Wednesday, April 9, 2014

It's the snot on the dress pants

Nobody warns you how much more you need to wash your professional clothes.
Sure, anybody conscious has heard stories about babies and their abilities to spew bodily fluids with great gusto and at odd angles. And obviously little kids and Oklahoma red dirt combine for some fantastic stains.  But nobody tells you that, by the time your kids are running around and keeping most fluids where they belong, you will still be doing extra laundry (or never ever wearing your actual professional clothes) because your kids hug you and want to be held, you won't even notice how much you've been snotted upon, and dried mucus shows up shockingly well on black pants.

I've spent a great deal of time recently noting where my time goes and thinking about all the little things that nobody knows are part of my jobs (as teacher, scientist, mother, and me).  I've enumerated many of them in blog posts in my head, from the obvious but overlooked (the paperwork) to the somewhat surprising (I recently spent an hour helping a student, neither in my class or my department, figure out what to wear for a trip to the National Academy of Sciences).  At the moment, however, this has mostly just started to make me wonder about all of the things that everyone else does that would surprise me.

Where does your time go that "wasn't exactly in the job description"?

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