This graph, featured in Sunday's NYT, illustrates how unemployed people, and employed people spend their days. , and I think it's astonishingly accurate, at least in my experiences. If production in the home got the same pay as production in the workplace, I think we'd be a much healthier, and happier nation.
Okay, back to sending out resumes... I kind of want to write about a woman whom I gave $10 to at Dunkin Donuts last night, though, which was a pretty stupid thing to do in retrospect given my own situation. It wasn't until she gathered her bags to leave that I noticed her hospital bracelet looked very old, like she'd been wearing it for longer than a few days, and perhaps she didn't just get out of the ER like she told me that she did, trying to get enough el, and Metra fare to get back to suburban Addison.
It wasn't until I took a closer look at her that I realized maybe she is 30 pounds underweight from drug abuse, and not from the stresses of living with an alcoholic like said she did. She seemed so relieved when I gave her the $10, and then went on to say that she had approached many other people while trying to get fare to get back home, and that they all had barely looked at her, saying, "I have no money!" and walking past.
"One guy wagged his finger," she said. "I hate it when people wag their fingers. You wag a finger to a child, not to an adult."
She had seemed indignant, insulted by the finger wagging. She told me she has a job, at a pasta place in Addison. I couldn't imagine her serving food, being so much in resemblance to a walking skeleton, the veins in her neck visible, her bright blue eyes somehow sunken in, yet bulging, too. I kept on reading the Sunday newspaper, which I seem to read on Tuesdays these days now that I write a weekly Monday newsletter, and she kept on interrupting. She asked me if I had any ideas for gaining weight. "Peanut butter?" I wondered. She lamented the weight loss, and said that she used to feel like putting on make up, and getting dressed up made a difference, but now, she said, it doesn't make any difference in her appearance.
She also lamented the fact that her hair is so thin that it takes at least three wraps of a hair bands to hold a ponytail, whereas her hair was once thick enough for one wrap, something I could relate to as well, along with her well articulated frustration with herself.
Part of the reason I also kind of believed her, that she wasn't high on coke, or meth, was that she was scarfing down a large amount of food, in a styrofoam carry out container like the kind at restaurants. She was eating quickly, and scooping up the rice into the little plastic spoon as fast as she could, hunched over, her lips close to the container as to not lose any grains. "Where did you get that?" I asked her. "A woman gave it to me," she replied. "I was starving."
She told me that she was in the neighborhood because someone from the hospital drove her here, and she was hoping to visit Mike, a friend of hers that lives near Dunkin Donuts. "The lady next store said he moved three weeks ago, I just missed him," she said. I asked her what she was doing here in Chicago prior to the asthma attack, which she said caused her to go to the hospital in an ambulance.
"A....a meeting," she replied, offering no elaboration.
"Look, I can take your name, your address, send you a money order for ten bucks," she said, kind of with a snort, like why go through the trouble for ten bucks.
"No, no, that's okay," I said. "I hope you get back home. Be sure to get change, because if you put all of that on an el card, you can't use it for the Metra, too."
Uh huh, she said, right. By then my money was in her emaciated hand, and I wasn't really believing her, as she had gone from sincere, to impatient, and I wondered if she was thinking about where, and how to get her next fix, what kind of high ten bucks would buy.
A high. A moment. Like the one we just shared, but much different.
What's in a day? Who is in a day? How does a day get spent? How many times can you fly, and handle the crash back down?
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