As this recession creeps along, slowly cutting down the working masses until absolutely no one has a job anymore and we're all reduced to an elaborate barter system, it's starting to hit closer to home. While I believe I have a modicum of job security, given that they pay me nothing and I don't get benefits and am not an official employee to begin with, several of my friends with similarly entry-level jobs (though I'm pretty sure they have benefits because it's ridiculous that anyone doesn't have health insurance... Obama '08...) are beginning to see their co-workers picked off. One one hand, it makes the fact that you have a job (any job) feel kind of exciting. On the other hand, it completely dims the prospect of having a better job in the near future.

It seems, though, that we as a working class (term used loosely, of course) are developing little games to save off despair. For instance, a friend said that as people in his office were getting fired, other people tried excessively hard to make light of the situation while everyone else was avoiding eye contact and clutching their staplers like security blankets.

We've not been doing so much of that around here, but in order to reassure myself that I'm not going to be an assistant for the rest of my life, I've been taking some cues from my unemployed friends and pursuing informational interviews. In theory, these basically mean getting together with someone who has a job you want and talking to them about what it would be like, hypothetically, for you to have that job and what you'd need to do to get it if, hypothetically, there wasn't an iron clad hiring freeze in every industry you would even consider pursuing a job in. In practice, though, this really consists of emailing someone you would never have any reason to email (or, in some cases, whose email address you would never even have) and asking them out for a drink so you can meet them and hang out under the guise that you're only hanging out because the economy sucks whereas the real reason is that you want to hang out with them because you think they might be cool.

In other words, it's a platonic date with that cheerleader/football player from high school who you were always too scared to talk to.