There’s a period of time where you will literally feel like you’re in purgatory.  Life after college Limbo is that rare beast that generations before us yearned to extend and you will be struggling to shorten.  Trust me.  I was just there.  Think of the following four rules as guidelines to seeing if you are in fact residing in Post-Collegiate-Purgatory.

9. You are or will soon be unemployed.  I mean, everyone that had previously graduated (mind you in decades past) that you talked to right before graduating joked about it and said, “Don’t worry.  It won’t be for very long.  You’ll find a job.”  They were lying bastards.  When they graduated, the price of water was also higher than the price of gas and even then we’re talking about numbers less than $1.50.  In these awful economic crap-storms, unemployment becomes your post-college career.  Get used to it.  LinkedIn and the classifieds will sit at the top of your most visited websites list just after Facebook where you will fuss about how broke you are and how much you hate every last classmate that’s currently employed.  Oh yeah, it’s gonna be loads o’ fun.

10. More time will be spent staring at the walls and philosophizing about why we’re all here than should ever be admitted out loud.  So you know how people are always saying that not having a job will give you time to think and reflect upon your life and the decisions you’ve made.  These people would be correct.  The tricky part of this is exactly how much time you spend thinking.  Albeit, this will undoubtedly be the first moment in a while where one’s school career can be looked back on and laughed at.  You will laugh at how seriously you/or your classmates took trivial things like the SATs and for some the PSATs in high school.  Or, at how when you got to college and spent your first night there in a dorm room away from home, you kind of missed your mom, her cooking and that stuffed animal you forgot to bring and cried yourself to sleep as a result.  Or, you’ll laugh at how you thought all-nighters were a myth, until you lived through one.  Reflect upon one of many nights spent either high, drunk, a combination of the two or bug eyed off of energy drinks.  And don’t forget about that hilarious prank when somebody threw a steak at somebody’s dorm room door and everybody played it off while the owner of said door pitched a fit.  Fun times.  As you sit back and recall these events, your purpose in life will come under scrutiny.  The question of what you’ll do with your life now that the greatest times are over will enter your mind over and over like an unwelcome guest who continually raids your fridge and eats all the good stuff.  You’ll begin to pen your manifesto and from there, you may begin to resemble the Unibomber never leaving your room, muttering to yourself about the meaning of it all and scribbling things in your manifesto growling at anyone who touches it.  Cue insanity.  Cue number 11.

11. Throughout the course of your unemployment, you’ll experiment far more than you did in college if that was possible.  To combat these symptoms of insanity and resemblance to the Unibomber, you’ll experiment with things you’d never touched in college.  Mind you, this is a pretty short list by now, but you attack it with gusto for one of three reasons:

a. simply because it’s a time waster,

b. you need something to do to feel useful or alive,

c. honestly you’ve got nothing else better to do which leads me to my final pearl…

12.  For the first six months, unemployment after college will feel like an extended vacation in which you can sleep late, watch T.V. and eat all you can lay your hands on.  You can go out every night if you want and come home when you please because there are clearly no classes to worry about being hungover for.  But, after that six month grace period is up, you’ll really be ready for life to start.

If more than 3 of these apply to you in any way, shape or form, then I’ll let you guess where you are.