March 26

Well, it took me all of 72 hours to find a perfectly decent job at a good salary teaching English in Korea. I'm headed out at the end of May. I'll have more to say about this as time goes on, but for now I'll just marvel at a contrast: Last year, after being laid off, I spent six months looking for a teaching job nationwide, plugged away at the search every day, and wound up receiving one offer, at a charter school that I suspected was marginal and turned out to be unbearable. This year, after leaving the same charter school, I spent two-and-a-half months looking for any work, and came up with nada. Then I go on the ESL boards on a Monday night; over the next three days I respond to 28 postings (and could have responded to many more if I didn't need to sleep and eat occasionally); I posted my resume on two boards and had 24 responses to those postings; was interviewed Thursday night; received an offer an hour later; worked out all the details by Friday morning.

What is wrong with this picture? I'm the same person in all these instance: I have the same bachelor's degree, the same master's degree, the same experience, the same interviewing skill or lack of it. Why are the results so different? Yes, we're in a crap economy, but it's more than just that, Job-seeking in this country has become a ponderous, embittering, incredibly protracted and largely futile pursuit. This may serve the hidden agendas of HR departments that need to make work for themselves -- and I've been attached to an HR department at a corporation, so I know what goes on -- but it is perfectly pointless otherwise. We're all being made like the miserable rats in psychology experiments whose learned helpfulness makes them retreat into a corner wanting to die.

Awareness of what is happening in this country depresses me, but it's not the same as the clinical depression that I have also suffered and continue to be medicated for. That is truly a rough beast. I read with genuine admiration Jennifer Michael Hecht's plea to....well, all of us....not to kill ourselves; Hecht has lost two close friends to suicide and feels this subject keenly.

Know that the rest of us know that among the faces we have met there are some right now who can barely take another minute of the pain and uncertainty. And we are in the room with you, going from one moment to the next, in whatever condition you manage to do it. Sobbing and useless is great! Sobbing and useless is a million times better than dead. A billion times. Thank you for choosing sobbing and useless over dead....Don’t kill yourself. Suffer here with us instead. We need you with us, we have not forgotten you, you are our hero. Stay.

http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2010/02/07/stay/

I respond to this absolutely, but I also know that the controllable factors that impel people in the direction of suicide deserve our anger and attention. Unemployment (which means, of course, lack of livelihood, of the ability to live) is clearly one of those factors, as every study has shown. And it is controllable. Don't give me some nonsense about "the economy" obeying its own laws. We are the economy.

Among notables born on this date are poets A.E. Housman, Robert Frost, and Gregory Corso, novelists Patrick Suskind and Erica Jong, dramatists Tennessee Williams and Martin McDonagh, journalist Bob Woodward, psychologist Viktor Frankl, scholars Joseph Campbell and Vine Deloria, scientist Richard Dawkins, composer Pierre Boulez, pianist Wilhelm Backhaus, Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, pop singers Diana Ross and Teddy Pendergrass, Mexican film director Emilio Fernandez, and actors Sterling Hayden, Strother Martin, James Caan, Jennifer Grey, Martin Short, Alan Arkin, Leonard Nimoy, and Michael Imperioli. Although one couldn't exactly say that Diana Ross ever went into a Garbo-like seclusion, the fact is that it's hard to make sense of what she has done with herself. Oscar-nominated for her first feature film, Lady Sings the Blues, she only made two more features in the Seventies and then gave up acting until the Nineties, when she made two TV movies and then dropped out again. Her pop music mega-stardom faded after the early Eighties, which is only to be expected (although she retained more of her popularity internationally). She was still a very young woman, and her varied talents gave her options, none of which she seemed to feel like exercising. Maybe, like fellow pop star Cher, who won the Oscar for Moonstruck and then more or less gave up movies, she just didn't like acting.