Work? Is that really expected of me?

I have one of those mind-numbing jobs. It's not what I set out to do with my life. I set out to become a great mind in the academic world of Comparative Literature. Which means I know lots of stuff that has very little practical value. YAY for me!

I ended up here because I happen to love the Husband. I've never been one of those Rose Colored Glasses kind of girls...you know who you are. You love the dating, the drama, the oooh it's soooo romantic. But it's not. The reality of a monogamous relationship is that it's a heaping serving of compromise, a side of sacrifice, and if you're lucky you get the ice cubes of romance in your slightly flat soda of domesticity.

The Husband worked crappy hospital jobs to put me through grad school. He cleaned up blood and vomit and poop. Adult poop. Trust me, he knows that adult poop is a whole lot grosser than baby poop. Now it's my turn. I work a lame administrative job to put him through grad school. You want the truth? I don't mind. Sure, I kvetch about being the copy girl. But I don't have to clean up any body's bodily fluids or excretions. And I have long stretches of time when the professors have their groove and don't need me. I have long droughts of work. You know. When I can read blogs all day long. And also wikipedia. And play with my ipod.

And then something strange and unforeseen happens. All of a sudden they all need me to do stuff for them. Lots of stuff. Stuff called work. It's pesky and annoying and requires me to use parts of my brain that have lain dormant for many, many seasons. The social parts of my brain that require me to make reservations and set up meetings and create working-dinners with multiple professors who have stuff to talk about.

The problem with this drought or flood scenario is that in the drought periods I forget how to work efficiently. So much so that this morning I spent a good fifteen minutes just staring at the piles that had strangely materialized on my previously clean desk. Don't worry. I'm so smaht, I figured it out all by myself.

I know people who wonder what in the name of Batman I'm doing, working this job that I'm over-educated and over-qualified for. I'll tell you. It's not a secret. It's love.

It's such a small word to describe the effect it has on a whole life.