Pat and Derek being adorable
Yup
Tuesday, June 2, 2009
Monday, June 1, 2009
Recently...
The road to my parent’s house is lined with mega-churches and fast food joints. However, the connection between the two has never been quite as clear to me as it was tonight. A strange newly erected building appeared in front of my little peepers on the drive home from Derek’s house late this evening. From a distance it resembled a cathedral but upon closer inspection I discovered that it was in fact an Arby’s. This sight, along with my car’s overly zealous cooling system, sent shivers down my spine.
I won’t make much of an effort to sum up the adventures of the past few weeks. Presently I am a languid creature nestled in a burrow I’ve formed out of pillows and blankets and I am quite content.
The series of final papers that I managed to retch out of me at the end of the semester left me sputtering for days in a mist of erudite up-chuck. I don’t know if you’ve ever found yourself literally sobbing from lack of sleep but it is a seriously bizarre experience.
I’m kinda bummed that I didn’t stick around for the end-of-the-year festivities or have an opportunity to say goodbye to all of the amazing people who won’t be coming back next year. I’ve got so much fucking love for all of those smarty-pants.
My good pal, a certain Mr. Timothy Nest, came home with me for a few days after school let out. The Bible Belt must seem pretty exotic to a Yankee like him. Unfettered (misdirected) hatred is our specialty here.
For some reason, homosexual people flock to Pensacola for Memorial Day weekend. It’s great! Great for business and great for the overall mojo of the city. Unfortunately, the city’s thriving population of evangelical Christians don’t take to kindly to them queer folk or their gay money for that matter. So these fundamentalists take it to the streets and explain that what God Almighty hates more than pretty much anything else, is butt sex. (It pisses him off even more than murder, that’s just how much it gets his goat, apparently.) Tim and I joined Derek and Patrick to participate in a counter-protest-protest and to support those brave souls ballsy enough to walk past the hundred or so people screaming at them to “repent now or burn in hell.”
Anyway, I hope Tim had a good (or at least educational) time here in the Panhandle. I was sad to see him go.
I start working my first serious archaeology dig tomorrow. I was accepted into the University of West Florida’s field school for the summer. It’s going to require me to get up early every day and put in about 40 hours of hard labor every week but I'm pretty fucking excited about the prospect of doing real archaeology. When I was working at the Florida Public Archaeology Network my duties were limited to:
1) sorting things –a task which could more or less be summed up as determining the subtle differences between dirt and not dirt (which had several subcategories- such as: cement, brick, and- if you got really lucky- pottery shards )
2) labeling things- sharpies and Ziploc bags are the less Indiana-Jonesian tools of the trade
3) giving "education tours" to third and fourth graders who would un-sort everything I had spend hours meticulously separating into neat little piles. Occasionally they would cut themselves on a rusty piece of metal (roughly dating to the Spanish occupation) and cry a little bit. Sweet vengeance.
I'm going to be working in Milton at the Arcadia mill site, the first and largest early American water-powered industrial complex in Florida. In its hay day the mill was equipped with a mule-drawn railroad (pre-steam-powered engine industrial archaeology= hells yeah!) and a sixteen-mile log flume, whatever that is. This year we’ll be focusing on the archaeology of ethnicity, social structure and community organization in the antebellum South. This is right up my alley. What a lucky little lady I am.
I won’t make much of an effort to sum up the adventures of the past few weeks. Presently I am a languid creature nestled in a burrow I’ve formed out of pillows and blankets and I am quite content.
The series of final papers that I managed to retch out of me at the end of the semester left me sputtering for days in a mist of erudite up-chuck. I don’t know if you’ve ever found yourself literally sobbing from lack of sleep but it is a seriously bizarre experience.
I’m kinda bummed that I didn’t stick around for the end-of-the-year festivities or have an opportunity to say goodbye to all of the amazing people who won’t be coming back next year. I’ve got so much fucking love for all of those smarty-pants.
My good pal, a certain Mr. Timothy Nest, came home with me for a few days after school let out. The Bible Belt must seem pretty exotic to a Yankee like him. Unfettered (misdirected) hatred is our specialty here.
For some reason, homosexual people flock to Pensacola for Memorial Day weekend. It’s great! Great for business and great for the overall mojo of the city. Unfortunately, the city’s thriving population of evangelical Christians don’t take to kindly to them queer folk or their gay money for that matter. So these fundamentalists take it to the streets and explain that what God Almighty hates more than pretty much anything else, is butt sex. (It pisses him off even more than murder, that’s just how much it gets his goat, apparently.) Tim and I joined Derek and Patrick to participate in a counter-protest-protest and to support those brave souls ballsy enough to walk past the hundred or so people screaming at them to “repent now or burn in hell.”
Anyway, I hope Tim had a good (or at least educational) time here in the Panhandle. I was sad to see him go.
I start working my first serious archaeology dig tomorrow. I was accepted into the University of West Florida’s field school for the summer. It’s going to require me to get up early every day and put in about 40 hours of hard labor every week but I'm pretty fucking excited about the prospect of doing real archaeology. When I was working at the Florida Public Archaeology Network my duties were limited to:
1) sorting things –a task which could more or less be summed up as determining the subtle differences between dirt and not dirt (which had several subcategories- such as: cement, brick, and- if you got really lucky- pottery shards )
2) labeling things- sharpies and Ziploc bags are the less Indiana-Jonesian tools of the trade
3) giving "education tours" to third and fourth graders who would un-sort everything I had spend hours meticulously separating into neat little piles. Occasionally they would cut themselves on a rusty piece of metal (roughly dating to the Spanish occupation) and cry a little bit. Sweet vengeance.
I'm going to be working in Milton at the Arcadia mill site, the first and largest early American water-powered industrial complex in Florida. In its hay day the mill was equipped with a mule-drawn railroad (pre-steam-powered engine industrial archaeology= hells yeah!) and a sixteen-mile log flume, whatever that is. This year we’ll be focusing on the archaeology of ethnicity, social structure and community organization in the antebellum South. This is right up my alley. What a lucky little lady I am.
Thursday, May 28, 2009
Monday, May 11, 2009
Wednesday, May 6, 2009
Tuesday, May 5, 2009
Mummy manifesto: archaeology for lovers
My love is a fleshly but not a carnal one.
I spend a lot of time thinking about mummies, more time than your average cusp-of-pubescence boy, whose depraved fixation on all things gruesome is soon enough replaced by far more gratifying perversions. I don’t think of myself as particularly morbid. Although, because I didn’t have access to cable during those most formative years of childhood, my favorite channel growing up was the one that aired live autopsies.My devotion to preserved human corpses in not an indiscriminate one: I’m not really into your run-of-the-mill Hotep types. Egyptian royalty doesn’t interest me much. Those mummies are a dime a dozen.
Anyway, I’ve formed something of a philosophy (and one Tom Waits-styled love ballad) from this otherwise unaired contemplation. But more on all of that later: first, a few words on archaeology in general. I’ve got some serious pet peeves (big barking ones) when it comes to the subject. Whenever I am cornered into telling someone that I fancy myself something of an archaeology student, I often get the response that they too “looooved dinosaurs” when they were a youngster. More than anything else, I am tired of this fundamental confusion of people with fossils. But all my internal eye-rolling aside, I also share this confusion. The distinction between man and mineral seems to be set in something softer than stone.
Archaeology is the study of material culture. So where do human remains fit into all of this? I love the poetry of archaeology. Every artifact is a metaphor. But how can these allegories make sense of a body/anybody? The body (human, animal, virtual, or otherwise… all of these categories overlap, after all) is partially biological, but it is also something that is actively (and culturally) produced and imagined. It is a site of/for spectacular involvement.
Mummies seem to reflect the sort of frozen-in-time-ness that is so appealing to many people: grisly lipless nostalgia. These time-travelers are non-threatening: they are partial and peripheral. In some sense, history has already been decided. Real people, whether alive or dead, do not seem to have much of an impact on it. However, I find myself nevertheless inclined toward romantic musing. The living and the lived must have a place in all of this. I cannot help but entertain some sort of fearful optimism.
After all, isn’t that what love is?
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