Slumdog Anxiety

It has now been 65 days since I was laid off from my job and based on the super fun Monday I just its become very apparent that the more time I spend away from cubicles the less I want to go back to them.

Monday 3/09 - After coaching a good friend of mine through the semi catastrophe of the pipes in her bathroom sink bursting, we decided to take a jaunt around town for some aimless errands and some good ol' fashion day drinking now that the northern hemisphere of mother earth is tilting its way back to nicer weather and providing us with more daylight hours in which to jaunt. Not so fast though -- It just so happened that with daylight savings now in our favor we didn't realize that our journey around town didn't get under way until about 4:45/5pm. So, instead of being met with the open arms of an unobstructed late afternoon Philly sidewalk, we had to deal with the onslaught of the proletariat making their mad dashes for public transportation and parking decks in their work suits and khakis now shlubby and wrinkled from a day spent at their desk in a recumbent position.

Weaving our way through the crowd with only my aviators to hide behind and our actual destination unknown, my friends and I started to experience what we affectionately refer to as "slumdog anxiety". For the uninitiated, "slumdog anxiety" describes the nervous/excited/extremely anxious feeling we (my friends in question and I) and I'm sure many other moviegoers experienced during the entire two hours of Slumdog Millionaire. I'm not saying its a bad movie, in fact it was a great one. I loved it. Part of its greatest though obviously comes from the fact that you experience a sense of extremely heightened anxiety, sustained for almost two straight hours. But I disgress.

Not having worked for two plus months now, it has been sometime since I have been around so many working people all at once. And, having most recently worked in the suburbs for over four years, it has been even longer since I have been in Philadelphia at 5pm when the school bell rings and everyone makes the aforementioned mad dash to get home to their loved ones (or cats). Between bouts of intense concentration of making sure that my stride was the appropriate speed to even be on a city sidewalk at 5pm, the slumdog anxiety that I felt in my chest just trying to navigate through the swarms really made me stop and think -- Should I be so quick to go back to that? Can I go back to that? What kind of beer should I drink while the sun is still up?