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That's right, I'm one of the meager percentage of Americans who isn't punching the clock, filling out the time schedule or doing whatever it is people with jobs do. And while nearly everyone, it seems, is prospering from the current boom economy -- buying armored SUVs or vacationing in the Caribbean -- I feel conspicuously left out. My only source of disposable income is the sofa. (Sometimes I find change between the cushions.)

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?

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