Superhero Living for the Everyday Person: Living Three Lives Simultaneously Pt. 1

As my wise friend Good Panda commented on my life: it appears that I am living three lives simultaneously. In case I’ve never mentioned, I straight up do not understand the concept of being bored. I can’t remember many times in my life when I was bored, and when that happened I probably went and did something else. #HighFunctioningAnxiety

I did block out this post in advance but I have a feeling that this is going to take a moment anyway. More tends to happen in three weeks of my life than does for many people in months. My plan is to visit each “life” I lead and then do some meta-analysis and State of The Brain (spoiler: it’s filled with poo and lies) at the end. If there is a part you feel would be relevant or interesting, you can jump to that part. I am not fancy enough to know how to do those hyperlink jump-tos so you’ll have to scroll and look for the bolded sections for now. Or teach me? That could work. Or I very well might just write separate posts since my days are absurdly long and I can only manage so much writing in a night. (Edit: this is what I'm doing, more posts to follow)

Life One: Sara the Geologist

Let me just start off by saying that actually working in the position I have now (woohoo, got employed!) is like…a million times easier and better than pretty much every other job I’ve had in my life. It’s like working, but on easy mode. Even though I’m out in the field this week, I’m only doing what I would consider “actual work” about 3 hours out of the 11. The rest is oversight and safety management.

So that’s one thing: the hours are long. They usually involve doing skilled labor that either involves thinking a lot or management/logistics/planning skills. One of the weirdest things I’ve had to do so far was research pee and poop for a day. Turns out sewers are dangerous on top of being gross? Who knew.

While taking lunch is required (yay, legalities) we have to make up our time and bill 8 hours each day. This means that my days are typically 9 hours long in the office. So far the field days have been “short” in that they’re only 11 or so hours. It’s only Tuesday and I’ve put in 23 hours, including transit to my site. PartnerPenguin has commented that it’s exactly what I wanted, several hours more per week than I wanted it.

One type of mindset shift that has been hard is the concept of “staying billable.” In academia there is a disproportionate burden placed on the shoulders of the professors to bring in grants enough to support the lab running. In environmental consulting people are a lot more…open about talking about money. It feels like the veil around actually living in a capitalist society has finally been pulled back. Instead of this mysterious thing shrouded in shame and misery, it’s a shared burden. There is this concept called utilization-everyone needs to try to make as many of their 40 hours a week billed to a cost code. It is impersonal in some ways, but it also spreads the responsibility of staying in business on everyone, not just one professor. Obviously I am a mere peon and my manager shields us well from pressure Up Above so I have little idea what that’s like. But the firm I joined is quite large so the supply chain is long and the contracts are large. I’m working on several DoD contracts and they’re pretty cushy.

Definitely one thing I can get behind is that I’m finally not the only woman in the whole office who cusses. My manager (loosely, she just makes sure I have work to do, she doesn’t actually supervise me) dropped the f bomb at our “get to know you” lunch. I have never felt such automatic comradery.

Yeah, that’s another thing I’m not used to. I’m not managed. Like, at all. I’m not micromanaged. My “manager” has even commented that it’s OK if I contact her less. Holy shit working in academia/government was a horrendous nightmare compared to how work gets done in industry. I’m assumed to be competent. I’m allowed to ask questions. No one gets judgey or annoyed when I ask too many questions. And then I’m encouraged to ask more questions to clarify. A supervisor on one project called me on Thursday last week because I hadn’t checked in all week on a thing due on Friday. It wasn’t a long conversation, just said what I’d accomplished and what I predicted I could accomplish by the deadline. She said I did the hard part and thanked me. And then we hung up after 15 minutes. Like…that’s it.

Related to that project: Did you know that there is a poisonous newt in Idaho? Along with rattlesnakes, bears and wolves they are the deadliest animals in the state. If I ever go there I might have to make up a newt based nickname.

Another friend who pivoted from academia to industry put it this way:
“I thought I would miss the rush of doing original research, of seeing things that nobody had ever seen before and figuring out puzzles that nobody had ever figured out yet. Part of me does, but I found that part offset very quickly when I realized that my employer thought that what I was doing was inherently and obviously valuable, and paid me without me ever having to justify my work by writing grant proposals. I hope that you find the experience equally rewarding.”

The hardest shift for me has definitely been the shift from Poverty Mindset to Safety Consultant Mindset. I feel like this might be difficult to describe but I will try:

The site I’m working at right now is investigating an emerging contaminant that is currently ubiquitous. It’s the thing that makes Teflon nonstick. It’s in sunscreen. It’s in GoreTex. It’s in anything that’s possibly waterproof. Because of its ubiquity combined with low testing limits, there are bananas absurd preparation methods for this field season. Someone in the field made the uncomfortable observation that we have more of this stuff in our bloodstream than we’re testing for so to some extent we can’t actually be blank slates for sample prep.

What has this meant for your regular, average, everyday Sara? Well, the requirement on clothing is that everything is natural fibers, eg. cotton, wool, linen (ha! Noooope). Ha! 100% cotton does not exist for women with curves, so Target would have me believe. I have since learned that field folk prefer Duluth or Carthartt but fuck spending that much money on clothes before I got my first paycheck. I only had one-ish pair of acceptable pants at the beginning of this whole thing so I bought 3 more pairs of pants, 4 new bras (they are terrible, I hate cheap bras with a burning passion), several new pairs of panties and a set of wool long undergarments. The kicker: I had to wash them 6 times before I went into the field. The worse kicker: my Laundromat is 5 blocks from my house. And I have had pitifully little time to go do this sort of chore so we’ve paid for fluff’n’fold.

Now how does this affect poverty brain?

New clothes are a dreadful necessity that must be avoided at all costs. Buy clothes at thrift stores, discount stores, Walmart, Target, or just wash your current clothes cunningly to disguise the lack of diversity in wardrobe.

Counterpoint:

I absolutely refuse to risk exposure so I need to commit to making sure the breakthrough time on my clothing is as long as possible. This means new clothing. And I need my boobs to have some sort of support too, so I need more than 2 bras total.

This battle in my brain keeps coming up because I have been trained that only the cheapest option in any situation is ever acceptable, no matter the time cost. My “manager” actually told me in an email that my time is more valuable than trying to get a truck on Sunday so I didn’t have to pay for Saturday. I almost cried. I have very very rarely been told by an employer or manager that my time or skills are valuable.

Somewhat to satisfy my poverty brain, but also to satisfy making sure all of my food needs were met adequately: I have become the Hobo Queen of the Quality Inn this week. I brought a rice cooker, a slow cooker and the room has a microwave. This was my dinner tonight:

and this was how I rigged all the dishes I’ve been doing:

I have been preparing all three meals a day in my room. Though…I did discover that the hotel has biscuits and gravy at breakfast. Yum. I think I’m still going to make myself oatmeal. PartnerPenguin has been perfecting the art of slow cooker oatmeal. Here’s his/our recipe:

3/4c (or 1/2c) steel cut oats

3/4c (or 1/2c) milk

3/4c (or 1/2c) water

Raisins

Strawberries

Cinnamon

Poppy or flax seeds

Put all ingredients in a Pyrex bowl thing. Place in a slow cooker with water enough to meet the sides of the Pyrex but not overflow it. Cook on high for 6-8 hrs. It creates enough of a double-boiler to cook the oatmeal well but keeps the great texture of the steel cut so eating isn’t too tedious.

So yeah. That for breakfast, sliced meats and cheese with pickles, veg and fruit for lunch and meat of some sort for dinner. I think I’m going to expand my meatsies prep and go full 50’s housewife and get into microwave cooking. We’ll see.

Anyway. All this prep has been an absurd amount of time commitment.

The final thing that’s difficult about my new job is how normal everyone is. People have functional families. They certainly encounter challenges but from what I’ve heard they are all very tame. I actually thought such a thing was fiction but multiple people have talked about events transpiring that I imagine can only happen with functional families. They certainly encounter challenges but from what I’ve heard they are all very tame. I caught myself mid-story today because I realized I was so poor when I lived in a house with a gas leak for a month I kept my head down and was just thankful for having a roof over my head instead of being concerned about dying from the accumulated natural gas in my bedroom. They just don’t seem to have stories like that. And I don’t know yet how to temper my life to seem more normal than it has been. More on this topic later.

To some extent it is nice that a lot of people are much more normal than me-in regard to anxiety at least-because they set the standard for what kinds of actions and levels of chill should be approached in a given situation. But it’s pretty mind-boggling. Though in some cases I am grateful to listening to my AnxietyBrain: it has prevented me from being phone-less for a week.

Overall I am loving the job and loving the work. I get to do weird research. I get to read policy documentation. I get to do Quality Checks and tell people where they fucked up, but like…they asked me to point it out and also I’m nice about it? I get to be outside and I got a <safety mullet> for my hat. Thanks to this job I have rad long underwear that I’ve avoided buying for my whole life.

Ok. I think I need to shower and make my food for tomorrow, despite that I definitely have more to say. I think I’ll make this LiveJournal-esque and say that I’ll come back tomorrow and talk about my other “lives.”

P.S. Here are some photos from the field: