Background Noise

biochemistry vs the fancy giraffe

I’ve worked for almost three months straight without taking any time off, but next week is the beginning of vacation season. We’re not going away anywhere and since I have the week of Christmas off, I have some time to burn before the end of the year. So I’m taking a few days off here and there and for the next few months I will be rarely working a full week. As for what I plan on doing with my time, I know it’s fall and then it will be winter, but this place needs some serious spring cleaning. My home is getting gross and I’m afraid that one day I will lose Joey in a random pile of dust bunnies.

Joey’s school is working out great now that they’ve hired a new teacher. Now instead of crying when we drop him off, and coming home with no information for us about how his day went, leaving us to assume from his physical state that he spent the day rolling around in a pile of dirt, he comes home with art projects and sings songs around the house that we’ve never heard and gets very excited on the mornings when he goes to school.

I can't describe the sheer delight I experience when Joey comes home from school with a new piece of art. He has brought home little paper puppets, a picture of himself pasted into the middle of a paper plate decorated with leaves, and an amusing assortment of simple pictures like a fire engine or a duck, that he has lovingly colored in himself with markers.

The giraffe is my favorite. I can't look at it without laughing because it is so delightfully absurd. I've decided to take it to work and put it up at my desk, because some days I need to be reminded that life is not all that serious. And when people ask me how old my son is I will say that he is ten.

In terms of balance, Eli has been taking a lot of responsibility for Joey lately, and I’ve been focusing on work maybe a little too much. And perhaps I need to dial the intensity down a notch. Or eight. So that’s what’s going on around here. To sum up the last few weeks: I can’t believe I lived so long without owning an iPod, watching a good superhero show can perk me up after a shitty day, and there is no such thing as too much coffee. Or sex. Oh, and on a related note, you haven’t felt mortification until you’ve gone to the drugstore to purchase a pregnancy test with your tired toddler who keeps running away from you and pulling things off the shelves and finally throwing himself down on the floor while the cashier stares at you the whole time in horror, likely making silent judgments in her head and wondering why a person who can’t keep her kid from tossing tins of altoids around in front of her register like confetti would even attempt to bring another child into the world.

When it comes to drugstore chemistry, and two exhausted parents of a toddler, one line is good.

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.

when a big bag of coffee is not a good thing

Today I continued my search for the perfect work bag. I went to every store I could think of that sells bags, and at the very last store, when the realization was starting to set in that my perfect bag does not exist in the world, and I will have to use a diaper bag as my purse at work next week, my gigantic iced coffee was spilling itself inside the bag, and 32 ounces of delicious coffee (along with gobs of cream and equal) was pooling in the bottom and ruining everything inside. I was walking through Macy’s when I felt something drip onto my foot, and when I looked down my flip flops were wet and I was leaving a coffee trail behind me as I walked through the store.

I lost a whole book of checks and now my bag has high tide marks showing exactly how much coffee my bag can hold before it starts to leak.

 

In case you’re wondering why I would put an iced coffee inside my purse, it’s because a cup of iced coffee is my child’s favorite toy. So it is easier to just stick it in my bag when I am shopping than try to wrestle the damn thing away from Joey every time he lunges for it from the front of the shopping cart, trying to pull the straw out so he can fling it at the racks of expensive clothes. This is also why I wear my sunglasses as a headband when I am carrying Joey anywhere because the minute he gets anywhere near them he strips them off my face and sets about dismantling them with sheer toddler force as his only tool.  I have lost too many coffees and I have too many piles of broken sunglasses parts to try to use these things like a normal person when he is around.

You’re probably wondering, “So why don’t you discipline him, then?” And that’s a very good question except that I do discipline him but I think he is misinterpreting my messages. Take for example my CD player that holds three hundred (shiny and colorful) CDs and even has a little blue light inside to make the shininess and colorfulness of the CDs even more attractive. Joey has figured out how to get the door open and pull them out and he has been doing it for so long now that whenever I see something shiny in his hands, I automatically tell him, "NO!" even though sometimes he’s just holding a spoon. Anyway, yesterday I heard him having a quiet conversation with himself in the living room that sounded like this:

"No! No! No! Nooooo! NO!"

I thought he was just playing a game, but then he came wandering into the kitchen with one CD in each hand, and before I could say anything he held one out to me and said, "NO!" and then he held the other one out and said “NO!” And it was the same way he holds out his cup and says, "Milk!" He stood there in front of me, waving the CDs in my face, yelling, "NO NO NO NO!" So either he thinks a CD is called a NO, or he is taking a hard-core, in-your-face approach to mocking my disciplinary methods. Either way, he almost got choked.

For reference, this is an example of the kind of bag I am looking for:

I'd buy it in a second, but I'm not comfortable enough yet in my new employment to justify spending $298 on one bag.  Maybe once my bank account recovers from the recent drought. But when I think about starting my new job with a stained diaper bag, I want to cry. We'll see if good sense prevails or if I just say fuck it and buy it anyway.

totally inappropriate sentiments

I don't trust myself to do the right thing. It started this week when I decided to send my aunt a care package. She's starting her first round of chemo and I wanted to send her something she could use in case the chemo knocks her on her ass for a few days. I'm sending flavored coffee, some bath stuff, and a card. But when I showed Eli the card I selected for her, he looked at me like I was insane and said, "You don't send something like that to someone who has cancer!"

This is what the card says:

(outside) Hang in there...Sometimes life hands you lemons, but then you can make lemonade.

(inside) Of course, sometimes life pulls down your pants, ruins a power sander across your naked butt, then pours lemon juice on your raw, abraded buttocks.

In that case, a cool citrus drink wouldn't really help, but darn it...you've got to hang in there anyway!

I thought it was perfect since if I were a card writer, this is the kind of message I would create. I could call my line Totally Inappropriate Sentiments and there would be cards for every occasion. Like, condolences for the affair your husband is having that you just found out about. Or, sorry your punk kid got kicked out of school again. Maybe a small note of sympathy for the person who just found out the babysitter is stealing. A whole line of cards with just the right heartfelt prose for those things that happen when nothing else you can say or do will make the situation better (washing machine breaks, cat has a virus that makes it puke up phlegmy hairballs on your rug for a week, your mother is on your ass to give her more grandchildren because she is blazingly oblivious about the round of postpartum depression you suffered after putting one little angel on this earth for her to spoil) I could even make a subdivision called The Science Series to express sympathy for a coworker who has an accident on the job. "I heard about the acid spill. Hey, at least it was only 1 Molar HCl and you won't have permanent scars!" "So sorry to hear you lost your wedding ring in the autoclave."

But that's a business plan for another day. I picked out a different card for my aunt and it is entirely appropriate and not funny at all. It has flowers on the front and inside it simply says Please feel better. And I will just have to fill it with colorful prose from my own head to make it more exciting.

But Eli planted the seed of doubt and today I can't find the words. And it's not just my aunt's card, I also found myself in possession of a fantastic postcard about cervical cancer and nothing to write on it. See, I found the postcard in a magazine and I want to send it in to Postsecret.

The card is the perfect canvas, but I'm having trouble coming up with a secret. This is not like me.

And now I know. I have card writer's block.

things that happened today

Took my thirty pound toddler for a long walk in the neighborhood and forgot to anticipate that he may get tired and refuse to walk home. When I realized I had no way to drag him behind me, I had to pick him up and carry him home. Uphill

Went to the pharmacy to pick up a refill on my prescription and let the technician search for my pills for ten whole minutes before realizing I was at the wrong pharmacy. 

Read the Better Homes and Gardens magazine someone left in my car and spent the rest of the day wishing I had a better home. And garden. 

Considered saving time by creating a posting on craigslist featuring my talents and letting the employers come to me. Thought about the tone of the post and wondered briefly about honey and vinegar. And which catches the best flies. 

Joey pulled my container of coffeemate off the counter this morning and covered himself in powdered non-dairy creamer from forehead to waist. I heard the thump and then he turned around and blinked his snowy eyelashes and stared at me like he couldn’t believe what was happening. I blew him off, wiped the white dust from his eyes and around his nostrils and then fell on the floor laughing. And I think Joey is starting to understand that sometimes mama laughs not because something is genuinely funny, but because she has a mean spirit because he stomped away from me and then turned around with his lips rolled into an unhappy frown of betrayal and started crying. 

Gave my child cookies because I hurt his feelings. 

Shopped for a music CD for my teenaged niece and felt old when I had to bring the piece of paper she wrote the name of the band on to the store with me because I’ve never heard of them. 

Went to Target to buy a birthday card and a gift. Bought a card and a gift. These are the things I almost also bought in Target but did not because I don’t have the money for frivolous extras: James Blunt CD, Sesame Street Sings the Alphabet DVD, new blush brush, set of martini glasses, pack of gum. 

Watched an old episode of The Office on Tivo and decided to put Eli’s brush in jello. As a surprise. 

Saw that someone came to my page on a search for “intentional noise torture by neighbors” and thought about writing a blog post about how to kill noisy neighbors without leaving a trace. As a reference. 

Eli walked into the room while I had this site up on my laptop screen and said, “Oh gross, what are you looking at???” Realized that even kind men can be insensitive jerks at times. 

Invited friends over to play monopoly. 

Contemplated how sad my life is that not only am I going to spend my Saturday night playing monopoly, but that I’m so into it I’ve already called dibs on the race car.