Unemployment inertia

It's happening. I can feel it. Every morning when my alarm goes off at 8:30, it strikes. Unemployment inertia.

Why bother? What's the point? Not another day of nothing. I think I'll just go back to sleep.

For the first seven weeks or so of my unemployment I got up religiously at 8:30, or earlier, every morning. I treated each work day as a regular work day. Start work at 9:00 and finish up at 6:00 or 7:00. Around the seventh week, that schedule began to change, and is still changing on a daily basis -- except for early in the week. Mondays, and usually Tuesdays, I can still get up at 8:30 without a problem, it's as the week progresses that the problems begin.

At first it was just the snooze button. The alarm when off at 8:3o and instead of jumping up out of bed, I hit the snooze button. Then I began hitting the snooze button more than once. I've now gotten to the point where my alarm goes off on a Wednesday or later, I hit the snooze button. When the alarm goes off again, I re-set the alarm for anywhere from 15 minutes to a half hour later. At this point, when the alarm goes off for the re-set time I am dragging myself out of bed, though I'm becoming more and more reluctant to do so.

My working days are ending sooner too. By 5:00/5:30 I'm basically done. And even worse, instead of "working" five days a week, I'm down to four -- though I'm usually heading into New York City one day a week to take care of other things, so I guess I can excuse that.

The thing that frightens me is that I'm only just a little over two months unemployed and already inertia has set in. I have to force myself to work on my novel sometimes, force myself to check the job boards, force myself not to just drop onto the couch and give up for the rest of the day. Each day my apartment feels smaller, more like a prison. Each day my computer looks more and more like the enemy. So you want me to work, do you? All right damn computer, show me a job I can apply to for f***'s sake!

And if this has happened after only two months, where am I going to be a month from now?

I want my term of unemployment to represent freedom, a time to do things I have been wanting to do for months or years but have never had the time before. I do not want to let inertia past the front door, but boy is it a sneaky devil. Just when I think I'm feeling motivated, it rears its tired head, begging me to put it all off, despair of a better future and just vegetate.

Maybe I need some sort of charm to ward off inertia. Perhaps there is a spell to banish it from my dwelling? Or maybe I just need to take my own advice to a friend who tends to wake up in the middle of the afternoon -- when the alarm goes off, just get out of bed. Don't think about getting out of bed; like the Nike ads have told us for years, just do it.