The continuing saga of one girl’s plight with unemployment…(read vol I,  vol II, vol III, vol IV, vol V,  vol VI, vol VII, vol. VIIIvol IX, vol X,  vol XI, vol XII,  vol XIII, vol XIV, vol XV and vol XVI)

Hi readers. Well, this new post was going to be a light-hearted, hilarious book report on Snooki’s glorious novel A Shore Thing since, yes, I read it. I didn’t pay cash money for it — I have a tiny, microscopic sliver of pride left I think, so I checked it out of the library. I was even on the wait list for it. For real.

I admit I did skim through a few parts about the mechanics of spray tanning and the drinking of buttery nipple shots, but read the thing I did. When a friend recently asked me, “What’s the deal with you and Snooki?” after I’d made my dillionth Tweet mentioning Miss Oompa Loompa, I thought I should address my fascination with Nicole “Snooki” Polizzi head on. Or… pouf on.

“Snooki and Vince Lombardi are like my twin pillars of strength…”

Hit the jump to keep reading about Snooki’s spiritual power…

Well that was then. As usual I stress about what I will write to you people next in my saga of unemployment and I usually go through a few different versions of what the actual topic morphs into. My friend’s question got me thinking. What IS the deal with me and Snooki? So I looked deep, deep into my soul for the answers. Like a holy person who exists solely on goat milk and lives in a cave, the answers soon came to me: Snooki is ballsy, she doesn’t give a damn what people think, and she’s a tiny fighter. At least, I think she is. I’ve never met her. It’s Snooki’s keep-on-keeping-on attitude I love — and that attitude comes across in the novel she wrote (or, the novel a well paid ghost writer wrote). And yeah, Snooki’s rich now, but she wasn’t always one of the privileged class like Ivanka Trump with her prep school speech patterns. In my mind, Snooki is like a boozy Buddhist. With an orange tint. And actually in a lot of sculptures and things Buddha does have a bun that’s basically a pouf! Think about it people…

The only time I’ve sat through an entire episode of Jersey Shore was the night after a minor car accident a few months back. The accident left my boyfriend with a concussion and me with two black eyes and what I was sure was a punctured kidney that would literally kill me in the night as I slept. It turned out to be a bruised muscle. I think. Unemployed people usually don’t have health insurance so it was just lil ole me and my Larry David hypochondria left to diagnose that one. The two of us flipped on the TV and stared at a few hours of Jersey Shore and The Bachelor — two shows that perfectly matched our mooshy mind states. Once the mooshiness abated, I didn’t feel the need to watch Snooki’s show ever again. Yet I still think of her as a kind of spiritual guide. Except when she gets wasted and crashes into Italian po-pos, but nobody’s perfect right?

This is something that comes in handy when life knocks you down a few pegs. A spiritual guide. Snooki and football coach Vince Lombardi now compete for that space in my life — they’re like my twin pillars of strength. Them and Luke from Cool Hand Luke. They do not give up, no matter if someone’s making fun of their pouf, beating their football team or beating the shit out of them with boxing gloves while the rest of the chain gang watches. “You’re gonna hafta kill me,” Luke told the much bigger dude who was pummeling him in the best scene in the movie. Snooki begins her book with the similarly inspirational lines: “Life was hard. But a pouf? That should be easy.”

“Even people with garden pizza ovens have their bad days…”

It’s not always easy. Life and poufs. In this saga of unemployment my struggle right now is more about making this “writing thing” happen. Maybe your crap moods are related to paying off the mortgage, paying the student loans (always a fun bill to get), dealing with a sick pet or a mean co-worker. Mine happen to be about making it as a writer, to be totally honest. No, it’s not like being a Navy SEAL, but it matters to me. A lot. And there are a lot of blows you have to deal with on this road and on many many roads like it — even accountants maybe have to deal with blows, who knows? Like I said before I freeze up when I see “guess how many jellybeans are in the jar” plaques so things like numbers and accounting are mysterious to me. But hats off to you accountants and jellybean counting champions out there.

Sometimes I get caught up in thinking that the big prize at the end of the road is that I can have tons of money and nice things and pay off Sallie Mae by dropping off a giant Louis Vuitton bag filled with cash at their headquarters as I swill champagne from afar, cackling about my good fortune. I recently saw in the illustrious US Weekly a little tidbit about Gwyneth Paltrow. Usually those tabloids have a section called “Stars: They’re Just Like Us!” with pictures of Renee Zellweger taking out her trash or Tom Cruise feeding a parking meter. This time it said something along the lines of: “Gwyneth Paltrow Is Not Just Like Us!” The little blurb was basically talking about her new cookbook where she writes things like “I had a wood burning pizza oven installed in the garden!” and talks about the importance of having intellectual dinner table convos “like they do at Nora Ephron’s house.” Now, I am happy for Mama Apple, but I’d like an actual oven and an actual freezer in my apartment, let alone a pizza oven in the garden for me to cook organic vegan pizza in while Chris Martin croons love songs to me from beneath a willow tree. But even people with garden pizza ovens have their bad days.

Sure I’d love all that and anyone who says they don’t is either a holy person happily sipping goat milk in a cave or a super wealthy person in denial. But what Snooki, Vince Lombardi, and Luke from Cool Hand Luke help me remember is it’s not about that, in the end. It’s about this.

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