Don't look a gift horse in the mouth.

One year and counting. Well, not quite an actual year, it hasn't even seemed like it's been that long. More like a season. A long, cold, wet season. Jan 31 2009 was my last day of my employment on the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange.

Leaving for greener pastures, I quickly came to realize that the greener pasture wasn't a pasture after all. It was more like a swamp. Or bog. I like bog. It brings to mind slimy creatures and gooey muckity-muck. Legs glued in place, unable to inch forward. If I sat down I would never get up. And thus the futile search for meaningful employment continues, unable to move forward, knowing full well that if I give up, I might as well move into a cardboard box underneath Wacker Drive in Chicago.

And what to do today? Clean house? Watch TV? Play guitar? Chat on facebook? Finish that novel I started 3 years ago? Guess what? It's 11:00 am and I have done all of the above. All except the novel of course. (Problem there is, every time I get on a roll, get a little idea in my head that turns into a big idea, the 13 year old comes home from school with her typical teenage brooding. "When am I getting a drum set? How much money do you owe me? Who ate my pudding? When are moving to a bigger house?" Yada, yada, yada.) Faithful readers might remember one of my first posts, celebrating the new found freedom of joblessness. Well utter ennui has set in, and now despair is taking over. The monotony of the day in day out routine we call life is even more mind numbing when one is not working. Whether you like your job or hate it, at least deep down you feel at the end of the day that you actually accomplished something. When I go to bed I have accomplished Jack. Unless you count getting through that stack of movies you have been meaning to watch.

Oh, don't cry for me Argentina. It's all my own fault. I left a job that was a steady paycheck for something that was a pipe dream. After 20 years in the cesspool of the trading pits, watching one rich asshole after another walk past my nose with stories of free money being handed out, I started to believe my own BS. That I could become one of them. (I'll take being a rich asshole over being a poor asshole any day.) It all comes down to one thing. Don't look a gift horse in the mouth. That's the problem with gift horses. You never know you have one until someone rides the damn thing off into their own sunset.