I can’t believe how fast this year is going! It’s already been six months since I lost my job and home. It doesn’t seem like that long. My severance package is now over, as is my health insurance. I guess I may get COBRA, depending on how much it costs. Unless I start bringing in a decent income, in a few more months I’m going to hit a financial wall. I’m relieved about the 13-week extension of unemployment, pathetic as the amount is in Florida. Florida’s unemployment compensation is crap — the upper limit is $275/week, no matter how much was earned on the job. In Massachusetts, it goes up to $600/week.

In spite of financial and housing woes, I’m pretty happy overall. I **LOVE** not going to an office!!! Oh my god, I’m so grateful to have any amount of time not having a job. I love working at my own pace on my own things. I LOOOOOOOVE not being trapped in a cubicle, and not having anyone telling me what to do. I love being creative and working hard and late on things I care about.

I worked at a small weekly paper, and several others were laid off after me. The local daily paper, the Sun-Sentinel, just laid off about 55 people last week. The Palm Beach Post recently laid off 300. It’s unbelievable how fast newspapers are disintegrating. In my opinion, one huge reason is that they’re publicly traded companies — they’re forced to obsess about inflating the next quarter’s stock price, to the detriment of long-term planning. Of course they also have a huge problem with advertisers moving to the internet, but I’ve heard that privately held papers are coping with that much better than the publicly held ones. Also, it seems obvious that when newspaper chains are bought in deals wherein the papers themselves are used as collateral for huge debt, and if profits fall at all, the result will be the cannibalization of the properties to pay off the debt. Duh.

The stupidity and greed of a few rich motherfuckers ruins many lives. Constantly and in an infinite number of ways.

Since becoming self-employed I’ve worked hard, but I often feel like I’m not doing everything I need to do. I work too slow. I’ve got to pick up the pace.

Although… I did draw 36 cartoons in three weeks before going to San Diego. That’s not bad. And I sent out about 80 mailings during that time. Maybe I just feel like I’m lagging right now because of recent traveling. I have so much I want to do and time is going fast.

I have a very long list of tasks, but my short immediate list (other than keeping up with Minimum Security) is this:

- six more pages for a graphic novel proposal
- 20 single-panel cartoons for a short list of magazines
- drawings to catch up with 5 of Derrick Jensen’s “Endgame” classes