This Is Me Being Matter-Of-Fact
- When you volunteer long enough with a somewhat anti-establishment professor, you develop an entire methodology to tracking him down when he decides to disapear on you...again. A research assistant and I killed the entire half hour we were waiting for him to show up today by dicussing how we had learned to listen for his jangling key ring, wait for the sounds of rustling from behind his locked office door, and try to smell the smoke of cigars.
- When you work long enough with archaeological samples, you forget that you've learned things until something makes you remember.
*New Girl is helping re-box a site collection*
Dr S: Alright, what do you think this is?
New Girl: I dunno, looks like a rock.
Me: *automatic* Grit-tempered sherd.
New Girl: .....
Me: ...pottery. It's a pottery fragment.
- When you work long enough sorting human skeletal remains, you get fairly good at writing those seven digit catalogue numbers in very tiny handwriting on the side of tiny bones that were once somebody's fingers or toes. Or some child's humerus. Damn, those are small.
- ...You also begin to develop a deep, unabiding hatred for the number of ribs in the human body, as well as their tendency to break post-mortem and look like about a dozen different other kinds of bone fragment at first glance.
- Finally: when you work twice a week at Lord Hall, the archaeology building that time forgot, where they don't turn the heat off even when it's hot enough to wear shorts, you have a really hard time coming off your two-hour shift in a small stuffy bone lab office lined with dusty cardboard boxes without feeling like you're going to die of dehydration. Seriously.
- When you work long enough with archaeological samples, you forget that you've learned things until something makes you remember.
*New Girl is helping re-box a site collection*
Dr S: Alright, what do you think this is?
New Girl: I dunno, looks like a rock.
Me: *automatic* Grit-tempered sherd.
New Girl: .....
Me: ...pottery. It's a pottery fragment.
- When you work long enough sorting human skeletal remains, you get fairly good at writing those seven digit catalogue numbers in very tiny handwriting on the side of tiny bones that were once somebody's fingers or toes. Or some child's humerus. Damn, those are small.
- ...You also begin to develop a deep, unabiding hatred for the number of ribs in the human body, as well as their tendency to break post-mortem and look like about a dozen different other kinds of bone fragment at first glance.
- Finally: when you work twice a week at Lord Hall, the archaeology building that time forgot, where they don't turn the heat off even when it's hot enough to wear shorts, you have a really hard time coming off your two-hour shift in a small stuffy bone lab office lined with dusty cardboard boxes without feeling like you're going to die of dehydration. Seriously.