can buy are the entire series together and that costs over a hundred dollars. Not that I buy DVDs anyway, I usually download shows. The thing with the Dr. Katz downloads is that they are not ripped from the DVDs or taken from a Tivo, they’re ripped from VHS tapes from the late 90s. Comedy Central hasn’t aired Dr. Katz in years because that would get in the way of them showing Mad TV for 26 hours a day.

Dr. Katz was produced by the same company that later made Home Movies for Cartoon Network. I like this company because I think it’s great that a bunch of people decided to get into animation by making cartoons where no one moves. I downloaded several Home Movies episodes a couple of years ago, but it was very hard to do because when you type “Home Movies” into a file sharing program, the results are mostly people’s home movies. They make them available on file sharing programs for some reason.

I don’t want to alarm anyone out there, but I’m unemployed. I graduated college just this spring but haven’t been able to find a real job yet. I tell, so far this hasn’t been too bad a deal. I’m living back home and it’s after Labor Day and summer is over for everyone but me. Normally this time of year, I’d be back at school, but I don’t have a school to go back to. So I haven’t stopped sleeping in late or watching daytime TV. It’s been a pretty sweet life so far.

I have been looking for a job though. The main problem I am finding with that is that I live in Michigan, where unemployment is so bad that no one here in the entire state has a job. I have been looking at moving to Chicago where there are jobs. At least I see a bunch of people dressed in suits walking around downtown Chicago during the day, so I assume they do something for a living.

I also noticed that if you are walking around in Chicago wearing a suit, a heck of a lot of homeless people will ask you for money. I also noticed that none of these homeless people were white, they were all black or Hispanic. A lot of people would find a piece of information like that very telling about our society. I do too. It means that if I move to Chicago, there is statistically no chance that I will wind up homeless. It’s comforting to know.

I like visiting Chicago because I can stay in cheap motel rooms run by south Asians and watch HBO. I don’t have HBO at home so I go to places that advertise free HBO. A lot of places like motels and coffee shops advertise that they have free wi-fi but I don’t like brining my computer into coffee shops that have free wi-fi that often because I only have a desktop computer and it’s always so much trouble to carry all the equipment over there and then hook up all the cords. I don’t even have a flat screen monitor; I’m still using a CRT.