It’s that time of the year and while last year I was still in the relatively decent shape that tends to follow those who have full time jobs working in a kitchen, this year has me a full four months into the blah fall and winter weather of Seattle and thus three or four months into a growing spare tire, spurned on by day long sessions in front of my computer and television rather than braving the sub freezing temperatures and torrential rain pouring down outside.

Yes folks, Con #10 of working from the comfort of home is the growing mid section that symbolizes way too much time planted on the couch rather than taking a walk to the store or riding a bicycle a few miles each day. What can you do to combat this ridiculously common occurrence and keep from falling into the common stereotype of a writer sitting at the computer all day eating potato chips and drinking energy drinks?

You’ve got to get out of the house first of all - at all times of the year. It’s easy to get out when it’s 75 degrees outside and you really don’t want to do any work, but what about when it’s 25 and you have lots of work in front of you? It’s a hard task, but it’s one you have to push forward and make yourself accomplish. Get up early, join a gym, find a community center, walk instead of drive - find something you can do to keep yourself from lounging on that couch for too many hours every week, because otherwise you’ll get to April and step outside, realizing you are in incredible bad shape.

Let’s pretend for an instant I actually follow my own advice (come on, at least pretend) and I am still doing okay even though it’s winter and I loathe going outside into this weather. Seriously, I haven’t let a couple of extra snacks get to me at all - I’m all about staying healthy all year long……..

Winter is finally looking small and fuzzy in the distance as we drive headlong into the heart of Spring and soon Summer. It’s been a long time since I sat inside in the dark in sub-freezing weather after a ridiculous storm and wished for warmth and now here it is.

Here it is then; I’ve been waiting for a good long while to say this, but Pro number 10 is getting to go out and enjoy the nice weather whenever the heck I feel like it. There are no more amazing days, with beautiful weather that I’m stuck working all the way throughout because of some horrible sheduling and need for work. I can stay out all day if I choose and then head home and work when it gets dark, or just hold off on my writing until the weather is worse.

I can take up any hobby I so choose and with the sunny weather coming more frequently and more lovingly and get the chance to go out and play tennis, basketball, golf, baseball or more. It doesn’t have to be the weekend and it doesn’t have to be a “sick day”.

For all of you schmucks chilling in the midst of the daily grind, staring out the window at the punks like me out in the world having fun with all that sun. I know, I’m kind of an ass right? Oh well, I’m completely okay with that.

So, when I get a writing job, I may or may not be faced with a deadline that isn’t desirable. Meaning, I might have a job of 30,000 words or so due within a week. That would not be much of a problem normally, maybe a couple hours a day of work, but when I’m leaving town mid way through the week and have a dozen things to do the day before and the day after than, I have maybe 2 days to work on the project. I’m exhausted. It’s 11 pm and I’ve been writing since 9:30 this morning. Granted, I took breaks for lunch and dinner and went for a walk in there, but more or less have worked all day.

I’ll keep this short and simple because I’m tired and don’t want to type anymore (plus I have more writing to do…goddamn), but the number 9 con of being unemployed is those few and far between days of extreme work so as I can enjoy my unemployment later.

The sun blew upacross the sky today, a gloriously 80 degree day on the first Friday of April, which considering the Mariner game in Cleveland was snowed out means we Seattleites are lucky bastards. With record highs, a flaky red layer of dead skin on my nose and a wonderful walk around Seward Park and furtive glances to Mt Rainier and the coming months of rain before summer finally truly arrives.

This, my friends is the number 9 Pro of being unemployed. Not only did I wake up bright and early today at nine and find my way to the golf course for a round of beautiful summer weather and golfing (regardless of how horribly I played) but I was able to head south and enjoy an afternoon on the water afterwards. A walk outside today at nine o’clock to the store was still gloriously warm and comfortable and meant that I didn’t have to bundle up (ah, winter, how I’ll miss you). The key to all of it is that I was able to just wake up today, send a couple of quick emails saying I was going to send in projects a day late and then leave.

Two or three conversations started today with “what a beautiful day. ” “yeah, I’m stuck inside working. you’re off today?” “I took the day off.” And it’s that simple. I took the day off. I woke up, saw the weather and didn’t feel like working. Simple as that. Eventually I have to do something; bills are there to be paid at least. But, the ability to just decide that the weather is too nice to work and then go out is something that I only dreamed of a few months ago.

Now that the nice days are here (or at least the prelude to them), it’s a matter of having no job and spending my time chilling in the nice weather. If there’s no other pro going into the summer months, than I’d be happy just there. Next up: tennis and swimming.

Okay, so this one doesn’t actually count right off the bat, because it’s not really a con, just a shortcoming in myself that tends to manifest when given the freedom to do so. Sitting at home all day working means that I’m also sitting at home all day wanting more than anything to go and lay down or play a video game. Not because I’m tired or have a new game to play, but because I’m at home and that’s what you do at home, right?

Converting any space of thehome into a full-fledged office is nearly impossible. You have to remove all of the distracting elements; the tv, the food, the pets. It all has to go in favor of a quiet, distraction free workspace that will allow me at least a couple of hours of uniterrupted work time in the middle of the day. Very rarely does it work out that way either.

Another obstacle is the lack of deadlines to keep me in line. Often, projects are due weeks away, or not at all, written on spec to meet only my own needs for rent and food money. To take the extra bit of effort and tell myself that on Tuesday my day needs to consist of X amount of completed projects and Y amount of leisure time, where X and Y are inversely proportionate is incredibly hard. Why can’t they both be astronomical numbers.

The mindset that follows is my desire to take full advantage of my at home status. I’m not employed by any human being, so why shouldn’t I sit at home and relax. Why not? Because my roommate would eventually begin to ask where the rent money is, shortly followed by a couple of credit card companies and the Federal Government harping on my student loans.

And yet, laziness creeps ever onward, infiltrating the deepest corners of my psyche, telling me to forget everything and have a beer and watch the game. So, what do I do to tackle this massive issue? The first step is taking apart my room as I mentioned. Unfortunately, the TV cannot leave. I don’t have an office, so my bedroom will have to do, and because of that, my TV will also have to do. But, doors can be closed, shades pulled, and dogs left to their own devices while I work. Music is kept quiet and unintrusive, and often the television is (against all better judgment) kept off while writing.

The next step of course is much harder. Instilling mandatory deadlines upon myself is almost painful at times, turning my once glorious haven of a bedroom into the site of a totalitarian work regime. Where are the baseball games, the online RPGs, the stacks of unwatched DVDs? They must wait, because I have a project that I forced my way into and told the client that I’d have done within a week, forcing near constant attention to getting it done, lest I fail completely. Ah, glorious deadlines.

Now, my at home time is akin to when I was in school, constantly pressured, wondering if that one email I’m waiting for with project details arrived, and constantly thinking to myself how much I’d love to be ahead for tomorrow by just writing one or two more articles….oh laziness, how I miss thee (and loathe thee).

The birds are a soaring, the sun is occasionally shining, and the jackhammering bandana clad beer bellied city employees are out in force tearing up our roads. Ah yes folks, it is once again spring in Seattle. Putting aside the easily alliterated pronunciation of our fair burb on the water, springtime in Seattle is a very interesting time of the year.

First off, Seattle doesn’t technically have much in the way of transitional seasons. Many places know the biting cold of near arctic, nipple biting winter, or the electrolyte draining sauna like pain of a scorching summer, and for them spring is a very important period of transition. It marks not just a rebirth from their deadland winter, it’s a time to wiggle their wee little heads out from under a pile of six inch comforter and reenter the world at large. For us Seattlites, it’s a matter of perspective more than anything. Our winters do get cold, and our summers hot, but the standard deviation from the average temperature is minimal.

And the winter…well it’s not painful, unless you’re manically depressed, and then the bone whitling monotony of the days upon days of rain and 43 degree highs will engender pain beyond your wildest imagination. To put it simply, our winters are boring. So boring in fact, that during the three months long deluge of rain a whisper of sub freezing temperatures or lowland snow will send all but the oldest, most jaded veterans into a tizzy. And along comes spring, an explosion of…well not much to be honest. The temperatures stabilize and for the most part never require wool stockings for your nipples, but neither do you get to whip out your flip flops and shorts for a while yet. It’s a neutral ground, chock full of dizzyingly dull manifestations of slight change.

The cherry blossoms come, the birds return, and the few bits of deciduous flora gracing our sidewalks repopulate. For this very reason, it takes a few very important events to smack you upside the head before the dawn of mass reproduction and occasionally sunny days become fully evident.

1. Baseball season: In most cities, it’s a passing fancy, attended by the diehards, enjoyed by the sports enthusiast, and meticulously recorded by the elderly. In Seattle it’s a way of life. Through thick and thin, wins and losses, and losses and losses, we stick by our guys and show up in force to cheer them on. That first week of April, those first few days, anyone worth their designer umbrella will know how well the Mariners are doing.

It doesn’t last of course; especially in light of abismally, confusingly bad play. By the summer, the Mariners could easily be on the top of everyone’s daily checklist when reading their paper or surfing the news sites, but they could just as easily have faded to second or third place behind the month and a half of ominously beautiful weather and the promise of drunken dock parties and fireworks.

2. Spring Break: These next two don’t really have anything to do with Seattle, just my observations on this time of year. Having just finished my gauntlet like sprint through three years of school and a one year slouch fest spent flipping burgers, I am all too familiar with the fortuitous ten days wedged conveniently into the end of March for all the tequila slurping, breast baring, girl chasing party mongers I’ve called my peers.

Myself, I’ve never had the time to take advantage of the festivities. It’s a right of passage some say, but honestly, if you can’t remember which foot you stuck in someone’s mouth the night before, why bother. It’s not a college student exclusivity though; it’s for the whole family. Parents worry for their kids, businesses prepare for more obnoxious customers, and bartenders drop to their knees in praise of the gods who invented the car bomb.

It’s a fun time to be had by all, and somewhere, deep within those magical days, the duldrums of a campus full of parka laden coeds shed in anticipation of skirts, tanktops, and “God Bless America” bikini weather.

3. Easter: I don’t really care if you celebrate easter or not. It’s still everywhere you look for at least a month and a half leading into spring. It varies every year of course, but the general idea is the same. A week or so after Valentine’s day after the red and white come down, the green and pink go up, and a grown man in a furry bunny costume begins to pace his corner of the mall waiting for children to sit on his lap.

Similar to, yet disturbingly less valid than Santa in November/December, the Easter Bunny is a complete conundrum. I won’t go into the childhood train of emotions I felt when in the presence of the magical hare capable of laying eggs (or carrying them around in his fur perhaps; this mystery has yet to be solved). Since then I’ve learned why he exists, and even what purposes a bunch of old celibates in fancy robes had in acquiring a bunny to represent the most important day in a religion. Simply put, the damn rabbit is everywhere.

And this rabbit isn’t after your trix, he’s after your attention. “Look at me, sit on me, eat me….don’t ask what the hell I mean though, I’m a freaking rabbit; rabbits are cute, and you get a basket full of candy. What more could you ask for?”  Relevance perhaps. Maybe it’s all relative.

And isn’t that what spring’s all about, relativity. If we didn’t get daily updates from Peoria, or see specials on why not to take your top off in public and take random drinks from strangers; if there wasn’t a twenty-five year old on work release in a bunny suit, would we even know it’s spring? Maybe, but how bored would we be until summer

I write a lot these days. Not all of it gets me a paycheck, but I keep on writing because it makes me feel like I’m getting something done. And when you don’t have a job, and spend as much time in front of the computer as I do, you want to feel like you’re getting something done. Every now and then something I write is a touch disagreeable to over denizens of this fine internet. People get pissed off and start doing what they can to let me know just how pissed off they are. It’s rare to really stoke someone’s ire. It takes my ranting particularly vehemently against something that in all honest sucks; Stephen King, American Idol, the American Education system. My short diatribe against Stephen King earned me scorn not only from random bloggers from who-the-hell-cares.com, but from my friends. I suppose Stephen King has a bit of a following of his own.

Anyways, the con in all this, because I honestly don’t care what other people think of my opinions, is that I have entirely too much time on my hands and can thus get on a roll, randomly surfing for things that mention my posts or articles. This isn’t restricted to just people writing angry disagreements with my opinions, but with anything in general. Occasionally I’ll find someone’s stolen one of my articles, or misquoted me, or something else completely irrelavent to what color the paint on my walls is, but I run across it and must inquire regardless. And if anyone goes so far as to ask, “don’t you have anything better to do?” I’m left scratching my head and shrugging, “not really.”

What’s the mesage in all this? I’m too self-conscious, especially if I’m going to sit and write angrily about all the things that get under my skin. If I’m complaining about the Seattle city transit system, yeah I’m probably okay, because who’s going to disagree with me. If I’m complaining about the most popular writer of the 20th century or the most popular show on tv, I’m probably going to get a few disagreements scattered across the net. I shouldn’t care….and if I had less time on my hands, I wouldn’t.

We have a local video store that goes out of their way to make sure every new movie on the shelf is gone within 30 minutes of opening every week. It’s their “Tuesday Mania” deal, and since the local video store is all but extinct any more, it’s a pretty cool deal. You get all new releases for $1.49, and stock movies for $.99. It’s more or less a free for all of everything that just came in and everything you wanted to see the last two weeks but they ran out of.

But, getting there before the walls are littered with empty slots is nearly impossible, especially when you work the night before and don’t like to wake up at 9 am to rent movies. I don’t. So, I head out as soon as I wake up normally, but that doesn’t work out because the unemployed and moms among us have already sucked the shelves dry. Well, guess what; now I’m one of the unemployed and I’m sucking shelves dry too.

I’ve been able to get in there and rent whatever I want for a couple three weeks now and it is glorious. I’m usually already awake by 9 anyways, and then it’s just a matter of getting dressed and walking 8 blocks to the video store. And the best part; I actually have the time to watch all 6 movies I just rented…because I’m unemployed. For those that don’t understand how that one works; I get to sit around all day if I feel like it and watch movies. I don’t. If I did I wouldn’t be able to pay rent. But if I wanted to, I could, no questions asked…except by my roommate, “Where’s the rent?”

Everything tends to take on an extra layer of importance when you’re unemployed. The writing of a simple article is somehow tied to how much food you’ll be able to afford. The holidays are fodder for fluff pieces, but also reminders of how poor you are and how little money you have.

Being constantly in tune with the world at large will create a certain empathy to the seasons and the places around you that some might consider a Pro, but when it turns from natural appreciation to subtle mocking by nature it’s less Pro and more Con. This one’s tricky though. Here’s how it can suck.

Buying Gifts - I couldn’t afford Christmas gifts this year. I’m not a fan of the holiday and tend to shy away from it, but occasionally there are certain people I like to surprise and this year was a no go in that arena, save my six year old sister. It passes, but then again there’s always a new holiday on the horizon. Of course sometimes you get lucky, for instance being single on Valentine’s Day.

Writing Instead of Celebrating - I watched the Superbowl, but at the same time I was writing about the commercials. I didn’t even realize the game was almost over until the final 30 seconds because I was polishing an article. When you write for a living, every major event is a chance to make money, but it also means that the major event in question turns a little bit into work rather than celebration.

Having Tons of Useless Facts to Throw Out - With the writing of holiday themed articles comes the onslaught of useless information I have that no one else wants. It’s a bad habit and we all do it, every writer among us. We spend all day learning all these useless things; someone had better learn more about them, because I’m definitely not going to carry this useless junk around for the rest of my life. Somebody, anybody, care about what I have to say!

Holidays are a joy for all sorts of random, sappy reasons. I tend to not celebrate, but when you’re unemployed they turn into a matter of priorities, in which eating and surviving tend to float to the top. Goodbye holiday, hello potential payday.

I love crossword puzzles. I always have. Scrabble is my favorite game. I watched Wheel of Fortune as a kid. I gut the Sunday Times whenever I’m near one and Wordplay was inspiring. Unfortunately I’m not exceptionally better at them than anyone else, mainly because I never had the time to spend doing them like I would like.

Enter oodles of free time and a brain yearning for some attention. Now, I get the chance day and day out to write in as many crossword puzzles as I can. For the most part, I tend to spend the evening after I finish writing doing one or two, unless it’s a Sunday, then it’s done while I’m working over the course of the entire day.

There’s something magical about finishing those criss crossed havens of synonyms, acronyms, and arcane knowledge. The moment of completion is as glorious as the first clue you look at and know directly, from the top of your head. There’s really nothing better than knowing the answer to a random clue without having to look at the squares, or the cross words.

I wish I had a story or something; I just like crossword puzzles….Go NY Times.