The Five Stages of Pre-employment: written with all the time I wish I didn’t have.

Perhaps you have heard about the five stages of grief. They are a profound look at the human healing process, and I wish I had come up with them. This is not about those stages. It is about the five stages that I have discovered result from the longer, more terrible and emotionally draining process of looking for a job out of college. I feel it is my duty to society to publish my findings in case you, or someone you care about, find yourself in this same situation and need external guidance and reassurance that you are not alone in what you are going through.

The Stages:

1. Woo, I’m in a 1960s spring break film!
2. Cat! Just one. Not the musical.
3. Remembering I’m allergic to cats and believing I will never succeed at anything if I can’t even remember I’m allergic to cats anymore.
4. The second language I will never know.
5. Re-studying for the SAT in a Quest for Self-Validation.

Woo, I’m in a 1960s Spring Break Film!

Think Gidget Goes Hawaiian, Where the Boys Are, Girl Happy or any other film where people are probably in Fort Lauderdale dodging reality. My game plan at the beginning of summer was that I wasn’t going to start applying for jobs until at earliest late July because I didn’t want to get hired before I had the chance to sufficiently lounge around reading chick-lit and drinking Crystal Light and rum. Ha ha. Hahahahahaha. ← That is me laughing at my naïve 22-year-old self. After three months of joblessness, I am still 22, but I am hardened. The sun makes me angry. I have developed an intolerance to artificial lemonade and have switched to vodka. I spend the first two hours of every morning trying to recreate the bloom of youth on my face using a sponge and a pot of rouge I found under the couch, which — full disclosure — may actually be red watercolor paint. And the overinflated sense of self-esteem that was 98% of my charm now seems as wonderfully impossible as NBC picking up the dramedy I would like to pitch: “Joe Biden on Ice.” No longer am I under the impression that life is a sequence of musical numbers sung on side-by-side surfboards. Rather, it is a grim place where companies put “5+ years of industry experience” up there with non-negotiable criteria such as being a non-murderer and having a can-do attitude. On the plus side, I have watched Blue Hawaii thirteen times and have thus made big strides on the Elvis impression I have been clandestinely working on for the last seven years.

Cat! Just one. Not the musical.

To be fair, the cat phase may be partly a reaction to a break-up, and not fully a product of unemployment. But let’s not examine that too closely because these stages are not about introspection or personal growth. The best way I can describe this stage is that it was characterized by an all-consuming urge to have something need me to snuggle it. To focus all my energy on making sure something small and fluffy wasn’t lonely because it meant that I didn’t have to address my sadness. I decided I needed a kitten — a tiny one that would fit in a shot glass. The idea first hit me when I was on Amazon trying to order the chemicals that make packaged Rice Krispies treats so much more fucktastic than all homemade varieties. I said to myself, “Grace, you don’t need Tetrasodium Pyrophosphate, order a cat you dummy!”

You cannot order cats on Amazon. Yet. (Fingers crossed for next holiday season). Luckily, I have so much time and can drive to any pet store within a four-state radius.

Remembering I’m allergic to cats and believing I will never succeed at anything if I can’t even remember I’m allergic to cats anymore.

When my poetry class was kicking my ass in the spring of my twentieth year on earth, I decided I was going to focus my energy on obtaining visible triceps. It was a classic example of a non-fix fix. Triceps Tuesday’s was to March 2014, as Project Penelope the Cat was to August 2016. My mom said no to the cat before I even reached the second slide of my PowerPoint, and then (correctly) guessing that I would get the cat anyway and try and hide it in her nylon drawer, she deployed a weapon stronger than parental force. Logic.

Mom: “No, because you are highly allergic.”
Me: (silent sobs)

And it is true. I am allergic to cats. Like, SO much. My eyes get all bulgy and gooey and I look like a swamp creature who’s evil, but only because it’s lonely (← This is, incidentally, the subject of a rock-musical I am composing as soon as I learn how to play the organ. Please expect to see a synopsis of the plot in my next blog post).

Alas, even now that I know in my heart of hearts that I am never going to get a kitten, I still walk around with a tiny cat-shaped hole in my chest, thinking about all the Sundays Penelope and I would have spent together drinking coffee, ranking the Rocky’s from great to greatest, and writing Russia jokes.

The second language I will never know

Do you know what sounds bad? “Oh, I’m just looking for a job right now, but no one has yet appreciated the limerick I put under ‘work experience’.” Do you know what sounds awesome? “Who me? Oh, I’m teaching myself German, denn ich bin ein sexy motherfucker.”

Perhaps the part I find most jarring about being unemployed is that I, Grace Shaffer, self-realized neurotic nut-job, feel lazy. Being lazy is, in my opinion, one of the absolute worst things to be. It’s different than relaxing. Relaxing is dope. Being lazy is not wanting enough for yourself to even try. In school, I abolished the word from my psyche by cementing myself to the library wall and ruining all chances at forming lasting friendships by telling every new person I encountered that they would be, at best, an irritating distraction from my goals. My little sister Genevieve told me that it was a good thing I was studying in the UK because I would have a better time in an army barrack than in a sorority house. She is tiny, but she is wise. If routine were a person, I would wed and bed it. This being said, I have been trying to cope with my post-college lack of regiment using a two-pronged approach: I run an extensive amount of stairs, and I crusade for the coffee cake boasting the perfect crumble-to-goo ratio. Both hobbies work together, so neither is visibly apparent, which equals out to me feeling like I am *still* doing nothing. It’s a vicious cycle.

I have wet dreams about billable hours and productivity enforced by a whistle, so when people ask me what I’m doing, I say, “Ich lerne Deutsch,” with absolutely zero intention to even download the duolingo app. Just to avoid feeling lazy. This happened about six times before I accepted I needed a change.

Re-studying for the SAT in a Quest for Self-Validation

Consequently, I became absolutely obsessed with the idea of getting a perfect score on the SAT. Now, this would be admirable, if it weren’t for the fact that I literally just graduated from college, in which case this is very creepy and very sad. But homegirl needed some self-validation, so pre-calc review it was. I called Sarah, my favorite person in the world (who also happens to be my older sister and an ex-SAT tutor) and asked her to hit me up with some practice tests. She told me to stop taking drugs and come visit her. Once I got to Berkeley, she tried to convince me that this impromptu sister-time was just because she missed me and was in the mood for a weekend of my particular brand of #ClassicComedy. But I know I was there under observation. And I’m cool with that. I let her study me for signs of insanity while I ate Mole tacos. And again while I ate meatballs. And some more when I found a box of fancy crackers in her cupboard (the kind with fruit in them) and said mazel tov on becoming an adult. When she seemed satisfied with her research, I asked her to read the brief I had written laying out all the reasons I believe I am a sociopath. I don’t think she found anything too alarming because she let me get on my plane back to Portland unchaperoned and without confiscating my pen-knife. But my bag was notably free of SAT prep and filled instead with a couple of Ken Follet novels that I will finish by approximately 2031. 2019 with Sparknotes.

Conclusion

There are two crucial differences between the five stages of grief and my five stages of pre-employment. The first being that the five stages of grief are the purely fanciful product of someone’s overactive imagination in the 1960s, whereas my stages are science. And the second being that mine include no acceptance stage. My stages are not about coming to terms with the fact that my main source of self-worth comes from writing a blog that I can’t even get my cousins (not even the half that like me) to read out of familial obligation. But rather they remind me that without externally set deadlines and pre-established work-hours I turn into the Grinch who stole all major and minor holidays from the townspeople.

I am totally at peace with the fact that I will probably live in my car until my late forties. But I will do so on my writer’s salary with my dignity intact. Eventually. Hopefully, before my loved ones/neighbors have to put up with five more stages of emotional/intellectual deterioration. Because, frankly, no one deserves that. Not even you, terrible Gilda from across the hall.