As a recent grad who is virtually unemployed, depression creeps in on me a lot. That’s why my online presence has been lacking lately – it’s hard to get the motivation to write a blog entry when you feel like you want to die.

I know more than a few people who have advanced degrees and are working minimum wage, and we all hear that familiar refrain, that the poor “just need to work harder.” So whenever people ask me what I’m doing (especially older people), I feel the need to explain that I’m not apathetic, and if I weren’t either overqualified or under-experienced for every job I’ve found, I’d be working my ass off to repay those tens of thousands of dollars in student loans. I’d save up my money, maybe enough to put a down payment on a house twenty years down the line.

When you go to college, they say they’ll help you find a job come graduation. Nope. Once they have your money, the only communication they’ll have with you is to ask for more money. The career center at SAIC told me to update my LinkedIn profile, and that was all the advice they could come up with. The University of Iowa career center, on the other hand, won’t even return my phone calls. Sigh.

So the depression makes a lot of sense. It’s not so bad, though. I’m not always full of despair – sometimes that emotion is overtaken by blinding rage. For example: I was downtown a couple of months ago (I was actually delivering physical copies of my résumé because that’s the only way I get outside anymore) and overheard two middle-aged men complaining about how my generation is lazy, and one of them actually says: “Kids these days won’t buy houses because they’re too lazy to do all the yard work.” Wow. Really? It’s pretty ironic that these crusty old cranks are so out of touch that it doesn’t even occur to them that some of us can’t afford a car let alone an entire house, and then they sit at a bar, drinking cocktails at two in the afternoon, yelling about how all the damn young people are “overprivileged.”

It all makes my blood boil. It makes me want to spit. I need an ice cream.