so random, can't think of a title
I’ve been walking around pretty self-righteously for a few weeks because I suddenly have a JOB. But in reality, my job so far has been trying to work out how many coffees I can drink to obtain maximum wakefulness without causing the vitreous humor in my eyes to start vibrating in front of my retinas. I have a lot of administrative work to do before I can get into the lab. On Friday I completed a fifty page test on the biostatistics software I will be using to analyze my data, and I have to do this for pretty much every piece of software and every instrument I will use before I can get a password. For some of it I even have to attend classes, as I found out my first day after orientation week when I went to my desk, opened my calendar and saw that I was scheduled to attend a three-day class in the computer lab. The work isn’t difficult and it fills up the time, but I’ve never spent so much time sitting at a desk before. I guess I’m a lab rat at heart and I’m not happy unless I’m chopping up rat spleens or at the very least handling toxic chemicals that could potentially alter my DNA.
Maybe it’s because I took a break for a year, but I was in a conference on my second week about one of the products in our pipeline, and it suddenly struck me that what I do is really fucking weird. In my last job it was routine to come in every Tuesday, get my supplies ready while waiting on the call from shipping that my box of blood had arrived, and then spend the rest of the morning holed up in a back lab washing the cells and getting them ready for incubation. One of my products was derived from human blood cells and the bags came in fresh from the donation site. If you’ve ever given blood, you know what the bags look like. And it became such a part of my routine that it never really occurred to me that it is not normal to spend four hours every Tuesday morning sitting in front of a biohazard cabinet cutting open blood donation bags (of course only after lightly massaging the bags to break up any clots). The only things I cared about on Tuesdays were that I’d remembered to bring in good CDs and that the person assigned to be my helper for the day (usually a temp) wouldn’t fuck things up or be slow and make me late for lunch. It wasn’t until I brought Eli in with me one Sunday when I had to feed and split my cells that I realized exactly how odd my work is. I showed him my incubator and let him look at my cells under the microscope and then I showed him my chemicals. He just looked around the lab and then at me as though finally comprehending exactly what it is I do everyday and how it may explain some of the curiosities that have developed in my behavior over the last few years.
But I won’t get into that because it’s pointing out the
obvious to give examples of the many ways I am strange.
One of the positive benefits of my job is that tonight we’re going out with friends like normal adults, and we didn’t even have to save up! I’m still having a hard time with the daycare situation, especially after signing my very first accident report this week after Joey decided to try out a belly flop on his mat during naptime. He throws himself around in his crib all the time, and he delights in the way his body bounces on the mattress when he hurls himself from one side of the crib to the other, but his mat is not soft like his mattress and instead of bouncing, he slammed his head hard into the floor.
This has all been a huge adjustment, but things are slowly getting better. I’ve had second thoughts almost every day since I started back to work, but then I go to sleep and wake up the next morning and I know that this is the right thing for all of us.
I’ve been having extremely vivid dreams again, but they’re
not necessarily all bad. Like the one I had the other night where I had to take
a shower with my boss. Aside from not being able to look at him without
blushing the next day, it was relatively easy to get over and much less painful
than the nightmares I have where everyone is being killed and there is
bloodshed and mayhem. I broke my sobriety again last weekend when Eli and I
went to the beach for dinner with some friends and we ended up on the strip at
a dance club until the wee hours of morning. Our babysitter thought we were
dead and when we finally rolled in around
There are a some standard things that happen whenever I drink too much. I always need to go dancing, I always flirt too much, and I always need to bring home souvenirs. I also never want to go home. Because of all these things, I'm pretty sure Eli doesn't want to date me anymore.
I need to take a shower now because I promised Joey we would go to the park this afternoon. I don’t know when I will update again, but thanks for sticking around.
