Ah, College

"Ah, Kentucky"



For a change of pace, I decided to go to summer school for archaeology in Kentucky this year. It actually turned out to be pretty fun. It's a lot like all my other summers, but a bit different. In the first four weeks, I think I've already been awake for more hours than in all my previous eighteen summers combined.



-There's a professor at this school, but most of the teaching is done by two graduate students. By the third day, they'd given up on looking professional and starting spending nights sitting in front of their hotel drinking. I'd say that any actual learning that happens at this school will be purely a coincidence.



-One of the graduate students is from Denmark. It's funny when we say things he doesn't get. All the time he'll tell us to explain our local colloquialisms to him. And this would have been even funnier if I hadn't asked him one day what the word "colloquialisms" meant in English.



-Archaeology field school combines all the things college students love – waking up at six in the morning to do manual labor in dirt and paying tuition for it all. If we could just throw in being bitten by raccoons somehow, man, this trip would be awesome.



-Kentucky has some interesting bumper stickers. I especially liked the combination of "Pray to End Abortion" right next to "Guns Don't Kill People – I Kill People" on a truck. I don't know. If I were God, I might suspect that guy's prayers weren't completely sincere.



-When I first got to Kentucky, I thought it was a hick state. Now I realize it's not that different from home. My town is just as full of deer hunting, cornfields, and people sitting on porches. Kentucky is basically Pennsylvania with a tan.



-As an archaeologist, I'm obviously not the coolest guy in the world, but there are some huge dorks at this school. I don't think I can hold in the laughter anymore when someone says, "Oh, what a neat rock. I wish I had my camera."



-I have no idea why I even brought my camera here. In the four weeks we've been digging, the most exciting thing that happened was when we found that really big bug. And it figures. On the one day I forget my camera…



-The dorms we stay at aren't so great. I can handle no phones, no television, no microwave, and no working toilets. But any dorm room with a glow-in-the-dark Confederate flag painted on the wall is a little sketchy. It's hard to sleep thinking that the Civil War ended everywhere except your bedroom.



-Why can't some agency regulate shower controls? It's hard to adjust to different ones in new places. The showers here have three identical knobs for temperature and pressure. Those are easy enough. But there's also a button. What the hell does that do? Unless it calls the flight attendant, I'm stumped.



-Within a week of field school, I'll forget all this stuff. I won't know the difference between time periods. I won't know rocks from pottery. I'll probably forget which direction to dig holes. But after six weeks of waking up this early in the morning, I know I won't have any trouble remembering how to sleep in until noon every day for the rest of the summer.



-Josh says "hi". He's won the contest for "Ten Thousandth Person to Ask Me to Write He Said Hi in My Column." Congratulations!