No Parking Fire Lane

OK, birthed out of our cumulative experience of unemployment, I/we have created a short film. This film explicitly brings to bear our previous musings on both censorship and meaninglessness. Censorship in that it contains explicit language, such that it definitively would not make it through the fearsome church filter. If you are offended by the word F#%k, please do not watch this video unless you desire to be offended. Please note that the word is not directed at the audience but rather shared with the audience as an evaluation of the meaninglessness of the monotony and repetition of life. While in the film this is depicted in the form of unemployment, it is my definitive experience that employment can be both just as monotonous, repetitious, and meaningless. I think that it is not too much of a stretch to consider this film a modern paraphrase of Ecclesiastes 1:2. It has been an interesting and worthwhile process to step into the void of unemployment and not find myself scooped up into the safety of employment immediately. According to Ernie Zelinski (The Joy of Not Working, 2003) employment often provides, by default, three things that we crave as humans: structure, purpose, and community. I think this is an accurate assessment and I would like to add that our identity is directly related to two of those three and perhaps not entirely disconnected from the third. It can be easy for people either unemployed or retired to lose track of their identity because without their job, which society reinforces defines you, one can lose self identity entirely. It has therefore been crucial in our journey of self discovery and reassertion of identity to build structure, purpose, and a sense of community into our lives outside of work and beyond school. I think that I have learned the importance of having one's identity rooted in something larger and more stable than employment.

The title "No Parking Fire Lane" makes reference to both the sign in the hallway as well as a reference to the socially unacceptable nature of unemployment. While on the one hand we are plugged into the machine with dreams and promises of "retirement" a carefree time of leisure "later". On the other hand, those who are unemployed are often berated with accusations of laziness and forced to struggle with issues of self worth along with the obvious financial challenges. Part of the challenge in the midst of this is that we evaluate everything in dollars and so, without income, it is easy to internalize the idea that one's time is worthless. In a job one is paid in some fashion for one's time, in school one pays large sums to spend time learning. In both cases time is valued highly. However, for the unemployed or retired, time becomes socially meaningless because it is no longer evaluated financially. Minutes, hours, days blend together. Time can be measured in books, cups of coffee, or Farmville crops harvested, resumes sent, or cover letters written...

This film is a comment on life and gives voice to a particular perspective. It should not be interpreted as an absolute perceptive or as Silas's perspective, rather it is a piece of art attempting to make social comment based on a single interpretation of a certain experience.