Background Noise

I write sins not tragedies

Today I’m downloading music for my iPod because next week I will be spending a lot of time at my desk. Now that I’ve gotten into a routine at work, I'm realizing how much time I spend at my desk. I spend about one week in the lab doing the normal chemistry stuff, and running my experiment on the instrument. Then the next week I'm at my desk working out the results. Each experiment involves a thirty page report with all my calculations, graphs and integrations, and I’ve found that the only way I can tune out everything around me and concentrate is to pop my headphones into my ears, blast something soothing like Beastie Boys to drown everything else out, and just work. If I don’t do that I start to get fidgety and then I make excuses to get up and go for coffee or get into conversations with my coworkers and before I know it, the day is over and my proteins are just sitting there all raw and uncalculated. If I’m wearing my headphones no one bothers me and I can get into my own world. The only problem is when I take my headphones off, I feel disoriented and twitchy, kind of like I just slammed my head into the floor.

I’m downloading a bunch of Weezer and the new Gnarls Barkley and also a really old Blind Melon CD that I know I have somewhere but cannot find. And maybe a few select tracks from Justin Timberlake and Christina Aguilera. One of the interns at work burned me a CD last week with a bunch of Bright Eyes and Panic! At the Disco on it, and now I’m all LET’S GET THESE TEEN HEARTS BEATING FASTER FASTER!!! and so I am downloading some Panic too.

Jesus fuck I’m too old for this shit but I love it so.

Speaking of too old for…please don’t judge me by what I am about to reveal, let’s just chalk it up to the female version of buying a sports car to counteract the feeling of getting older. There is a boy who makes my coffee every morning, and for months I've just looked at him, admired his body in my head and went on with my day. But today when he touched my hand to press my change into my palm and looked into my eyes it was electric, and I briefly, BRIEFLY, entertained the thought of inviting him over while Eli is at his poker game tonight. It wasn’t even like a whole thought, more like a thought flash, like…have you ever seen the commercial for Britney Spears’ perfume where she sees this guy who is basically walking sex, and suddenly images flash through her mind of what it could lead to? I was tracing his biceps with my tongue and SexyBack was playing in the background and I know that thoughts alone do not make me an unfaithful whore, and really it’s almost completely about this guy’s amazing arms and how I can’t deal with that shit in the morning without having an impure thought or two.

Considering there are four coffee shops within driving distance from my house, I suppose a change wouldn’t be bad. Because right after the bicep lick the thought flash turns into a nuclear explosion, sort of like what would happen if I ever put my tongue on another guy’s arm.

life is good

I see the phrase everywhere. On clothes, on hats, on bumper stickers. Life is good. And every time I see the logo on someone's car or clothes I think that either someone is very naïve or simply trying to convince themselves of something that they wish was so. Because if we’re going to be truthful about it, life cannot be summed up so simply. Of course there are parts of life that are amazingly good, but life overall is difficult and in every life there exists some degree of pain and suffering. I don’t know of a single person whose life is simply good. Maybe if you’re a cartoon.

Don’t worry, I’m not depressed again. The medicine is still working and my life has been going amazingly well lately. But I would never proclaim to the world that life is good because I’ve seen the dark side.

I tape Oprah every day because I don’t want to miss a good guest like Will Smith or Brad Pitt. So that’s how I ended up watching the show about people who tried to kill themselves and survived. The person who made it through the best was the woman suffering from postpartum depression who tried to jump off a bridge. Police officers were able to pull her back over and she’s fine now. But the kid who blew his entire face off with a shotgun and the girl who got her legs ripped off by a train have a few more physical scars.

When I was depressed, I never really thought too much about ending my life, but it did cross my mind. When you’re in pain and desperate for relief but you can’t imagine ever feeling better, it’s just natural. But eventually I got obsessive about an escape plan, not an escape from life overall, but an escape from my life. I figured that if everything was so miserable I could simply change it up and then I would feel better. I realize this kind of thinking is just as sick as suicidal thoughts, because no rational person wakes up and decides that everything in their life is wrong and they need to escape their entire identity and start all over new to feel better.

It still bothers me to hear people talk about postpartum depression. I have some distance now but I remember how it feels. And I can’t help but think how close I came to losing everything. I have no doubt that something chemical happened in my brain after I had Joey, but I don’t really think depression is strictly a hormonal problem. There is such a lack of support for new moms that it surprises me more women don’t flip out after giving birth. You’re suddenly alone with a new baby, everyone is at work and going on with their lives, and you’re not going to work and you’re not sleeping and all of it happens immediately after your body is so violated that all you want to do is just take a little nap because hello! Just had a person ripped from my loins! You pretty much exist to make milk and be puked on and each day feels like a month and you can’t imagine going back to work but diapers and laundry detergent don’t grow on trees and you need a job to afford things like pureed bananas and books on how to get your baby to sleep longer than fifteen minutes at a time. But going back to work means you will be leaving the sole reason for your existence for the past three months with strangers who will charge you an extra mortgage to do something you’ve been doing for free for weeks and weeks, and you know they won’t do it as well as you do, because how could they! How does a person not lose her shit? HOW?

I guess this is my way of saying that I’m not having another baby until society decides to wake up and show a little fucking respect for motherhood. And since I don’t see that ever happening, I will be content with my only child. I’m just glad I got a great one.