The Joys of Joblessness: Day 3

Apparently, my roommate and I live parallel lives. Upon returning to our apartment after Christmas break, we found that we both
a. received flameless candles for Christmas (which means we also hold in common the fact that our relatives don't trust us with fire...)
b. discovered over the break that we do actually like sweet potatoes (I'm eating one right now!!), a food we both abhorred as children.
I take this as a sign. We were destined to split a rent check.

In other news, I am relishing my new-found joblessness (since classes started Monday, and I'm not joining the ranks of students returning to school, I consider this my third official day of unemployment). Today I slept late, leisurely drank tea and wrote letters, and went to a local cafe to study my SPSS for Dummies manual that will hopefully help me get a job at the metropolitan studies center nearby. & who should I see at the cafe but Bruce, an older gentleman who frequently plants himself & his chess board across from the register to wait for someone who'll challenge him. He was kind enough to suffer through a game with me once, but I need to hone my skills a bit more before requesting a re-match.

Because the weather was nuts today (pelting rain one minute and bright sunshine the next) & there were a couple rainbows around town, one customer at the cafe told me that she once saw a full circle rainbow during a vacation in Iceland. I'd never heard of that, but apparently it's just very rare for us to see the full circle of a rainbow from most vantage points on earth (a USA today article said they can sometimes be seen from airplanes). Cool!


Also, I stumbled upon this Somali rapper









(K'naan, aka "The Dusty Philosopher) thanks to NPR. I'm not usually big on rap (& this guy's not totally Kosher), but his stuff is full of interesting social commentary and neat beats. You can check out his songs on his myspace page. Try "In the beginning." He also wrote an interesting article about the ripple effects of European imperialism on contemporary conflicts in Africa.

Now, off to dig into some more SPSS. As much as I am enjoying unemployment, it's a status I don't want to experience for too long..