My Big News

If you are a woman of a certain age---and particularly if you are a woman of a certain age who has been married going on two years---and you write a blog post entitled "My Big News," you are probably going to get a reasonable number of people assuming that you're pregnant.

(The Internet loves to assume that you're pregnant, have you noticed that? You can't write a blog post about being tired or smelling something weird in the movie theater without a small segment of the Internet raising their virtual eyebrows in your comments section. And while I do know, of course, that it's absolutely well-meaning, I have to say that there’s still something a little unnerving about having an unseen mass of people speculating on your reproductive state. Look, Internet, if I am ever pregnant, I will let you know. I promise I won't just suddenly post a picture of myself nine months along, all "guys, I just ate a really big burrito for dinner.")

So no, my big news isn't that I'm pregnant.

My big news is that I quit my job.

I know! It’s crazy! And it’s still a little weird to type, actually. I gave notice last Monday—during my first ever meeting with my new boss, who’d only been at the company a week; that certainly added another layer of awkward to an already awkward situation---and my last day at work will be this Friday. I was approached, a little while ago, with a really fantastic opportunity that I couldn’t turn down, and so I’ll be starting my new job towards the end of the month.

First, however, you'd better believe that I am taking a week off, during which I plan to loll in my hammock for seven days straight, making no decision more important than “Baileys in my morning coffee? Or Kahlua?”

Excited as I am about the new things on the horizon, I’m a little sad still about leaving my current position. I’ve been with the company going on five years, after all, which is a lot longer than I attended most of my schools for, and about fifty-seven thousand times longer than any of my past relationships apart from my one with Sean. I've loved this job, I really have: as well as being a total blast day in and day out, it's allowed me the opportunity to travel to  Berlin, Buenos Aires, Chile, Mexico City, Hawaii, Los Angeles, New York, Dallas, Philadelphia, Chicago, Detroit, Orlando, Austin, Savannah, Las Vegas, Phoenix, Lake Tahoe, Denver, Miami, and the entire state of Montana, as well as twice each to the Bahamas and London. Thanks to this job, I’ve seen Jay-Z in concert on New Year’s Eve, had dinner three feet from Gwyneth Paltrow, and visited the home studio of Paula Deen. I’ve been on the field during a Mets game, on TV during the Today Show, and on my very best behavior on several transatlantic business class flights. It has, simply put, been an incredible ride.

But there are changes coming, which I'm excited about. My new company is based in Austin and, much as I think it might be funny to be all SURPRISE, I'M ALSO MOVING TO AUSTIN!, I'm actually not moving to Austin; instead, I'm going to be working from home in San Francisco, which is actually kind of even more exciting because now I get to turn my spare room into a bitchin' home office, which means I get all the fun of the before-and-after room makeover with none of the hassle of actually, you know, moving. I also get to visit Austin every couple of months, and we all remember how much I liked the food in Austin. Good news for the cash registers of the taco shops in Austin; bad news for any clothes that don't have elastic waistbands.

So that's the deal right now: a bittersweet mix of saying goodbye to the old things and looking forward to the exciting and new. But that's life writ small though, isn't it? We're all doing it, all of the time. We adapt and look forward and move on.