Gen-Y and wondering

It's May and the sun's still shining. By all accounts, I should be having a ball. I have time on my hands to run, walk, skip or jump (at mantrayoga.com.au I can even get cheap classes, being unemployed); I can laze about the Parental's abode reading mags and watching daytime television and I'm free to catch up with friends - for lunch, for dinner, whenever. Yep, one day I'll look back on this time and want to slap the sorry, whinging version of myself sitting here now. But that's what hindsight is for...

Right now my glass is looking decidedly half empty. And I hate that.

I've just come back from a long brunch with a girlfriend (she ordered eggs, I sat on a pot of peppermint tea for two hours), who at all of twenty-two is still cocky and confident and certain the world is her oyster while I'm trying to weigh up the pros and cons of a career change. Said-girlfriend has known me for almost a decade - since I briefly dated her older brother in high school - and always saw me as such a go-getter; a girl who would take on the world. I guess that's why I find my current unemployment so devastating. I feel like I've let her, and others, down. In her youthful (Christ, she's only three years younger!) exuberance she sat there dishing out loads of advice, "Try X... Could you maybe do Y?", while I smiled, nodded and ultimately poo-pooed each idea.

I'm not negative by nature and I know my personal slump has more to do with the economy than my own drive, but I just wish there was something else I loved to do. Then thinking up pros for a career plan-B wouldn't be so depressing.

GWAS posted a (what I should have found) very inspiring piece on Tuesday about ambitious Gen-Y women turning lemons into lemonade and seeing their new found redundancies as opportunities to fulfill their 'other' ambition. Be it going back to uni, penning their first novel or starting a business, these chicks are positive and positively driven.

Back in December the BBC business channel interviewed Tamara Mellon - Founder and President of fashion label Jimmy Choo - on how she brought her dream to fruition and I thought, "Hell, yeah. I could do that!" But now that I have the time and the luxury of no rent, no mortgage, no real job, I also have no idea.

I suppose I should get back out into the sunshine and go for a walk. Maybe one will come to me?