Tools for the Hesitant Zombie

being unemployed during a recession sucks. not only is the traditional job hunt (seek, send, wait, give up; repeat ad infinitum) a deflating experience, but you're isolated, broke and depressed.

if it's any comfort, isolated broke and depressed are prime qualifications for zombiedom.

besides, once you've lived the "effort > reward" equation, sliding into the zombie zone is quite easy. but if you find yourself haunted by pesky pockets of positivism, then you may need a game plan to reach that blissful zombatic state of "meh":

8 Indispensable Zombie Tools

1. Abandon the idea of food. Zombies don't eat. Besides, when you seriously consider the condition of your food - chemical and hormonal additives, recalls and FDA bans, bacterial growth and pests, questionable categorization as "food" (looking at you, Cheetos) - your brain will explode, and you can eat that.
2. Drink coffee. Two benefits: One, it kills your useless appetite (see Tool #1); Two, it enables you to get out of the house and surf mindlessly for hours in your local WiFi cafe nursing frozen, congealed house brew and sucking up space.
3. Go Emo. Grow long greasy bangs, slouch, wear black and purple, snarl at people who commute on their bikes. This way you can break slowly into zombiedom while presenting a trendy facade based on shitty music and cultural irrelevance.
4. Declare devotion to "Grey's Anatomy" without any irony whatsoever.
5. Frequent boutique clothing stores that boast a wide collection of hand-screened T-shirts by local artisans priced at around $115. Buy nothing. Complain loudly about the destruction of individualism when the store closes after 6 months.
6. Say that Windows 7 was "your idea" (again without irony). Should anyone mention that Windows 7 is basically Mac OS X from last century, flip your long greasy bangs and call the person an elitist. (For obvious reasons, never confess that you're actually Snow-Leoparded out the ass. You're a zombie, not a moron.)
   
7. Worry about Conan O'Brien's future.
8. Tweet and tag with #thoughtsonthetoilet. Over-abbreviate and misspell lest someone imagines that you still have a brain cell left.

still functional? well, there is always the solid fallback of cheap alcohol. it is, after all, "the cause of, and solution to, all of life's problems." (homer simpson)

I, Zombie

~ 7:30 a.m.

as my roommate knelt next to the bathtub, cleaning out a giant crap her cat had deposited, she turned to me and said:

Sometimes you are not the easiest person to live with.

the irony of that statement, spoken through a wafting stink of cat shit, eluded her.

i had woken up in a fit of rage because i had not slept all night. some of that rage was still spilling out when she walked into my room. that was unfortunate.

but i believe the definition of "not easy to live with" pretty much begins with a cat who craps in the bathtub.

this strained moment passed without comment, because i am a zombie. as such, my days play out a full menu of conditions you living types would not tolerate. ever.

it's not difficult to pinpoint the precise moment i joined the undead. i left an ass-sucking job in a badly run company early in 2009, but after years of being pushed by drooling morons into Fuckit mode, a rejeuvenating sense of hope and purpose wasn't going to just dawn with the new day. i had to make it happen; unlikely, since i was tit-deep in an overwhelming sense of lethargy best documented in the movie Office Space. 

NOTE: Didn't like Office Space? Stop reading this and click back to your Hello, Kitty! tab. You do not belong here. Remain and the following will occur:

• you will disparage the zombie.
  
• you will attempt to post chipper, idiotic Palinesque homilies in the comments. 
• the (trust me) unpublished comments will prompt a verbal machete attack sprayed with hydrocloric acid from a super soaker.

Zombie Stat #112: Lethargy declines in direct proportion to the rise of desired carnage in the presence of Palinesque homilies.

sorry, my class of zombie is prone to following the shiny thing. to continue...

my lethargy was spawned by the realization that work performed under the supervision of curriculum vitae-swinging fuckmonkeys in a half-walled maze is nothing but soul-sucking bullshit, assumed to be manditory for paying mortgages and eating food.

An important distinction:

Work: essential, desirous and potentially fulfilling.
Monkey Servitude: not so much.

i'd already endured several rounds of monkey servitude in my work life, and had no motivation to continue the practice. this combined with the ratio of available jobs to job seekers (1:2383) meant that zombietude was a viable option.

and zombies blog.