2002-06-24 - 2:22 a.m.
With the eventfulness of my recent days and nights, my diary should be overwhelmed with lively and interesting entries. So many interesting conversations that I don’t take for granted, and strange sights and places. So many colorful adjectives and conjunctives.
But despite the jump that came from the new setting, my time is as usual mismanaged. I shouldn’t even be writing this. I should be asleep, since I have to be in Annapolis in less than six hours, and in the second half of the day we’re going out to Wye Island on the Eastern Shore.
Every day I come back from Annapolis exhausted from the exhausting work of shoveling dirt out of 5’ by 5’ holes, carrying it in buckets across the yard, sifting it, picking out artifacts, and repeating for hours. I came to this field school because I’m interested in the same postmodern Marxist theory as the director. Yet on Saturday, the TA who is supervising our site and already thinks that I’m lazy, told me as I was shoveling dirt out of a hole, “This is real archaeology. All that theory you do back on campus, that’s bullshit.” His voice was rising with a tone of intensity. “This what archaeology’s really about.”
“I call myself a historical archaeologist,” I joked earlier, “but I analyze garden perspective.” Everyone laughed, but I don’t think that they thought I was making fun of Leone—they probably thought I was poking fun at myself.
I don’t call myself a historical archaeologist, and I have no plans to go into archaeology. While this diversion has been fun, I’d rather be stringing words and phrases together and staying up late and having adventures than, in ascending order of desirability, digging, sifting, washing, re-bagging, labeling, cataloging, coding, and writing site reports.
I have a greater possibility of being late tomorrow because I’m driving myself, for reasons that are another story. The same was true on Saturday, when I showed up 45 minutes late (They make us work on Saturday in order to do public presentations as we work). The other members of the site were going to give me grief about it, but they liked my reason: On Friday, I went to Dupont Circle, the same club, the same fun. Going back, I took the metro, and after making my connection to the last train going out, I allowed myself to fall asleep, thinking I would wake up at the stops. Instead, I slept through them and didn’t wake up until one beyond College Park—Greenbelt, the end of the line, with no transportation. I walked for an hour in a bad part of town I didn’t know at all, but as it was happening, all I could think was this will make a great story, if I live to tell it. Which I did.
Saturday, we met at a friend’s house (she’s in the field school) before departing for clubs in Baltimore. Waiting outside, I recognized part of the bike path I’d walked on the previous night. I’d gone right by her house early in my walk.
