Tuesday, July 27, 2010

Call it a concession, if you must, but the headline you see at the top of this page is the closest I’ll ever get to a “status update.” It hasn’t changed in weeks, and it’s dense and obtuse, a secret I share with myself. Clearly it doesn’t adhere to the traditional notion of a status update, which suits me just fine–my goal isn’t to offer you an unfettered play-by-play of what I’m doing or how I’m feeling, after all, but to preserve a one-way conduit of information curated with an iron fist. If you think of Facebook as a party lined with Polaroids, and Twitter a bohemian carnival of oversharing, then all of this–the splendor you see before you–is a police state.

And the mandate for tonight is to close the file on my recent job hunt. You know the arc. The follow-up e-mails to the interviews, which I pored over late into the night and then let sit until the morning, when the timestamps would look a lot more reasonable. The waiting, punctuated by moments when I wondered what I could’ve handled better to lessen the waiting. Then, the conviction that I had done all I could, that I was the shopper here, and that some things are and aren’t meant to be. The browser tab devoted to Gmail, one eye fixed on it at all times, almost willing it to change from “Gmail – Inbox” to “Gmail – Inbox (1),” only to find the (1) was for the weekly specials e-mail from Southwest Airlines. You may recall how you camped out by your mailbox after you sent in your college applications, fingers crossed tightly for a fat envelope. It’s the modern retelling of that.

But eventually the key e-mail makes it to the inbox. There’s the initial pitch. The counter. The counter to the counter. And finally, finally the formal offer letter. I thought it would be easy to sign it, break ties and move on without a second thought, but this wasn’t the case. I remember clutching a pen and hesitating at the dotted line. I remember drafting my resignation letter, then hovering over the “send” button, heart in my throat, rationalizing why it took so much effort to just click. Sign and send I did, though, which brings us back to the headline. It’s the sound of an elevator reaching its destination, an oven proclaiming it’s ready, the clink of more cheddar, a timer fully unwound. Ding.