Even after

I have to find the words for all of this. After nearly six months of hiatus from writing, I am striving to attain some sort of assessment of this current state of things. Perhaps if I start with the bare essentials, if I set some the stage, the rest will fall in place. I live at home, with my parents. I live in my once-bedroom-converted-to-guest-room-reconverted-bedroom. Most of the time, I sleep here. Sometimes I don't. Now my room has two bookcases, one I hauled in when I moved back in April. It has furniture that's vastly too big for the space. A new addition, two whiteboards are screwed into my walls, providing a canvas for graduate school plans / meanderings / random thoughts / strategies. 

S'been a long time. I graduated from Brown, and right now I'm in my last week of archaeological lab work in Guatemala City. Then I fly home, watch my sister get married, find a job, live somewhere, and do something for a living probably. Cuz you know, theoretically I'm qualified for stuff now.

I can teach you how to do-si-do

I can show you how to scratch a record

I can take apart the remote control

and I can almost put it back together

I can tie a knot in a cherry stem

I can tell you about Leif Ericson

I know all the words to De Colores

And I'm Proud to Be an American

Me and my friends saw a platypus

Me and my friends made a comic book

(And guess how long it took?)

I can do anything that I want cuz, look:

I can keep rhythm with no metronome

And I can see your face on the telephone

It's good to be alive in such a small world

I'm all curled up with a book to read

I can make money open up a thrift store

I can make a living off a magazine

I can design an engine 64 miles to the gallon of gasoline

I can make new antibiotics

And I can make computers survive aquatic conditions

I know how to run a business

I can make you wanna buy a product

Movers, shakers, and producers

Me and my friends understand the future

I see the strings that control the systems

I can do anything with no assistance

Apparently it's time to grow up, and figure some stuff out. And when I stop being petrified long enough to think about it, I see that I can do anything I want now.  

So life isn't all that great just yet. I'm waiting on comments from my thesis advisors about the (ostensibly) final draft of my thesis, the one that needs to be given some amount of verbal approval before I get it bound and it turns into approval-by-written-report. I have to get my GIS up and running and making some sort of analysis, and that seems like it will be a whole lot of work, but it needs to be done by Tuesday (with an accompanying 15-minute presentation, and 12-page research paper). On Wednesday Christian turns 25, which is awesome, but on Tuesday (after GIS) and Wednesday I have to write my final research paper ever for Brown (provided I pass my classes *holds breath, freaks out*)--it's 15 pages about Brown integrating women into the University in 1971 (while Barnard decided to stay segregated from Columbia), and I've already given the presentation that was to accompany it.

history fly jack name business place fisher dalliance timing art thrill post-apocalyptic problem dancing cherry indecision deliverance heady indirect inflate entire quiet wither enduring rely tide youth understudy iniquity populace acquiescence sure thing dial favorite gamer heredity liminality king judgmental zones of expectation color valor bother nano molecule tangental sadness place better. 

So I got comments back on my first draft of the thesis. The meeting with my advisor went really well, and he had extremely helpful and completely legit suggestions and comments. Not much was unexpected--I need to rework the intro and conclusion, which I absolutely intended to do because the ones I wrote were very much a place holder for when my brain became solid again and could produce actual writing, rather than babblebabblebabble which it was producing by the 25th hour of my thesis-writing march toward completion. 

Thesis Nest

04 Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa

Excavations at the First Baptist Church in America, Providence, RI went really well today. Aaron and I were reassigned to a trench on the western side of the property, at the base of College Hill. We went through 3 levels, corrected some incorrectly oriented maps and notes from the previous group (magnetic north labeled wrongly), made a drawing of level 6, and made the first discovery of bone yet found at the site. Aaron first picked up a bit of calcified faunal bone, handed it to me to examine, and we realized that we were dealing with bone. By the end of the day, we had found bone in levels 6 and 7, including 3 teeth fragments, one of which is a big ass tooth, probably of a horse or an elk. Maybe even a moose. No, just kidding, no moose. Was about 5 to 7 cm long, I'd say, most of that length being roots. We found quite a few other fragments of bone, many of which large fragments, along with glass shards, pottery sherds, lots of brick fragments, metal, including a badly rusted metal disc which may be a coin or a pendant, and shell.

FBC B2 - Aaron with Animal Molar Cropped

Very cool, altogether. Aaron does have photos, and so I'll post those later. We were also interviewed while we worked, although I didn't think to ask by whom, probably Providence Journal. Daylight savings complicated things a bit, as by 5:00 it was too dark to do any effective sifting of artifacts from the dirt fill. We packed up early and left, for that reason. Unfortunately the ground dried off while we were working and now I have dust-filled lungs. 

So the Brown website's pushing academia with my hands. Confusing, eh?

Jenna Hands Ceramics

I came to own a reading of this poem by A. R. Ammons (and so read) completely on accident. A misunderstanding with iTunes. It has finally grown on me; now it is indespensible. His reading brings across more than the text, I'd imagine. Ammons passed in 2001.

Still

I said I will find what is lowly
and put the roots of my identity
down there:
each day I'll wake up
and find the lowly nearby,
a handy focus and reminder,
a ready measure of my significance,

A. R. Ammons

but though I have looked everywhere,
I can find nothing
to give myself to:
everything is

magnificent with existence, is in
surfeit of glory:
nothing is diminished,
nothing has been diminished for me:

I said what is more lowly than the grass:
ah, underneath,
a ground-crust of dry-burnt moss:
I looked at it closely
and said this can be my habitat: but
nestling in I
found
below the brown exterior
green mechanisms beyond the intellect
awaiting resurrection in rain: so I got up

and ran saying there is nothing lowly in the universe:
I found a beggar:
he had stumps for legs: nobody was paying
him any attention: everybody went on by:
I nestled in and found his life:
there, love shook his body like a devastation:
I said
though I have looked everywhere
I can find nothing lowly
in the universe:

I whirled though transfigurations up and down,
transfigurations of size and shape and place:

at one sudden point came still,
stood in wonder:
moss, beggar, weed, tick, pine, self, magnificent
with being!

What was the last game you played?

The new Final Fantasy game that focuses on Vincent Valentine. Dirge of Cerberus, they call it, I think. Met my expectations, in that it was fun to shoot things and the storyline was eh if not worse.