Welcome to Love in the Time of Doom, a weekly column written by Flavorpill’s resident relationship expert and death metal enthusiast, Lord Grimmak of the planet Arkonia. Please submit any questions concerning love, romance, and human relationships to him directly at raiseyourhorns [at] gmail.com and he shall duly answer them to the best of his abilities each Friday.
Get your first dose of Grimmak’s most excellent advice after the jump; in honor of the current layoff-crazy economy, we’ve asked him to do a special career edition.
Dear Lord Grimmak,
Until recently I was working as an assistant at an entertainment firm, but my position got eliminated in a round of company-wide layoffs. My dream is actually to write my own film one day, but in the current economy, pursuing that line of work just seems foolish. A few of my friends have ended up with seasonal gigs at stores like Pottery Barn or the Gap, but I really don’t want to work in retail. Any suggestions?
– Hjørdis the Economic Casualty
Dear Hjørdis,
I am more of an expert of the human heart than I am of human career choices — anatomical charts are infinitely more interesting than books by Tony Robbins — so my main advice here is to follow your heart. Indeed, this recent economic downturn has hit many of your fellow homo sapiens quite hard. I myself just lost my gig as an understudy for a corpse on CSI. Good thing my Overlord Commanders supplied me with a small stipend, enough for me to at least buy some dry ice that I can use to put myself in cryo-freeze until they come to rescue me from this doomed planet.
But back to your question — truthfully, did you enjoy working in the position you just lost? Would you have been happy working at that entertainment firm for the next, say, ten years? Seems to me that you took that job for security and a regular paycheck, but it was only tangentially related to what you truly wanted to do. Now, that position turned out to be not so secure after all. Doesn’t that tell you something? Looking for another stable, well-paid, career-track position right now is like looking for a rabbi at Red Lobster. You might as well take the first tolerable job that you find (if not in retail, what about food service?) to cover your basic expenses. In your down time, focus all your energy on writing your screenplay. What else can you really do? Seriously, this is the time when we all have to hole up in our bunkers, eat canned food, and work on our own schemes until the alien invasion has ended. Not that we’d ever invade you. Why would we do that? That’s silly. It’s just an analogy.
P.S. Would there be a role for a shape-shifting Arkonian researcher that digests his food via a protein-dissolving enzyme excreted from his rectum in your movie? I’m a good character actor, and my true form (i.e. not the little Asian man body I chose as a disguise in this world) resembles Philip Seymour Hoffman, but with tentacles.