no subject

About to hit NY with the back of my hand. ("back..of the hand.." 2:35-2:44).
I'll be heading out to Israel in just 3 days now. At which point I will also hit tell Ashkelon with the back of my hand. (and a pick).
In the meantime I've settled into that lifestyle which makes up that delightful fraction of a grad student's career: doing nothing. While the reader may be inclined to think and then suggest that I must, in fact, still do something (I mean geez, he's still alive, right?), I am adamant: nothing. Deal with it, reader.

For those more inclined towards the anxious, wide-eyed, intellectual-hopes-and-fears kind of posts, I have no doubt those will find their way back here in due time. It's hard to be existential all the time. It's even harder to be not-existential all the time. I suppose we can only hope that I'll be near a laptop when it strikes.

On the back slope

In just about a week I'll be hopping my annual flight outta here to Israel. It always strikes very suddenly, this summer thing (which I suppose is liable to elicit a few disgruntled ... grunts, from readers who have real jobs). It'll be interesting to get back into the field and see if I'm able to keep thinking when I'm in the heat of the action, so to speak. More heat than action, typically. The skeletons are mostly pretty tame.
That is to say that after a first year in grad school (3 huzzahs) and the ensuing layering of perspectives,* ideas and entirely too much theoretical thought (I don't actually think there can actually be too much), I'm curious to see whether it will really be impossible to make room for critical thought during a dig. As a staff member (10x10 meters for me, this year) the workload is prohibitive, which means that usually any free time is spent staring at walls hoping for a quick death, and not in profound (or affected) consideration of what cultural assumptions I may be expressing by my choice to excavate those pits in a certain way.

"Following this prodigiously verbose and obscure statement, he returned to occupying an otherwise delightfully vacant evening with video games."


*en français, s'il vous plait.

It's been such a long time

If I could be any song, I might be Foreplay/Prelude.
I've just about survived my second bout of gradscholasticus finalius, which is, as are most things, much better appreciated with a bit of retrospection. I can imagine myself whyinmydaysing some poor kids in 20 years, scaring the living daylights out of them, only so they can discover on their own time (as I have) that it's not quite as apocalytpic as it is played up to be (le style s'inspire de G Keillor)(y tambien de Kerouac - esp. lo que sigue). I rushed into the museum this morning in a fustle, thinking my german competency exam would be starting, scampering from room to room trying to find where it was (where the hell was it, anyway??) only to realize, as I retreated to a computer equipped with internet in order to "find it out for myself, damn them" (random students sitting in empty classrooms are of no help whatsoever) that the Deutschefest was scheduled for 10 am, not 9 or 9:30 as had been my proto-diurnal, self-righteous conviction (I still think someone changed the internet behind my back).
And the natural thing to do, when you realize that you have a full hour to review before a required test, is to remain on the internet, check facebook, dilly dally around, and throw some shwag onto the blog.
Das Schwag wird geworfen.*

* en allemand dans le texte