debitage
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Today was the last day of the Oneida Workshop. We brought the kids to the lab, had them clean all the stuff we found this week, then took them to Mr. Ed's for ice cream. It was kind of sad to see it all end. Not in a sappy "I feel down because the workshop is over" kind of way, or "I cried when I realised I'd never hear Tupac offering his colorful thoughts on female dogs, African Americans, and people who enjoy sexual intercourse with their parents from Carl's enormous headphones." It's just that the past two weeks I felt like I was really working, for the first time in a long time. Maybe it's just the fact that it was physical labor that left me tired enough to feel like I could indulge in a nice lounge around when I got home, but not mentally demanding enough to impinge upon my chosen methods of amusement (such as sitting here typing into Blogger). But aside from that, I think it's also because what we were doing was real -- a real site, real artefacts, which we were really destroying in order to learn about it. As I'm typing this, I realise how incredibly trite that sounds. But just because a feeling is common doesn't make it invalid, does it? I can't be coming up with profound and original breakthroughs all the time. Of course, having been at this for four weeks or so now, I'm probably due for some profundity. No dad yet. I need another thought. I decided just now that if you have more than a cubic meter of stuff, you have too much. I'm looking at all my boxes piled in the corner, and it seems like when I add the things that are piled on my dresser but not packed yet (due to lack of boxes), it will add up to about a cubic meter minus computer. So I have too much stuff. I wonder how I ever made it all semester in Australia with only two suitcases and a backpack full of stuff. Granted, I didn't take my stereo and I didn't have a computer. And this calculation doesn't take into account all the stuff that I use, but don't own -- a refrigerator, a stove, a washing machine, etc. Prof. Kerber and Siobhan were issuing dire warnings about the amount of stuff one accumulates when one owns a house. And volume is actually a rather silly way to measure the degree of a person's materialism -- if I had a laptop instead of a desktop computer, I'd cut the biggest item I have down to a fifth its size or so (not counting the extra room the packaging for the computer takes up). But I still look at the pile and say, "wow, that's an awful lot of stuff to be dragging around." I want to be like a nomad, not owning any more than I can carry on my back. But what stuff could I get rid of? And again, why is it volume that's so important? Maybe because volume makes the situation look better than weight. Well, for me at least, becuase a lot of my stuff is paper (books). Paper is incredibly heavy for its size. Still no dad. He's 18 minutes late so far (by my clock). I think I'm going to go waste time elsewhere.
Last fall, when I went to Australia, I took a hiatus from the Brunching UBB. I quickly went into bulletin board withdrawal, so I ventured into the Washington Post's OnPolitics forums. I didn't post very much there, because the volume of activity was so great, and too much of the conversation was about "$hrub" and "albore." But I did comment from time to time. This forum has a feature that sends you an email every time someone replies to a post you made (that is, they specifically comment on your post, not just reply to the whole thread). Today I got an email saying someone had replied to a post I made on August 24 regarding embryonic stem cell research. It's amazing that the same thread managed to stay active all that time, considering every new development in the debate among our leaders would have spawned a news story and therefore a new thread.
I'm still debating opening up and re-stuffing the two dozen that I forgot to put the subscription letter in. And I missed my chance to add a snarky note to Amanda's, because I was on auto-lick when I went through Massachusetts (yes, the mailing list of first-years is organized geographically. Although I can't figure out why it goes California - Hawaii - Oregon.)
I also got Dante's Inferno and two books on New Zealand. Hopefully those will help me keep my sanity.
I was at Prof. Kerber's house for a cookout with the other supervisors for the Oneida Workshop dig. As we were sitting around talking after dinner (I believe I was telling them about my possible Watson/Fulbright application to study indigenous involvement in heritage management in New Zealand), I felt something hit my shoulder. I figured it was a leaf or a seed of some kind, so I reached back to brush it off. But leaves and seeds generally aren't wet and gritty.
I just read a really good article:
First off, I feel like I have too little time and not enough direction. I'm still in a very exploratory stage, which I should have finished in the first half of the summer at the latest. My problem, of course, is that I didn't start even considering fellowships until Christine, being a Fullbright winner and convinced, for reasons that defy all obvious facts, that I'm smarter than her, badgered me into it. I'll probably wind up doing a second geography degree if I go on one of the British Isles university fellowships (Marshall, Mitchell, Schupf). It's the only thing I'm really prepared for (much as I would like to take, for example, geology or philosophy to broaden my horizons, I don't have any credentials there whatsoever), and it's much easier to justify, given the strength of the discipline in Europe as opposed to America. But I'm still poking around at other things. Today I saw that Oxford offers a joint modern history and politics degree, and my immediate reaction was "ooh, that would be really neat to learn about" -- never mind that I have no qualifications beyond a 100-level Australian History course in Wollongong and my commentaries for The Maroon-News. The number of universities to consider is huge, and I don't know the first thing about how they stack up beyond that Oxford and Cambridge are considered the top two unis in the English-speaking world. And that fact means I shouldn't bother seriously considering them. Because, to be honest, I don't have fellowship-calibre credentials. My GPA is good, but it's not a 4.0, I'm active on campus, but I'm not the leader (and certainly not the founder) of any organizations. I haven't pioneered any initiatives or made any mark that will remain visible on campus after this May. So it seems like maybe I should cut my losses and do a good job of looking at US grad schools (which I haven't even started thinking about), since I have a good shot at getting into one of those. And I wonder if I'm going about this all wrong. I seem to be taking a very selfish (though I'm sure completely typical) tack on this -- "I want a fellowship, so what kind of program can I come up with to win me one?" It seems like a better approach would be more along the lines of "I have this idea for a project, how can I get the resources to do it?" I think too much of what I do is motivated by a desire to prove that I'm better than I really am. And although the selection committe doubtless does a pretty good job of deciding what the best projects are, I have this worry that I could win with an inferior project by virtue of talking it up so that it sounds better than it really is. I have a real history of completely revising (and scaling down) projects after the design has been approved, from my Eagle Scout project to my research this summer. I even have issues with whingeing about it like this -- I know I'm profoundly lucky just to have the leisure to seriously consider applying for a fellowship. I'm sure anyone who isn't thoroughly blogged out after the thon and is reading this is probably shaking their head in disgust.
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I just discovered that, on my family's computer, they have Internet Explorer's homepage set to about:blank, and Netscape's set to msn.com. I find this highly amusing.