This was my fortune at dinner tonight. I like it of course, not least because I've been spending quite a bit of time on career issues lately. Then, I got home, went to the computer, and found this from Long Story Short Pier via Dorothea. Dorothea picked out the kernel, which I'll reproduce here:

That sort of domestic obliviousness is something men (as yet) find a lot easier to get away with than women. Where’s the toilet cleaner? What did you do with the light bulbs? Do I put the liquid bleach in before or after the rinse cycle? I couldn’t find the baking powder—I thought baking soda would work just as well. Don’t you like your shirts folded that way? —And this has nothing to do with hunting giraffes on the veldt and what that did to our brains, either, and it has everything to do with who does what chores when, growing up, and who’s expected to keep things clean and fill the glasses, and truth be told there’s more than a little of that trick where you break a couple of plates and they never ask you to wash dishes again in there, too. And the extent to which men (broadly) are allowed to get away with this and women (broadly) are expected to pick up the slack is the extent to which men will (broadly) have an edge in fields that call for such extended grinds of rarified, abstract thought, best left uninterrupted by more mundane concerns such as paying the electric bill on time, and women will (broadly) be more inclined to seek out fields that are more, or are at least perceived as being more connected with day-to-day life.

I've been thinking about this a lot lately, wondering how much more women would have been able to get done if not for the cleaning and the cooking and other piddling household chores. Sometimes simple, repetitive work leads to good thinking time for me, and sometimes it doesn't. But the simple fact of the matter is that time spend on this sort of stuff is time not spent reading or writing. It's also a mind-set: there's a certain psychic space that mundanities are handled in, and an entirely different one that Big Thoughts happen in, and for me the twain never do meet.

All of this makes me sound like an oppressed wife. First off, I'm not a wife. And secondly, the distribution of labor is fairly even in my house. The thing is that I'm an academic, and Mister Boyfriend is an academic, and when the end of the semester rolls around ain't nothing getting done that doesn't have to do with school.

Sometimes we joke that we need a toga boy. Someone should do something around here, dammit. What I want to know is, how does one successfully combine academia and domesticity? AKMA seems to have figured it out, what with cooking pizzas and washing dishes with his progeny and then whipping out articles on hermeneutics before preaching and teaching class. He also claims to sleep. Lauren makes it work too, but she never claims to have slept at all. Is there a trick to all this, people? Or should I just accept the fact that my life will consist of take-out pizza and dirty bathtubs?