It was never my intention to be deliberately cagey; I just underestimated how much people would care.
A couple of weeks ago, after being a shiftless unemployed student (and being out of a job for the longest time in my life since I was 10 years old) for four years, and after job hunting for about three months, I got a job. The job was with the EMS service, doing dispatch in the county where I live, and I was ambivalent about it. The money was good, the hours were rough and weird and inconsistent, and I needed to do it for a while to see if I was going to be any good at it or get anything out of it.
As it turns out, I am ill-suited for the position and I have just emailed my resignation this day. This was why I didn't really want to go into with the whole world - because I wasn't sure if I was going to keep doing it anyway.
It was a very strange experience which will fade with time - it started with interviews and more interviews and many, many documents to sign, and then me being drug-tested and told that I have weird fingerprints followed by 10 hour stretches of sitting at a desk and listening to 911 calls, typing in codes and echoing radio traffic, which was as far as I got. What I discovered is that many of the people who work in the dispatch center feel "called" to it, and get something emotional out of it. Ultimately, I was never going to be one of those people, so it seemed like it was time to quit wasting everyone else's time, so I did. Plus, there was this thing of never knowing how things turned out for the diabetic, the parking lot heart attack, the flipped over Subaru, or the unresponsive toddler. I was supposed to be able to capture satisfaction from being a link in the chain, but I couldn't do it.
This is okay. I start my job with the downtown library tomorrow, and I've got some consulting work, too. I have a couple of other applications out there, so we'll see what happens next, but in the meantime, mystery solved.