Tuesday, January 11, 2011

New Year Day 11 Adventure....Field Trip

What does it mean if I get a huge adrenaline rush when discussing the study of past human societies, primarily through the recovery and analysis of the material culture and environmental data?  Seriously, my heart starts to pound and I feel a euphorically light-headed.   I think I am supposed to be an archaelogist.........EXCEPT for the fact that ........




I want to TEAR my hair  OUT  when I see how excruciatingly systematically SLOWLY they must proceed in unearthing these treasures centimeter by centimeter.  Surely they must hand out Valium by the bucket each morning in order to keep each artifact hungry archaeologist from trampling each other with shovels.   I accompanied Emmy on her school trip to Eastern Washington University today and had to sit on my hands to keep from asking if my sedation hypothesis was accurate.

At the end of the day, I still don't know if the greater adventure was the visit to the archaeology department or if it was the bus ride from the archaeology department.  I sat by Chase, a young boy who could not stop talking.   It was amazing.  I think he may have uttered more words in these 30 minutes than all three of my kids in their combined 30 years of life.   I have to share an excerpt I thought most entertaining:

"So, my grandpa gave me ski lessons for Christmas and I went on Saturday for 
the first time and it was really fun and I actually want to snowboard, but my grandpa
says that I should ski first to get the hang of it and I also noticed that snowboarders are 
generally meaner than skiers because My dad failed {I think that meant fell...must be the word kids
are using these days because he used it at least three more times in a similar context} under the 
chairlift and only the snowboarders were laughing at him and  then when I went 
to the bathroom I noticed that the skiers washed their hands but the snowboarders 
didn't wash their hands and I knew this because the snowboarders wear a completely
different kind of boot and also the snowboarders were always hocking loogies and I 
never once saw a skier do it, although I'm not saying their aren't any nice snowboarders, I'm 
just saying that on the mountain, there are way more rude snowboarders than skiers...and my 
mother has been in a bunch of car accidents and one really bad bike accident when I was in
 1st grade and I still remember what color shirt she was wearing and and ......"   

I noticed I got a bit of an adrenaline rush by analyzing a bit of this living human 5th grade bit of culture and I didn't even need any sedatives, although Chase could maybe use a Valium chaser or two.  

1 comment:

Sijbrich said...

While reading this post I came to realization that I have visited a ridiculously large number of archaeological sites. Honestly, I get a bit bored after about an hour of each visit.
I even heard one of my college anthropology professors utter the words, "I'm all archeologied out!" True story.