Where's my noun?

Days Unemployed: 224
Weeks of Unemployment Insurance Remaining: 2 and then on to the extension
Jobs Applied To Date: E-mail files support 53 applications but it's gotta be at least 80 so I'll start there.
Phone Interviews To Date: 1
In-Person Interviews To Date: 3
Pounds Gained To Date: 8
Entertainment of the Day: Rome S1 E3-5 (so far), Oprah, creating blog
Lunch of the Day: Roasted corn and goat cheese quesadilla

Welcome to the first post. If, of course, anyone actually reads this. I guess we'll see. I've created this blog in order to prevent myself from going crazy. You see, being jobless has it's obvious problems (lack of money, frustration at not being able to find work, shame, dejection, etc.) but in my opinion the worst is boredom. Finding activities to fill the day is difficult given the sorry state of daytime television. This may relieve that, it may not. And I might just get bored with blogging. But it at least has kept me busy for the last few hours.

Speaking of dejection, though, I've begun this today because today I received two miserable job related pieces of news:
1. I did not get a job offer from my interview two weeks ago even though I knew the recruiter personally and worked closely with her at my last POE. Even with a personal reference from the person recommending me for the job it didn't happen. This is particularly sucky but it means that I can't even get jobs that I don't really want with really long commutes in an industry I could care less about. (It's always harder getting rejected by someone you're not interested in in the first place.) Tears were wiped. Cat was obviously uncomfortable. There was somone more qualified who got the job. I guess the main question is: when won't there be?
2. I recieved notice that my regular unemployment insurance will run out in two weeks. Now, I will say that recieving anything in the mail on the Minnesota Unemployment Insurance letterhead is a harrowing experience these days. This is, of course, not good news but all is not lost (like my home, ha ha), as there are extension instructions.

In naming this blog I came across an interesting dilemma: there is no traditionally accepted word to mean "jobless person who doesn't really want to be jobless." Jobless is a state of being, not really a title. It's an adjective, not a noun. A person with a job is a worker, administrator, coordinator, employee, associate, etc. But a person who has been laid off has no single word to describe themselves that doesn't take into account their past status as a no-longer-needed reject. I find this frustrating because I meet many people who ask me what I do. A single word descriptor would be preferable to a full sentence explanation with adverbs and adjectives. I can't just say "I'm unemployed" as that has such negative connotations and seems to imply that I am therefore unemployable, which is not true (at least in my mind, anyway). Talk about a conversation killer. I want a noun to describe what I am now, not what I was before. Something without the negative connotations that come with what's been floating around in my head the last few days: loafer, idle, layabout, ne'er-do-well, waster, slacker, disenfranchised, laid-off,

A person without a job has no noun. Sigh. I want my noun.

Unemployment Article of the Day: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/08/opinion/08friedman.html?em
Unemployment Statistic of the Day: The unemployment rate rose from 7.6 to 8.1 percent. Good times.