Why do people have to sit and wait?  The nightly wait in front of the computer or a TV set for some news, some word--that help is on the way to them.  Selling things you never wanted to part with, so the baby will have enfamil.  The can costs $14 dollars, and lasts less than a week.  Unemployment is on extension after extension, but that will run out soon.  You are also running out of insulin, the fourth type of insulin you've had to try because the kind your old insurance company had you on costs around $100.  The last time you went to a doctor, George W. Bush was still President.

This is what alot of us do every day; sit, watch TV, wait for phone calls and emails that never come.  Some days, you just end up sleeping. 

It shouldn't be like this.  You have sent out resumes, posted yours online, applied through the local newspaper ads, craigslist, careerbuilder, hotjobs--but no calls, no emails, no interviews.  You feel paranoid; people who know you, friends and family, may think you haven't been looking--why else would you still not have found work?  They don't know how or why you can't relax, can't make plans, and never seem to take the kids and wife out anymore.  You have too much pride to tell them what a struggle it is--how this time you are failing.  It is too embarassing to talk about.

When I was a kid, I felt this strange yet comforting feeling that everything just goes and keeps going; the machines, the mail, the buses, the planes, the truckers on the highway.  You could go to sleep at night, and almost hear people working in the nearby factories, the assembly lines, the trains moaning in the distance--and it all made you feel not so alone, as if someone was making sure it all ran smooth, it all kept going.  I imagined in my head (having never been there) the white house and Capitol, and people like Tip O'Neal and Ronald Reagan and Paul Simon and his bowtie, that I saw on TV all the time, and imagined that they were the ones, that Washington was the place--that made all of these things a whole.  As if my dad went to work because this all was in place, and it was all simple.  You had a job, you went to school, nobody seemed to starve.  Only the homeless people downtown.

But as I got older, and became a worker, and saw how the world works, and heard the repeat of the words over and over every election--I lost that image of a perfect machine, everyone a part of a whole.

By the time I was laid off in September of 2008, I had already felt the sting of a layoff before, I had already experienced unemployment.  But I never ever thought it would last this long.

I never imagined I would spend hour after hour copy and pasting cover letters, changing the heading and job titles, uploading my resume, over and over and over.  Applying to janitorial jobs, though I went to college.