Another problem with my new work schedule is that it allows no time for dinner: I come into the office around 1:30 to prep, work straight from 3:30 to 9:30 with only five-minute breaks between classes, then head on home. So-- when to eat? I'm old enough to know the quirks of my own digestive system: it's usually six hours after I eat a meal that I experience the need to visit ol' Uncle John. This means that eating at noon-- before I leave for work, will entail a poop run sometime during my work hours. The office is too cozy for that: kids use the lone bathroom all the time, and no adult staffer would ever drop a load in there, for fear of being branded a turdmeister. So when I wake up in the late morning, I don't even think about eating; dinner has to be after 9:30.
I accepted two slices of haemul pajeon from a supervisor yesterday, and spent the evening worrying whether that might produce intestinal chaos. Luckily, it didn't. Now, the goal is to keep from overeating at night: eating right before sleeping is never a good idea. Then again, I usually stay up beyond 3am, so if I eat around 11PM, I'm not sleeping immediately afterward.
Back in the 1990s, when I was a fresh-faced French teacher, I remember a day where I was passing out copies of a worksheet for my kids. While I was standing next to one girl, my stomach let out a loud, long gurgling noise. She immediately looked over at her friend and shared a not-so-secret smile. I nodded and said something vague like, "Yeah, yeah-- that's right," as if I'd deliberately timed my gurgle for that moment. Now, sitting in front of groups of three students, I worry that my empty stomach might decide to do what it did in the 90s. Kids in a learning situation will often latch onto irrelevancies instead of concentrating on the task at hand, and my stomach could easily become that sort of a distraction.
It's a biological Scylla and Charybdis: a full stomach carries with it the danger of an in-office poop run; an empty stomach, meanwhile, brings the threat of gastric thunder.
_
No comments:
Post a Comment
READ THIS BEFORE COMMENTING!
All comments are subject to approval before they are published, so they will not appear immediately. Comments should be civil, relevant, and substantive. Anonymous comments are not allowed and will be unceremoniously deleted. For more on my comments policy, please see this entry on my other blog.
AND A NEW RULE (per this post): comments critical of Trump's lying must include criticism of Biden's or Kamala's or some prominent leftie's lying on a one-for-one basis! Failure to be balanced means your comment will not be published.