Admittedly last few days, blogging has been the second to last thing on my broken little mind. I’ve spent a few long hours on a variety of work projects which were tallied with meeting some quarterly revenue goals. One of these needed a bit of work at the last minute. But, I really enjoy that kind of thing. There is a challenge to meet when you have this limitation of time to get a critical thing done. You can really tell who the team is when you stay at it longer and wake up the next morning and its still not really done. Then suddenly it is! There is a sweet sense of victory at doing a thing.
Back in anthropology and archeology, you would think finding the next big prehistoric archeological site would get you there. The senses are lifted, the pulse is quickening, the feelings are all super charged. But finding the sites while exciting to me never matched recording them. Recording them gave a picture of a thing. The measurements while in size never really held a match to the extrapolation of function, technology, social complexity, trade. All of the things we all engaged in. Others have asked what it all was like, beginning to end. It was like…
the mind wielding a trowel
Someone said that and I cannot find a source for it now; but it captures the essence. I always thought it captured the physical and mental nature of doing archeology. People have said, “its an earth science. its paleontology. found any dinosaur bones.” But the truth is that its more than those things. Its like a picture we take of a time before but things are missing in the picture. Some may be buried, others are simply missing. Still others may be all mixed up. Sometimes the camera seems to not work right and we cannot solve a thing we hoped. Once upon a time, I made some observations and hypotheses regarding the size of hearths or cooking pits and I went through a whole genesis of ideas around them.
If I flash forward to today’s stuff, I find that the work is interesting, frustrating, and enabling. Is that not the nature of jobs today? That same job keeps me busy, keeps me moving around, and I still feel quite happy that I have what I have.
