> I'm an EE that has been out of work since April, and in the past five months, I've noticed that I have gradually... how can I saw this... lost my focus. I hum mindlessly all day long, I sing along with commercials, I forget why I'm at the supermarket and wander around and around, and last week I burned soup, and that's pretty hard to do!

I'm curious about long-term unemployment. Without wanting to sound as though I'm belittling your situation, can it really be that hard to get a job where you live? I accept that it may be temporarily impossible to get a job in the field you work in, but there's always *some* sort of work going, even if it's just data entry or flipping burgers.

The only reason I can think of for not taking *any* type of work as a temporary measure, would be if it took away time you need for more serious job searching. But even then, there is part-time work. And even if you're flipping burgers, at least you're out there working, doing something which occupies your time and stops you from sliding into months of inactivity and brain death.

I'm sorry if this sounds like a personal attack; it isn't. I do sympathise with your situation. But I am just very curious about this, because whenever I have found myself unemployed, I have always managed to find *some* sort of underpaid crappy job within a week or two, to keep me going until I could get a real one in my own field. I'm not saying these were good jobs, or jobs I enjoyed, but they kept me sane and focused on my job search instead of staying home and drifting aimlessly from one day to the next. Perhaps it's just that I've been lucky so far, but I still find it hard to understand how there can't be any work at all available in any reasonable-sized town.

Going from the general back to the personal: if you can't find, or don't want to take, other types of work, maybe you could look for some kind of course to do, or (as Gahalia suggested) go through your old textbooks again. It does sound like you need to get some structure back into your life and keep your mind going.