Flashes of Panic

When I was a senior in college, it was traditional to post all the negative responses received relative to whatever one planned to do after graduation. Normally, these went on the bulletin board outside one’s door, but I recall some doors which were entirely papered, and there may have been some senior-dense areas where the whole hall contributed to a communal wall of rejection.

Since my job search was pretty half-assed (I actually forgot an interview, and got a call from the no-longer-potential employer asking where I was,) I didn’t have much to post; instead, I kept a public archive of the March of Doom in the form of my major department’s communications about my comprehensive examination. Comps were required for me to graduate in the major, and since my GPA in my major was actually somewhat worse than my overall GPA, there was at least a slight possibility that I would crash-land. Anyway, I had no idea what I was going to do after graduation; at the time, remember, the concept of creating web pages professionally was still pretty new.

The idea of posting the letters, anyway, was somewhat like the Callahan’s motto of “Shared pain is lessened.” We were all in the pool together, and since you only needed one positive response, the negatives were more about bravado than gallows humor.

I bring this up because I haven’t recycled my two letters yet. I felt like I should be doing something with them—filing them, maybe—but tonight I realized that I was planning to post them on my door, without any actual door in mind. They can’t go on my office door at work, I think; nobody would understand why they’re there. (Maybe if I had a cubicle?) Putting them up in the apartment would just be weird, and not in a good way.

Maybe I should sneak back over to the college and post them outside my old dorm room. That would leave ‘em guessing!