The Waiting Game
if you've ever wondered what graduating into a pandemic is like, this is the place to find out. Spoiler alert: it's not fun.
“Well the name of the game is hurry up and wait
But that ain't putting no food on my plate”
-Sturgill Simpson, You Can Have the Crown
I wake up on the couch with the dim blue light of the TV shining into my eyes. For a second I can’t recall where I am. Then, the almost muted voices of Chris Fowler and Kirk Herbstreit coming through the speakers remind me that it’s Saturday night and primetime college football is on. My rumbling stomach clues me in on why I woke up in the first place so I groggily stagger to the fridge. There’s two slices of day-old pepperoni and black olive pizza calling for me. My brain creaks and groans to life as it encounters the first bit of critical thinking in days: should I heat the pizza up in the air fryer or the toaster oven?
This is my life right now. Replace the college football with old seasons of Survivor, a game of Call of Duty: Warzone, or any other piece of on-demand entertainment and this could be any day between the present date and when I moved here in late July. “Here” would be my mom’s house. A fortress of rent-free refuge to shelter in while job hunting in the midst of a pandemic. As if written by a past his prime sitcom writer, my bedroom is in the spare room above the garage. It is my domain, and I patrol it much like a grizzly bear would patrol theirs. Searching for food, occasionally scratching my hairy belly, and driven by nothing but an instinct to survive.
To preface, I’ve been blessed to say that certain factors have allowed me to live a more privileged life than many others during the ongoing pandemic. There’s a roof over my head, I haven’t gone hungry, and I’ve been able to stay healthy. But like so many other recent college graduates, I’ve had to do my best to wade into the job market during the most uncertain economic times since the Great Depression. In case you were wondering how that’s going, it absolutely blows.
During the second week of March, I stepped out of my final class before spring break not knowing it would be the last time I was on the University of Georgia campus as a student. Two months later I submitted my final assignment as part of an amended online learning schedule and that was it. No pomp and circumstance, no tear-filled hugs as I saw my peers one last time. Just hitting “submit” on one final essay then treating myself to some tacos for lunch.
This was always due to be a potentially difficult emotional transition period in life. Unlike graduating high school where multiple next steps are clearly presented on the journey of life, graduating college is full of uncertainty. Where am I going to live? What kind of job am I going to get? Why does health insurance cost so much? How the hell am I supposed to find people to hang out with and date now? Valid questions, all of them. And the confusion around them is usually eased by everything from job fairs to those aforementioned heartfelt goodbyes. But not this year.
That uncertainty is what is making the steaming shit sandwich that the universe has been serving so hard to digest. The few guide posts to help navigate this stage of life have disappeared and been replaced by a darkness that is so pervasive it can swallow you up. Instead of starting my career I’m here, sending out one job application after another into a silent void. At least in college I had grades to tell me whether or not my work sucked but now, it’s just unemployed silence. And as I’m still sitting in the starting blocks I get to watch the country tear itself apart in response to a contentious presidential election that has made many forget the disease that caused all these problems in the first place.
Admittedly, I didn’t do the best job of responding to this unfortunate set of circumstances. Like plenty of others, at the start of all this I bought a new pair of running shoes and plenty of books. If I was going to be trapped inside for months, I was going to better myself. But that drive faded fast and instead I ended up spending way too many nights drinking Taaka vodka and watching action movies. (I watched The Matrix trilogy four times. It took an extended conversation in the mirror to convince myself that I could not pull off a black leather duster over a tank top.) As my personal job hunt stalled I deleted various forms of social media, bitter at my friends who had secured employment and furious with myself for such childish anger. It was easy to let the isolation allow me to forget that almost everything sucks for everyone right now. Plenty of other recent grads are sending out applications that feel like they have the same response success rate as drunk texting an old Tinder match. Those that have found jobs are thanking their lucky stars every day for them as layoffs and closures cause more and more people to join the unemployed masses each day. It’s bleak, but it’s life right now.
I mentioned watching old seasons of Survivor earlier. Since the start of the pandemic I’ve been burning through them like cheap cigarettes. For the uninformed, the gist of the show is that a group of people are separated into tribes and stranded in a remote location. They build shelter, find food, and struggle to live all while competing in challenges for immunity and rewards along with forming strategic alliances to avoid getting voted out of the tribe. The show’s motto is the very direct “Outwit. Outplay. Outlast.” and if you do all those things you win a million bucks. But along the way, many contestants learn that the real reward is the experience itself (this would be a very sappy revelation were it not reality television). It’s a fascinating watch because the brutal conditions make people act completely batshit in what is already an entertaining game.
Throughout this whole experience, I’ve felt like I’ve been playing my own game of Survivor. Not in the literal sense of avoiding a deadly disease, even if that’s definitely part of it. But more specifically in the sense of how a shitty environment has made an already difficult social game even worse and how every move I make is part of a strategy to avoid elimination. One of those moves involved my diploma. When it first completed its winding journey from Athens, Georgia to my current abode I decided not to open it. I couldn’t bear to look at a symbol of accomplishment when I presently felt like such a failure. Then the more I thought about it the more that idea changed. One day, in spite of it seeming impossible now, this will be behind all of us. An incomprehensibly shitty experience that was far worse than it should have been but that we all grew from. When that day arrives, I want to crack that diploma container open and hang that crispy piece of paper on the wall of whatever building I’m working in. But until then it’ll stay sealed and I’ll be right here. Outwitting, outplaying, outlasting, and outwriting.
The Waiting Game
The “steaming shit sandwich that the universe has been serving” is absolutely my favorite line of this omg haha. Love hearing your honesty about this shitty time we’re all going through. Your transparency is refreshing & you’re such a great writer!!