When I cavalierly remarked once that I wanted a life lived out of step, this is hardly what I had in mind. Rather, my plan was to waltz through my 20s keeping to the fringes of the workaday world until my writing career took off, earning me wealth, status and the chance to avoid the monotony of the 9-to-5 lifestyle altogether.

Others weren’t sure this was a very good plan.

“Your plan is to what?” my father asked in horror when first I sprung the idea on him.

“All great visionaries work outside the system,” I boldly replied. And to my credit, since graduating from college two years ago, that’s exactly what I’ve done. I have worked in a series of part-time jobs including, but not limited to, cleaning sewers, shelving books, mowing grass, proofreading, patching potholes, hauling furniture and reviewing bars and dance halls for a night life guide at $20 a pop. I sought out jobs that were low on expectation and employers that were lax on commitment. Most important, I wrote “on the side” while successfully avoiding the 9-to-5 grind, not to mention wealth and status.

But I was happy. Moreover, I was a proselytizer for the life I’d chosen. As college friends entered the work force I consoled them with the kind of tenderness and understanding that you’d give a marathon runner who craps out in the first mile.

“You fools,” I cried, “you’ve traded your freedom for two weeks of vacation and a wad of dough.” It was this last part, however, that started echoing in my brain late at night.

In a nasty little moment of self-reflection, I realized that while I was busy doing mind-numbing work for a pittance, the rest of the country, old college cronies included, were getting rich off the hyped-up economy. One friend, in fact, was sitting on a pile of cash big enough to make a third world dictator envious. My inner capitalist pig awoke, and as never before I wanted in on the take.

In short, I wanted what my present lifestyle couldn’t provide: money.

Lots of it, in fact, with enough left over to crumple up and stuff down my shorts should the mood strike me. Call me quick, but I also knew that I wasn’t going to get it by stuffing envelopes, working the night watch at a warehouse or performing any of the other dead-end jobs I once coveted. Something had to change. Something radical and ingenious — like getting a job. Blatantly disregarding my life’s plan, I decided to look for a full-time position in the magazine industry.

Some six months later I’m still looking.

I grew up in an industrial town in central Pennsylvania that was crippled by the effects of Reaganomics. So why did unemployment feel so shocking? When the Piper airplane factory that once kept the people of Renovo, Pa., in work pulled up its stakes and planted them southward in the early ’80s, an entire population — still recovering from the massive railroad and coal mine shutdowns of the ’60s — found itself once again economically castrated.

As a kid, I was used to seeing grown men standing on street corners, whittling away their time until the next fly-by-night manufacturer moved into the abandoned railroad shops at the northern end of town. Yet amid all the defeated faces and dashed hopes, there was almost a dignity, if not at least an understanding, in being unemployed during those recession-plagued years. After all, it was the government’s fault, not theirs, or so they could claim.

But in a period when the unemployment rate is at a 30-year low and acne-ridden teenagers routinely spearhead multimillion-dollar IPOs (if magazines are to be believed), being jobless is like being the sweet-toothed girl home alone on prom night — you can’t help feeling partly responsible.

And I do. My job search has gone on for so long that it can no longer be dismissed as a period of transition or a bump in the road. Instead, after six months of rejection letters and silent telephones, it has slowly become a part of my identity.

When you enter these sorts of dark tunnels in life — a streak of bad luck, say, or a dry spell with relationships — the initial response is to think it will end shortly. But in my case the phrase “when I get a job” has turned from a positive affirmation to a punch line, for over the past six months I’ve gone to so many interviews that, teeth gleaming and shoes shining, I have elevated the process to performance art.

With a stint at my college newspaper and an internship at a national magazine behind me, and contributing-writer status at a respected Web site thrown in for its cutting-edge cachet, the problem is not, I think, with my credentials. Instead, I believe it is my not-so-distant past as an anti-9-to-5 activist that is conspiring to keep me from gaining access to the lifestyle I once avoided like the black plague.

To put it in street terms, I just can’t get past the human-resources folks, you dig?

Gruff, humorless and exhibiting many of the same qualities that would make for a stellar concentration camp warden, they eye me suspiciously during interviews with looks generally reserved for the last car left in the used-car lot. They sense that beneath my sharp suit and eager-to-please smile beats the heart of a subversive; not a Charles Manson-like subversive, mind you, more a Walter Mitty-like one, but a subversive just the same.

You can’t spend a lifetime dissing the 9-to-5 world and not expect the attitude to show on some level. The standard “Tell me about yourself” sends me into the kind of panic attacks a former stripper might feel when meeting her in-laws for the first time. I’m afraid I’ll blurt out something that will betray my past — and blow my attempt at reformation.

As I try to dupe the wise, I wonder just how long this whole thing will drag out or, more important, how much more I can stand before I say screw it, revert to my old ways and apply for a night manager position at 7-Eleven.

Knowing I am weak and bordering on recidivism, my father often calls to offer moral support and check on my progress. He’s a generally caring man but, unfortunately, his phone manner has all the subtlety of a gunshot. Our conversations go something like this:

“Steve.”
“Dad.”
“What’s new?”
“Nothing, really.”
“Did you get a job yet?”
“No.”
“Oh. Here’s your mother.”

Despite the general view that the unemployed are shiftless louts, I’ve found that being out of work is as tiring and demanding as working at a job, but without the paycheck, the security or the cute girl in accounting. Crushed by the remarks of friends who call me a cheapskate and the irritated look of store owners when I fish my pockets for change, the reality is that basic survival — never mind luxury — is expensive. Couple that with the earning power of the ungainfully unemployed and you’ve got problems.

My decisions have become utilitarian in nature. I have stripped my life to the bare necessities. No socializing — costs money. No vices — drinking, smoking and sex all cost money. I spend money only on the promise of making money and, invariably, it’s money ill-spent. The endless stream of faxes, cover letters and risumis sent have nearly bankrupted me. Each time I enter Mail Boxes Etc., the Brooklyn store that has become for all intents and purposes my office, the Jamaican manager greets me with a look of compassion mixed with steely-eyed capitalism. Though I’m sure he wishes me well, at $1 per color copy, $2 per fax and $12 per hour of computer time he is slowly getting rich off of my marathon job search.

Not every waking moment is dedicated to the hunt, though. In the bipolar world of the unemployed it’s all or nothing, and when I say nothing, I mean it. When not temping, applying or interviewing, I spend my hours in a dizzying haze of banal activities and daytime TV. Time is marked by the shows that become my daily obsessions. In the fall it was “Law & Order” reruns at 1 p.m. and “Northern Exposure” at 2 p.m. I have since moved on (that is, seen all the episodes). Lately I’ve been riding high on the wave of courtroom shows, such as “Judge Mills Lane” (“he’s fair and he’s firm”). I dig that righteous old tart “Judge Judy” too. I snack on pretzels and offer my own version of justice to the feckless litigants, losing myself in pure silly abandon until a wave of nauseating guilt over wasted time hits me like a punch in the gut.

Another fascinating, if ironic, byproduct of my unemployed state is that I’ve become a horribly materialistic person. Like the most cartoonish of scoundrels, I see people only in terms of their finances. At parties or on the street I sneer and make comments like “Did you see that man’s shoes? They’re scuffed!”

My fine-tuned eye for money has its drawbacks. When I moved to New York a year ago (to further my writing career), I was under the impression that the city was still the bombed-out urban jungle depicted in ’80s movies. I had no idea I was landing at ground zero of the economic boom, no clue I’d be living in a virtual showroom for America’s revitalized buying power.

Every day Midtown bustles with tourists from Middle America spending newly minted dollars with gloating smiles. My own home isn’t even safe as each week my roommates, smitten with their newfound disposable income, parade a slew of luxury items (stereo systems, cell phones, Italian shoes, DVD players) past my bedroom door. Even my grandfather, a man who has used the past 20 years’ worth of family gatherings as his pulpit to lecture on the inevitability of a catastrophic stock market collapse, is pouring money into tech stocks. The sights and sounds of the economic machine on full throttle are inescapable — and I am cracking.

Last week on Madison Avenue an Armani-clad ad exec turned into a walking mutual fund right before my eyes. I had the sudden urge to grab him, call his broker and cash out before he could squirm away. It was a full-on Wall Street acid trip. Barring an interview or temp assignment, I’ve stopped going into Manhattan altogether, preferring to stay near my Brooklyn home, where the prosperity is less obvious. At least there I only hallucinate 401Ks and gold teeth.

In what seems (in my fragile state) like fate’s attempt at a knockout punch, my most recent temp assignment has landed me in the payroll department of a prestigious nonprofit organization. Yes, readers, it is the time of year for raises, and yours truly has been brought in to help administer the upgrades. Calling out the new salaries yesterday, I felt such a yearning for money and the luxury it can buy, it created a physical ache in my bones. Weak-kneed, it was all I could do to stand and plainly recite the numbers to my unfazed superior.

After work I went home, made dinner and picked up yesterday’s Sunday Times from its resting place on the floor. Scanning the litany of numbers and addresses, I grew weary. Tomorrow I will do it all over again: the faxing, the calling, the mailing, the hoping, the hustling, the elaborate and exhausting interview dance.

For some the working week is a tiresome, self-questioning experience. In typically backward fashion, for me just getting there is proving to be the same.

Trying to convince dad @JonHuntsman to run for mayor of NYC. Thoughts? #whynot?

— Abby Huntsman (@HuntsmanAbby) May 17, 2012

Why not? I mean sure he has never lived in New York and has no connection to the city, but why not?

Of course, now that this idea is floating around, very rich and well-connected morons just might set about trying very hard to make it a reality. Jon Huntsman is a creature of the sort of oblivious center-right rich folk who bankrolled the hilarious failed New York campaigns of Harold Ford Jr. and Reshma Saujani. They would like very much to see another one of their class be the mayor of their city, after Bloomberg ends his term (if he ends his term). The Republicans have essentially no candidate. (I still wouldn’t put it past Police Commissioner and professional harasser-of-minorities Ray Kelly to mount a run, but at the moment he’s sounding disinclined to.) And Jon Huntsman is the sort of nationally prominent “independent” candidate all three major New York newspapers would love (the Daily News would love him the most, obviously, but the Post would love him because he is secretly not actually that moderate).

Jon Huntsman — whose tax plan called for the complete elimination of taxes on capital gains and dividends, as well as the elimination of the Earned Income Tax Credit, the Reagan-era tax benefit for poor people that used to be the sole form of welfare that conservatives supported, and who also wholeheartedly supported the Paul Ryan plan to fix the deficit by eliminating Medicare and not making rich people pay taxes — was of course beloved by the press and labeled a reasonable moderate when he ran for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination. He was mistaken for a political moderate primarily because he does not believe that God created cavemen and dinosaurs at the same time, roughly 4,000 years ago. Huntsman, who supports the complete repeal of Dodd-Frank and is strictly antiabortion and anti-gay marriage and anti-healthcare reform and pro-gun, is now essentially a symbol of the dignity and sagacity of the “radical center,” even though he is a conservative Republican.

So obviously New Yorkers would be thrilled to vote for this guy. I endorse this.

The Obama administration would also like the Bloomberg endorsement, and both campaigns are trying very hard to win the mayor’s support, as Michael Barbaro writes in the New York Times today.

But as his mayoral term winds down, he has told advisers that he is willing to back a candidate this time around, touching off an intense competition for his support in the general election.

“I’ll see down the road,” the mayor said coyly on Tuesday when asked about an endorsement. Describing his impressions of Mr. Romney and Mr. Obama, he made clear that he sees a wide gap between them. “They’re very different, and they give the public a real choice,” he said. “It’s hard to argue that you can’t tell the difference, if you will. They run the spectrum on lots of different issues.”

I would be surprised if Bloomberg ended up endorsing anyone. He loves the attention he receives as a potential endorser, but he cherishes his “non-partisan independent” label much more, and an endorsement of a major-party presidential candidate would sully his carefully maintained brand. He is leading both campaigns on, just as he did in 2008.

In 2007 and 2008, Obama tirelessly wooed Mayor Bloomberg, meeting with him multiple times and showering him with public praise, and he never received an endorsement. McCain also tried to win the mayor’s support to no avail. There was even (dumb) speculation about each campaign considering offering Bloomberg the running mate gig. Since Obama took office, he has continued attempting to win the mayor over, inviting him to golf and lunch at the White House and so on. When Bloomberg was running for his third term, in 2009, Obama did no campaigning for his Democratic opponent, Bill Thompson. (Though then-press secretary Robert Gibbs did allow, in a cagy response to a direct question, that the president “would support the Democratic nominee” in his position as “leader of the Democratic party.”) The mayor has returned the favor by repeatedly, quietly undermining Obama, dismissing him as arrogant to his good pal Rupert Murdoch and trashing Obama’s deficit reduction proposals as, you guessed it, class warfare.

The absurd thing is that there is, policy-wise, practically no daylight between Obama and Bloomberg. The president is a moderate Democrat who believes in the importance of deficit reduction and comprehensive tax reform. The mayor is a liberal Republican who believes the exact same thing. Both of them are “education reformers,” both want immigration reform, both support carbon emissions reduction, both are pro-choice, and the list goes on. They don’t agree on everything, of course. Bloomberg is more strictly anti-gun than the president, and openly supports gay marriage. You know, just like Mitt Romney.

The only reason Bloomberg would have, from a policy perspective, to back Romney over Obama would be over Dodd-Frank, which Bloomberg opposed, and Obama’s plan for a millionaire’s tax bracket, which Bloomberg thinks is a “silly” idea. But the mayor’s stated position is that all the Bush tax cuts should be allowed to expire, which is the opposite of the Republican position. His other disagreements with the president are solely about rhetoric — the mayor finds any whiff of economic populism or Democratic partisanship distasteful — and personality. Not that Mayor Bloomberg, the wise technocrat who always carefully weighs the evidence before making his rational decisions, would support a candidate whose entire platform is wildly at odds with Bloomberg’s stated positions, simply because the candidate is nicer to billionaires like Mayor Bloomberg. That would be absurd!

The White House’s attempts to win Bloomberg over seem to me perpetually doomed to failure, though I imagine they’ll continue to embarrass themselves seeking his support, as he continues flirting with Romney.

I asked her a few questions about “endangered local signage.”

How are you defining “Vernacular Typography”?

I guess it should technically be Vernacular “Lettering,” but I define Vernacular Typography as the found lettering that exists in the built environment and surrounds us everyday. It doesn’t have to be pretty or use an existing typeface, it’s just any visual representation of language.

How do you think New York City’s vernacular typography differs from other cities around the country and the world?

New York’s vernacular typography is unmatched in terms of intensity and variety of signage. On any given block, you can see the city’s forgotten history through the layers of still-visible signage in basically any medium. The typescape is also much denser than in other places because the city evolves so rapidly and retail turnover is so high.

Which New York City typefaces are your current favorites?

I’m partial to the type and signs I grew up seeing every day, most of which have disappeared (Gertel’s Bakery) or whose surfaces seem to be slowly melting away (Ideal Hosiery).

I love any type that somehow still clings to life or relates directly to a time and place (Horn & Hardart Automat).

And of course, you can never go wrong with beautiful neon (Montero’s).

What do we lose when the vernacular typography of the city streets vanishes from sight?

A sense of the city’s history, and also a precious visual resource. Typography can you tell you a lot about local culture and urban communication and when we don’t see it, our sense of the city is diminished.

What do you think might be the psychological impact of living in a city where the native typography is replaced by homogeneous corporate signage?

I think there’s less of a personal connection to a specific place. With standardized corporate advertising, signs are no longer representative of a group of people or a neighborhood, just a business that could be anywhere in the world.

For natives, connections to the past are lost, so a sense of home or a memory of a place is devalued. And for visitors, there’s less of the unique experience you get from traveling someplace new.

Vernacular typography is such an incredible marker of regional identity, spatial orientation and even personal history. If we lose it altogether, we not only lose that individual and cultural connection, but also a physical map of the city, which is why documentation and preservation are so important.

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But the NYPD’s “covertly follow every single Muslim in the tri-state area” approach to counter-terrorism has its defenders. Like Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who believes Americans Muslims have the right to worship wherever they see fit so long as they don’t pay any attention to the unmarked vans parked across the street.

And the department argues that it is allowed to carry out surveillance wherever it chooses, because there’s no law against just going around looking at things and taking some pictures, right? No, of course not, unless you look sort of Middle Eastern.

The NYPD earlier this week announced that they had totally caught some people who were almost definitely probably Iranian spies. These spies were caught red-handed spying all over the place!

Authorities have interviewed at least 13 people since 2005 with ties to Iran’s government who were seen taking pictures of New York City landmarks, a senior New York Police Department official said Wednesday.

The NYPD’s Mitchell Silber told Congress that Hezbollah and Iran definitely want to blow up New York, and the proof is three incidents of people “associated with the Iranian government” getting caught photographing things, in New York. (I am not much of a terrorist, but if you want pictures of New York City landmarks in order to figure out how best to blow them up why not try Flickr? There are hundreds of thousands of photos of every landmark in the city already online!)

While other so-called intelligence experts say ” there are no known or specific threats indicating Iranian plans to attack inside the U.S.,” Long Island-based Islamaphobe Republican Congressman Peter King and documented supporter of terrorism wants us all to be on high alert, because Hezbollah is everywhere:

Opening the hearing, King said, “We have a duty to prepare for the worst,” warning there may be hundreds of Hezbollah operatives in the United States, including 84 Iranian diplomats at the United Nations and in Washington who, “it must be presumed, are intelligence officers.”

Stop telling the NYPD not to spy on all the Muslims, everywhere! If they don’t keep tabs on all of them, the Iranians will get us!