<font color="purple">Hi CandyBear --I am soooooooo sorry. I know how this stings. It seems as if the world is completely nuts! (((((((CandyBear)))))))
</font>
Okay, I'm about to make this about me, not you. Sorry. I'm an out of work college professor, also, being rejected for all kinds of jobs that I know I'm more than qualified for. Not Target, but I have been rejected by a Barnes and Noble bookstore.

I was a newspaper reporter for 20 years -- on the basis of 2 years of college. I left to get my graduate degrees -- have been teaching journalism and communication skills for the past 7 years -- and I am rejected for jobs at teeny tiny newspapers, with much lower circulations that the ones I worked for in my 20s and 30s, with jobs representing a 50%-60% drop in pay. Do they really believe that someone who has been teachng journalism does not know how to write a news story? That somehow, during all those classes of news analysis, I forgot how to put an inverted pyramid story together? That even though I created a lecture on interviewing skills because NO textbook covered the topic in sufficient detail to be intelligible to my thirsty young learners that I've forgotten how to do an interview myself? <font color="red"> And if this sounds very angry, yes, I guess I am angry. </font>

Yes, I can freelance and get some more recent clips to prove myself all over again. But the whole idea that I <font color="blue">have to prove</font> I can still do what I used to do when I was young, after getting a Ph.D., is part of the reason I've been so depressed that I sit in a recliner, doing very close to nothing!

I'm at a complete and total loss about how I'm going to take care of myself when the unemployment checks stop in a few weeks. Plus, the lupus affects my energy, so I don't even know how I can work at a 40-hour-week job anymore, since being a professor allowed me to do a lot of work at home and I could budget periods of work and rest to suit myself.

<font color="red">Oh, CandyBear, what are we going to do? </font> If you want to discuss this in PMS, shoot me a message.