Busy, busy

Posting is light this week, as you’ve probably noticed. Ever get busy to the point of exhaustion? Ever been working on the computer for so long that the act of scrolling triggers a migraine? I’m not quite there, but blogging every day— at least right now— might do the trick. Kinda sucks too since this week was very blogworthy.

The news on Bush’s poll numbers was bittersweet. Bitter because to my thinking he never should have been able to garner that much public goodwill based on the sorry job he’s doing. Bitter because the freefall means that things are getting worse. Much worse.Salon has a good piece today on joblessness.

According to numbers released by the Federal Reserve in August, there are approximately 9 million people currently unemployed in the United States. My husband and I are lucky to not be among them. InvestorWords.com, which calls itself a leading Web-based glossary for financial terms of art, defines our condition as underemployment, "a situation in which a worker is employed, but not in the desired capacity, whether in terms of compensation, hours, or level of skill and experience. While not technically unemployed, the underemployed are often competing for available jobs." My husband, Andrew, and I, motorcycle salesperson and movie-house concession bitch, respectively, embody all the features of the definition.

Before his current inability to be employed in his "desired capability," Andrew worked at a software start-up. Prior to my scraping gum off the bottoms of chairs and reheating popcorn, I was a Web writer for a multimedia dot-com corporation. It's been like this for 16 months, the two of us struggling to make ends meet, to emotionally and financially support ourselves and our two young children while battling self-pity and overwhelming panic.

Yes things are bad.

I’ve also been trying to put together a longer post on the Clark, Democratic candidates, and the media which hopefully will come together this weekend during one of those lulls when I should be doing other work. The gist of it is going to be how far behind the press is when it comes to how these campaigns attract interest, and how that translates into underestimating voters. Remember how shocked they were at Deans fundraising success? If they had been paying attention they would have seen it coming. But I’ll come back to that later.