Background Noise

Dylan McKay

I have a perfectly good reason for not updating my journal for so long. The Soap channel airs two hours of 90210 reruns every night.

Eli and Joey just went out to Lowes, and I’m up here in my office trying to find ways to put off what I should be doing right now. I should be looking for a job, but I’m still in denial that it could come to this. I love my job. I know love is a strong word, but I really like what I do most of the time. Sure I have days when it takes everything I have to not choke my coworkers, but I guess that’s why they call it work.

I have a diverse work background and I’ve done my share of undesirable things for money, so it makes me appreciate how good I have it where I am. Mostly I appreciate the culture of personal respect. I’ve worked in places where the code of ethics is just a magical fairy tale you can read about in the HR manual but that no one really takes seriously. Of course it is difficult sometimes for me to function in an environment where I can’t tell someone they’re an asshole to their face without receiving disciplinary action, but there also is a distinct lack of tantrum throwing from others and I like that.

But my company is having problems, and I could be out of work soon. I knew it was bad in the meetings about layoffs when they told us that they’d be looking for volunteers. I knew it was horrible when my teammate offered himself up and his resignation was accepted. For some reason I thought my department would be spared. I’m sure the same way everyone thinks that their job is most important.

Anyway, pharma as an industry is going through a rough time right now so I'm going to expand my search to also include some less obvious career paths. I recently discovered that the FBI employs not only secret agents, but scientists too. And I suppose it wouldn't kill me to tutor kids or analyze soil or do any of the other weird jobs a person with my skill set is qualified to do.Though if I could just figure out a way to isolate and manufacture something useful to humans from squirrel blood or carcasses, I could set up my own lab right here at home and I wouldn't feel bad about killing off the squirrel community for violating my fucking birdfeeders every moment of the day, because it wouldn't be about the rage any more. It would be for science and the good of humanity.

So I have to look for something else, and I can’t believe I’m on Bostonworks again. I thought we were done for good this time.

countdown to doomsday

I am impulsive and I have a habit of doing things without completely thinking them through. The latest example is the course I found on the internet that directly relates to the work I’m doing and could possibly answer some questions and solve some problems I’m having with my experiments at work. I casually mention it to my boss, who agrees that it is definitely something I should attend, and suddenly the ball is rolling. The admin starts setting things up. She gets me registered for the course, she books my rental car, she arranges my expense account and books the hotel. And then she calls me at my desk on Wednesday to let me know she got a fantastic deal on the flight and will I be needing the service to get to the airport? And that’s when it finally dawns on me. The class is in Chicago. And I have to fly on a plane to get there. By myself.

I’m terrified of flying, even though I still do it when I have to. I just grit my teeth and let my body cycle through its ridiculous anxiety routine through the whole flight, to include heart racing, palm sweating and periodic impulses to stand up and start screaming. And then when I arrive at my destination, I'm so fucked up I need many drinks and a big nap to get my shit back together.   

And this is when I fly with someone. I can’t imagine what will happen when I try it alone. Which of course I will because I refuse to let anyone at work know that I’m afraid of flying. This would be a career ender since I’m pretty sure science happens all around the world and isn’t isolated solely to the Boston Metro area.

I have some anxiety pills left over from my post-partum days and with them I hope I can medicate myself to a beautiful state of calm enough to fly yet still conscious without going overboard and having to be scraped off the floor of the plane when we land.

And while I’m on the topic of doing things that I know will lead to intense psychological pain, Eli and I were watching a soothing documentary before bed the other night called Countdown to Doomsday. And one of the doomsday scenarios was about robots becoming intelligent enough to take over our planet. “The luckiest of us might end up in zoos, while the vast majority of humans would likely become pets.”

Jaeme: I want to be in a zoo!

Eli: I want to be a pet!

J: A pet? Why?

E: Because I could just lie around on the floor and sleep…

J: ????

E: And… have robots that love me….and give me treats…

I don’t think Eli wants to be a robot pet as much as he would really just like to be a cat. He doesn’t realize that the robots would not let him lie around in the sun all day eating fancy feast. They would enslave him and make him do horrible things that he hates. Like cook. Or clean things.

 

talking about my uterus at work. again

I need you Dear Diary, because I’m doing it again. One of the best uses for this journal is that it is a place where I can dump all the idiotic shit that rattles around inside my head constantly without finding myself one bright Monday morning sitting in a meeting about capillary electrophoresis and slipping into a conversation with my boss that ends up with me describing what a contraction feels like. To my MALE boss. We were talking about donuts and of course that made me remember how I would eat a donut every day for lunch when I was pregnant and how for the next hour it would feel like Joey was going to rip out of my stomach straight through my belly button, only to find out when I gave birth that I was not actually hosting an alien fetus, but instead having perfectly normal Braxton hicks contractions.

I share those things with you.

Everything is fine with me. Everything is the same since I last wrote except that I am no longer the new girl at work, and Joey is talking in full sentences like a real person.

So it’s hard to start working in a new place, especially if the environment is ultra-conservative like the one I work in. It took months but I am finally at a point where I can work independently once again and schedule my own time and workload without everyone freaking out and hoping I’m not some kind of loose cannon who could bring the entire corporation crashing to its knees. I know how it works. Everyone wonders what the hell the new girl is doing with all her filthy new ideas and experiments. What if she uses one of them and ruins everything!!! She’s new! She doesn’t know how we do things! What will the FDA think????

A lot of my time at work is spent pondering the question, WWTFDAD (What Would The FDA Do). When I scribble a comment in my lab notebook, I try to imagine how an auditor would interpret my message and I end up clarifying so much that I run out of room for all my explaining. I actually had to attach a formal memo to a data sheet about a simple instrument calibration when my comments went too long and I ran out of space. When I have to recalculate an area because I decided to move my baseline slightly to the left, I write an entire paragraph into the audit trail in my computer explaining why. My motto has become No Red Flags, and so I am always thinking: WWTFDAD?

I have a recurring nightmare that I am not following correct protocol for doing normal things that I don’t even do at work like taking a shower or eating dinner or setting my alarm, and I get busted in an audit and they take away all my patents. It’s absurd but then sometimes so is my job.

At least I don’t have to worry about Joey ever having work-related stress. At school today they traced an outline of each of the children’s bodies onto a huge piece of art paper and hung it on the wall. And at the top of each child’s body outline they listed the occupation that the child hopes to someday pursue. One kid wants to be a truck driver. Another kid wants to be a mailman. One of the little freaks wants to grow up to be a princess. But they’re two and three years old, so it all makes perfect sense. So when I look to my child’s outline to see which occupation he thinks would make a great career, I half expect to see something like garbage man or guy who drives a plow. Imagine my surprise when I look at the words above my child’s outline and it says: “The letter O”.

I guess from watching Eli and I run around here high on work stress all week long, we've ruined engineering and science for him. I guess I'd want to grow up to be a vowel too.

 

resisting mr. mom

My laptop is dead and I’ve decided that no matter how tempting, I will not use my work computer for this. I work in a highly regulated environment where everything is tapped in the interest of preserving company confidentiality, so before I do anything questionable I always run it through my head and try to imagine myself explaining it to a conference room full of people. Which is why I still visit certain blogs and I also read celebrity news at work--a girl’s gotta live! And I have no problem defending my right to E! celebrity news in the workplace. But updating my journal at work is not something I ever want to explain to anyone because it is too weird.

Anyway, work has been great. I went to my first teambuilder this week, and imagine my surprise when I realized that the word “teambuilder” meant I had to take a whole day off work and go to a baseball game, drink beer and then go to lunch at a bar with more beer. As I’ve probably mentioned before, I hate baseball. But I love beer and being outside in the sun and also bars and free food. So it was a very nice field trip. And much better than running around an obstacle course, or sitting in a room all day sharing feelings with my coworkers, which is what I always thought teambuilding was about. 

Yeah work is going really well, but adjusting to the new schedule around here has been difficult for all of us. Joey hates daycare, Eli hates that he has to take more responsibility for things around here because I am working, and I’m just trying to figure out how to do this without everything falling apart. In our household I have always had the least important job. And by that I mean that my job is usually the one that pays least, sucks most and is not essential to our financial security. But now that has changed and I am less willing to take everything else on by myself so that I can feel better about not contributing as much financially. So on Friday morning, after Joey had been up all night screaming his face off because he has a cold, Eli and I had it out about who would stay home with him. Eli was all set to go to work and I guess he just assumed that I would do like I always do and bend myself into a pretzel trying to work everything out. But I had a meeting and a training class and a project to finish, and also I have been at my job for only three weeks. We talked about this a lot when I was looking for a job, how things would be different and we’d both have to make some sacrifices. But as soon as the first conflict came up we’re suddenly having a fight straight out of the 50s.

I thought we’d worked it out earlier in the week when Eli announced one night before bed that he had an early dentist appointment and that I would have to take Joey to daycare in the morning. We have an agreement that he drops off and I pick up, and I’ve set up my schedule at work to accommodate that. So Eli had a dentist appointment that would totally fuck up the schedule and instead of picking up the phone and rescheduling it, he decided that I would just rearrange everything to make it work. I felt my blood start to rev up and instead of saying something mean I just said, “No.” This pissed Eli off and we got into a heated fight about why I am such a bitch and why he is such an insensitive fuck. It went on for hours, but it finally came down to the fact that Joey only goes to daycare two days each week, Eli’s dentist has him on some kind of year-long dental schedule that requires he go there like once a month for continued work, and how fucking hard is it to just pick up the damn phone and reschedule for a day that will not fuck up everyone else’s life???

“Why didn’t you just say that?” “Because you should KNOW THAT ALREADY.”

It was awful and I went to work the next day feeling all kinds of ugly things about my marriage. But when I got home that night I walked into a spotless house, there were a dozen roses in a vase on the table and there was beer chicken and corn on the cob cooking away on the grill for dinner. And if I continue on the path I am currently on, and things work out, I would be so happy to take over financial responsibility for the family and let Eli stay home and be my househusband. Because there is nothing better than coming home to a clean house and a nice dinner that I didn’t cook. I think a lot less women would be on antidepressants if we all had our own househusband to look after things while we’re out in the world. It’s our turn, man.

new world

The only place I’ve ever worked where I had to go through such an intensive orientation and training program was Disney World, many many years ago. But unlike Disney World, I was not required to know the names of the seven dwarves at the end of it all.

I had a nightmare on Thursday night, after a trying day which involved maps I couldn’t read and getting lost on my way back from lunch while trying to find my office. I dreamed that I was starting school again and I kept getting lost trying to find my classes. I can’t believe where I work. There is a store down the hall from my office. There is a post office, a bank, three cafeterias and a gym. Each day I have to consult my map to find the different rooms and buildings I am supposed to be in for my next training class.  I lose my car every day and I spend at least ten minutes wandering around trying to find it at the end of the day.

In my orientation class there were lots of people from different departments all over the company. Luckily, in my group there was another scientist who will be working in my department so I didn’t feel so alone. He is from China and there is the obvious language barrier, as I discovered when I asked him if he knew where I could find a shredder close to our office. He started laughing and kept asking me to say it again. Shredder? Shredder? Ha ha, what is this thing you are talking about? He probably thought I was talking about something kinky because when I asked him to tell me about his first impression of American culture, he told me SEX. “When I think of America I think of SEX because you are very free here.” He was probably very disappointed that orientation was not a week long orgy.

Anyway, Joey is having a hard time with daycare, but mostly just in the morning when Eli drops him off. Eli is very clever to take charge of dropoff and leave me out of it. He knows that at the first sign of distress I would scoop the child into my arms, bring him back home with me and promptly resign from my job. And then I would spend the rest of my life watching Sesame Street and building block castles while ignoring phone calls from the bill collectors. Sort of like how I’ve spent the whole summer up to this point.

I had a hard time on Monday when I looked at the clock and saw that it was Sesame Street time. And then at lunch when I only had to worry about myself and I didn’t even know what Joey was eating. And then again at nap time when I would normally be settling Joey into his crib and kissing him on the head before settling down in my own bed down the hall to read for a while.

My new life is strange and exciting and scary and exhilarating all at the same time. But I’ve never felt more that this is the right thing, that this is exactly what I am supposed to be doing at this point in my life. And nothing beats walking in at the end of the day and seeing Joey’s eyes light up as he drops whatever he’s doing and rushes at me screaming, “MAMAAAA!!!!”

It makes me feel like a hero.

petty crime

Joey broke two of my calculators this week because I keep forgetting how tall he is and leaving them close to the edge of the table. I’ve been doing a lot of calculating because I’m setting up a grand budgeting control sheet for our household. I’m so giddy about the fact that we will finally have money left over after the bills that I am taking a shot at trying to manage it even though my cats could probably do a better job of handling the finances around here. But Eli and I are trying to be more responsible, and so he is taking on the exciting task of learning about mutual funds and I am making a budget.

I’m not finished with my project yet so it’s a lucky thing that I still have two calculators in the house that work. And that is because I am a thief.

I took a small collection of stuff with me when I left the soul-sucking job that fucked me over after I gave them three whole years of dedicated service. Okay, I wasn’t exactly dedicated, but I went there every day. Well, most days, except when I was burning sick time. Still. Somehow I can rationalize it--like the establishment owes me calculators.

But because I am a professional, I did not do anything disastrous before I left. I did not free the rats and frogs, I did not kill the cells, I did not lick all the culture plates. And even though it was especially tempting, I did not delete the database I made that took me one whole year to compile that should have earned me a promotion and instead earned me a spot in my department forever because the thinking in a poorly managed company is such: When someone shows initiative you must never promote! You keep them for yourself because they make you look good. 

I did not delete the database. Though I did password protect it before I hit the road.

Anyway, when you’ve worked at a place for three years, you accumulate a lot of stuff. And you start to form attachments. That doesn’t explain why I took four calculators with me when I walked out for the last time. But it does explain why I have a nice selection of pipettors on a rack next to my paints in the basement. And some pH strips. And a gel staining tray and strainer set. I was planning to work it all into an acrylic-based rage piece entitled BIOTECH CAN SUCK MY ASS. But then my rage cooled and I decided the world doesn’t need more stupid art. Though if you ever come across an abstract piece that looks like it was created by spraying the canvas with human blood and bits of bone, and there are also pH indicator strips embedded in the paint, it is probably mine.

 

Joey's World

I woke up this morning feeling like maybe yesterday was just a really great dream. But judging by the way I slept I figured it was real. I haven’t woken up feeling this rested since the doctor put me on tranquilizers and I spent three days in my bed, unable to pry my drugged head from the pillow. But when I was out in the front yard this morning (having coffee with my neighbor while our children played on the lawn in their diapers AND NOTHING ELSE—white trashin’ it like it’s 1972 and children can go around barefoot and free! I fully expect one of the neighbors to mention my practically naked child outside playing, in some context or another, in the next few days) the FedEx truck arrived with a package for me. And it was confirmed.

So I was leisurely reading through the offer packet this morning, and some thoughts I had were at first hmm, which medical program should I pick? And then wow, I never knew there were so many ways a person could get fired AND be brought up on criminal charges at the same time. And finally my mind shifted to a detail infinitely more important than proper medical coverage and legally binding confidentiality agreements. The one detail that I’d overlooked in this whole thing. I don’t own a bag good enough for my new fancy job!

I have an assortment of handbags and cute purses in all different colors and sizes, and if I need to carry something bigger I have my favorite Nike backpack (school bus yellow) and my Patagonia messenger bag (fluorescent green). And lately I’ve been using the most perfect bag in all creation, the Kate Spade diaper bag that Eli got me for Mother’s day that doesn’t look like a diaper bag at all except for the insulated pouches and changing pad inside. You’d think with my collection I’d have it covered, right? Wrong. I need a business bag. Not a briefcase, but something that looks nice and will hold all my work stuff and a laptop. So I’ve decided I can delay the Grand Week of Big Fun I have planned for Joey by one afternoon. Anyway, bag shopping is about him too since he needs an insulated lunch box for school, and I’m thinking something…Elmo. Or Builder Bob. Dark, masculine colors. With washable material. Something fashionable, yet boyish. (GWoF is a concept I came up with yesterday after receiving the job offer and realizing that I’ve been spending a lot of time frantically worrying and obsessively waiting for phone calls and sitting in front of my online banking program trying to figure out how to play around with the bills creatively enough so that no one will realize that we’re not paying them, and in general just not being very much fun. Joey will probably forget he even has a mama after I’m back at work for a few days. So I’m planning on counteracting this unavoidable side-effect of employment by making next week the best week of his life. Though I suppose it could backfire and make him miss me even more once I’m not around all the time)

One thing I’ve noticed over the last couple of days is that it is impossible to get a big head or feel like some kind of fancypants with Joey around to remind me that I am, at the core of my being, first before anything else, from now until I die, his mother. And as such I will be subject to his daily abuse and I will just put up with it because this is Joey’s World and in Joey’s World you cannot write someone up for harassment or fire them for insubordination. And this is what happens when I forget that.

 

 
Check it. That's where I got bit on the leg. Hard. Broke the skin and everything and left a huge ugly bruise (about the size of a silver dollar) that looks like what would happen to your skin after a bite involving a serpent and necrotic venom. I’ve shown my mark to a lot of people and it is so base in its ugliness that every single person immediately asked me what I did to Joey after he attacked me. As though I’d be like, Yeah, so I fucking kicked his ass and told him: son, you best be keepin those baby teeth off my AUTHORITAY! What the fuck do you think I did? I was startled and pulled my leg away in shock, then after inspecting the damage, scooped the child up, walked upstairs with his body hanging over my forearm like a sack of potatoes, and without a word deposited him into his crib where he would be safe. I mean, he had to be sleepy, right? Because what kind of person would do something so deranged to another person, especially when that other person gave you fucking LIFE, unless they were literally de-fucking-lirious with exhaustion. Right?

Joey knew I was angry by the way I picked him up and by the lack of pre-naptime sweet talk and singing I usually indulge him in. I was afraid that if I opened my mouth, I wouldn’t even be able to speak English, as my rage would overwhelm my vocabulary and leave me sputtering the devil’s latin.

In case you’re wondering, I’ve forgiven him and unless I have to go to the hospital to be treated for a bacterial infection (he broke the skin with his razor sharp baby teeth, providing a direct passage into my bloodstream for anything gross that may be living in his mouth) we will put the whole thing behind us and move on. But this serves as a reminder that like the human mouth, Joey’s World can be a dark and dangerous place. And just because something is small and cute doesn't mean it can't fuck your shit up. I live with a Gremlin.

working girl... but, not that kind

I’ve written a little bit about my search for employment over the past month, and despite the fact that I have around fifty resumes floating around out there, I've had my heart set on one particular job that I applied for back in May. The whole thing has been a tedious saga involving pre-interviews, written interviews, actual in-person interviews, a background check, reference check, one scary moment of not getting the job, but then being considered for the same job again a few days later but with slightly different hours, and so much waiting and waiting and waiting.

Last night I began to accept the bitter fact that it might not happen. It just wasn't meant to be with this company ... fuck that place, man, MOVE ON!

So of course it would only make sense that today I would receive the call I’ve been waiting on for weeks. It’ll be officially official when I receive my offer package tomorrow, but I got the job.

I cannot believe I will have a salary that I could support myself and my family on if I had to, and I don’t have to sacrifice any body parts to do it. I never thought this would be a possibility living in New England (with a mortgage). Almost as important, I will have a title that does not dance around what I do with clever corporate-speak words like analyst and associate. I know now that companies do this not because of what you’re expected to do, but to avoid paying people a proper salary. I am a scientist, and I will finally be paid as one.

And for the first time in my life I can look at salary.com without losing my shit because I don’t match up.

I feel high. But Im not. I still have to take a drug test.

on the DL

I can’t believe how much I’ve been updating lately. I think it’s true that any activity leads to more of that activity. It’s like a theory I have about sex where if you abstain for a while it becomes less important. But the minute you go for it again you can’t get enough and you feel compelled to do it all the time. Look at me talking about sex and writing habits like they’re a universal condition instead of my own private problem.

Anyway, I’ve been working a lot lately, and I finally seem to be finding a groove. Which of course means that it will be disrupted because that’s what happens when I get comfortable.

Eli took Joey to the park yesterday afternoon so I could work for a couple of hours before our company came over in the evening. It was a relief to have the house to myself, and I celebrated by turning the stereo up loud and cranking out a bunch of articles. If you’re wondering what the articles are about or where you can read them, I’m sorry to say that this is a ghostwriting gig and I’ve signed a contract that lets the buyer remove my name and edit the articles as they see fit. I know there are writers out there who think that this is not a legitimate writing job, but rather a skanky, low-rate, rent-a-writer gig that gives a bad name to the art of writing. Fortunately, I don’t look at content jobs like that. Maybe I’m just too greedy. I see it as money in the bank and if the person is paying me well enough, they can remove every noun from the article if they like and I won’t complain one tiny bit about my art being sacrificed (real writers can be terribly dramatic).

Things like this make me glad I’m not a real writer.

Anyway, aside from the gritty pseudo-writing jobs I’m doing to help pay the bills (oh, who am I kidding, I’m saving for an iPod), I’ve also been submitting articles to various web-based publications. I’ve had several things accepted and published but the only problem with that is I write my journal under a pseudonym (I hope this isn’t a surprise to anyone) so it makes it hard to advertise my stuff here.

I know I shouldn’t be ashamed of my blog, and I’m not. I don’t write too much here that anyone who knows me in life would be surprised about. The thing that keeps me on the down low is that I can’t stand to think of being judged professionally by what I write here. Much like how I wouldn’t go into an interview casually as though I’m sitting down for a chat with a friend, I wouldn’t want my future possible employer knowing everything about my personal life and the things that bounce around in my head, and use that to make a judgment about my science. This would probably be different if I worked in a creative field, but I don’t. I work in a field where having a personality is secondary to having good analytical skills and being smart.

And maybe that’s just it. Maybe smart people don’t do this kind of thing.
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Beyond the Gecko: Buddy on Demand.

Buddy on Demand is a cool new inflatable car companion for drivers. This new feature comes from the women’s car insurance company, Shielas’ Wheels. No matter what state you’re in, you can get a quick auto insurance quote
conveniently, without having to go to several different sites to comparison shop.

fucking high

Someone was cool enough to send me the James Blunt CD after I talked about it in a previous entry. Thank you so much kind person!

I had no idea flying high was really fucking high and that's the problem with listening to music on the radio. It’s like when I first listened to that Radiohead song on CD and learned that the girl Creep is talking about is not so very special, she is so fucking special. And it makes more sense. Censorship ruins everything.

I ended up posting an ad on craigslist whoring myself out and as of 24 hours later I have received exactly ZERO responses. Excellent. And because of how these things always go, Eli, who is gainfully employed and is contacted at least once a month with offers of employment from people who want to steal him away from his current business, just got a sweet gig teaching a college class this fall. It’s a two hour lecture with a two hour lab, and he will be able to do it in addition to his regular job. And I’m happy for him of course, but it’s like he’s some kind of fucking money magnet. He doesn’t even try. While I sit here trying to figure out how to sell my body parts for cash and hating myself. I never wanted a sugar daddy, and even if Eli was pulling down a seven figure salary, I would still want something of my own.

But I have weird luck. Like yesterday, when I woke up and decided I could either work on the employment thing or give it a rest for a bit and go to the beach for a nice relaxing day in the surf. Since it was almost 100 degrees here in the city, and I was sweating my head off even before 9am, I decided to go to the beach. And lo, while I was there I got a phone call from the original company who didn’t give me the job I wanted, telling me that there is another opening for the job I wanted, and they want me to have it! Me! It makes me feel a little silly for all the self-loathing I did last week. I did indeed rock the interview after all.

So the beach. It was absolutely divine and the first time in a week where I was outside and not sweating at all. I lost at least a gallon of sweat at a cookout on Sunday from chasing Joey around in the ridiculous heat all afternoon. The kid exhausts me. But at the beach he’s in his element. He plays in the sand and swims and doesn’t run away like he does everywhere else in public, and the only bad habit he has is that he likes to grab my sunglasses off my face, pull my bathing suit down and visit with people who are sitting near us on the beach. Oh yeah, and he bit my toe once while we were swimming.

Joey makes friends everywhere he goes because he is bold and unafraid. He made friends with an old lady under an umbrella sitting near us who gave him cookies and talked to him for a long time. Then he made friends with another lady who gave him sunblock for his scalp and his own bottle of cold water to drink.

He also made friends with a little girl who belonged to a couple that Eli and I both agreed are the most beautiful couple we have ever seen. Eli and I sat there in our chairs at the edge of the water, staring at these people who cannot possibly be human, while our children played in the sand at our feet. As I stared at them, and then down at myself, I wondered how it is possible that they could look so collected and beautiful while spending a day with a toddler at the beach. I took my sunglasses off and stared at myself in the reflection to see if I was also rockin the beach with my own beauty, and I was sad to discover I was not. My hair was a mess of dreds collected around my head and reaching for the sun like some kind of gravity-defying, ocean-salt-based medusa wig. My skin and bathing suit were covered in a crust of sand, the result of being the human canvas for the sand-flinging toddler at my feet. And I looked more like something that got washed up on the beach than something that stepped out of the white sands in a glossy mag.

When I got home and took off my bathing suit, I realized that sitting prettily on the beach all day on a blanket with a book and my suntan lotion is very different from spending the day swimming, letting the waves drag me up to shore and dragging around in the shallow water with a toddler. I looked like I was wearing a sand bikini on my skin and when I brushed my hair a delicate sprinkling of sand gathered below me on the floor.

I had to wash my hair three times to get the sand out, and my highlights are looking a little brassy from all the sun and salt, but I don’t care because it was a wonderful day. And when I got home to the news that I may be working again very soon, my decision to ditch responsibility and hit the beach made even more sense. In a few weeks things like the sun and swimming and having a tan will all just be fond memories, as I begin spending my days indoors and taking on the sallow appearance of a lab drudge once again.

But at least I’ll have more cash.