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Pro-tips: Surviving Unemployment

1. Apply for unemployment benefits.

2. If you are disqualified because they contact your previous employer who fired you over a technicality and claims you didn’t follow a policy that is in fact nowhere in the company handbook, deeply mourn the loss of that $200/week, then curse said employer.
3. Try to maintain a normal sleep schedule. Do not stay up all night watching movies on HBOgo. Do not sleep all day.
4. Just because you can apply to jobs all day from your bed, doesn’t mean you should stay in bed all day.

5. Go for walks and sit in parks in the middle of the day because it’s free and you have no one to hang out with during that time, but also because your employed friends can’t. Sunbathe on your lawn/roof, and content yourself with the thought that your former coworkers are still stuck in that horrible place while you are working on your tan.

6. Do NOT plot revenge against your former employers. It is definitely a waste of energy and you will not get the enormous satisfaction out of it that you think you will. Being the bigger person is totally fun and not unrewarding at all.

7. Absolutely no daytime drinking. Not because you’re afraid of becoming an alcoholic, but because you’ll be hungover by dinnertime. Basically, if you do drink in the daytime, just keep drinking to avoid the hangover.

8. Start a blog.

9. Don’t blog about being unemployed.

10. Definitely not in list form.

11. Fuck it, go ahead and plot revenge against your former employers. Obliterate the bastards.

So HBO’s new series ‘Girls’ premiered this week, and though it’s gotten some praise from the critics, there has also been a backlash against the new show.

This critic was quoted in a Huffington Post article about the backlash:

“Girls feels less like a commentary on this generation and more like an indictment on it,” John Kubicek wrote for BuddyTV.com. “These characters have been raised believing that they’re special and that they can do anything they want. The problem is that none of them seem to want to do anything. There’s nothing particularly special about Hannah’s life, no reason that her memoirs would be remotely interesting.”

Several people I’ve spoken to about ‘Girls’ expressed a similar opinion, saying that main character Hannah and her friends are completely spoiled and unappealing as characters. They complain that they can’t sympathize with Hannah (played by Lena Dunham) at all.

This doesn’t come as a complete surprise to me. Hannah is not an eminently likable character. She is immature, even childish, and not at all independent. Her friends don’t come across as extremely mature or likable either.

But I think Dunham is touching on something very real with this show, as she did in Tiny Furniture as well. When Hannah has to beg her boss to begin paying her after a year of unpaid interning for his company, and when she is basically laughed at and dismissed by him, that rings true. Some would say it is Hannah’s own fault: she’s two years out of college, and if she doesn’t have a paying job by now she must be lazy. She must just not care or want to be independent badly enough.

Even if you don’t like Hannah, that attitude is mind-boggling to me. Even if you didn’t graduate from college recently and you don’t have firsthand experience like Hannah’s, I guarantee you that you know, at least tangentially, several young people in this situation. To blame them outright and call them lazy is not merely unsympathetic; it’s wrong. Unpaid internships not for college credit are commonplace, yes. But they are also an illegal and unethical employer practice. It is an employer’s market right now, and they are taking advantage. This is not an indictment of companies who hire unpaid interns. I just want to point out that this is the system Hannah and her real-life counterparts have graduated into. In many fields, unpaid internships are now a necessary step to getting an entry-level job.

Should Hannah have left after three months or six months? Maybe. But this is what she was told she needed to do in order to get a job in her field.

Being in Hannah’s situation, or Aura’s in Tiny Furniture—being dependent on your parents at an age when many would judge you harshly and look down on you for that—is extremely frustrating. And it brings out the worst in people. When Hannah’s parents cut her off cold turkey, pulling the rug out from under her, she reacts childishly. But that is because she is overwhelmed and unprepared to deal with this unexpected turn.

She and the other characters in this show are not meant to be likable. They are meant to reflect realistically how many young people would react in their situation. How many do react to that situation.

This obsession with the characters not being likable or relatable is strange to me. (Name one character in Game of Thrones who is likable and to whom you can relate.) Yes, it is nice to have characters you can root for unthinkingly. No, ‘Girls’ does not offer that. But most good TV shows do not. Rather, they offer complex characters and challenge us to realize that no character is simply all good or all bad, just as no person is.

And ‘Girls’ may well prove to be one of those shows.