How come I'm the only person updating nowadays?

So I’ve been trying to figure out how to appropriately introduce you all to the life of an archaeologist. A greenhorn archaeologist, to be more precise, and several times I don’t think I’m doing archaeology so much as I’m doing some landscaping on a mound of dirt, and the next step will be to pour some gravel and plant some well-placed feng-shui-ish bonsai trees, and presto! we’ll have a Japanese garden on some Spanish island in the Mediterranean!

I’ve been using the pick axe quite a bit. What started out as wee, timid scratches upon the earth has grown into frenetic, wild chopping onto the earth’s crust as I anxiously try to pick axe as much as possible before it reaches an ungodly temperature. This doesn’t mean I’ve gotten much stronger or way more accurate, but at least now I’m not scared of pick axing. The typical “Imagine you’re chopping up someone’s head when you’re out there in the dirt” does seem to work. Lately, I’ve been imagining various administrative department heads from my school buried in the dirt while I mercilessly pound away upon their thick skulls for taking away my passport, but more on that later.

Today I happened to be pickaxing when Regina, the German REAL archaeologist in the program, came over to me and told me to take out the mound of hard dirt she was standing on.

“Take out this mound of hard dirt I am standing on,” barked she. “Not like it’s getting any softer since I’m standing on it.”

Then she jumped on it several times for good measure.

It was a super hard mound of dirt.

I guess that’s just how some archaeologists are. The only word to describe her is INTENSE. All caps plus italics. She has the strictest eating regimen ever, we already wake up at what I consider to be a pretty ungodly hour, yet she goes out every morning before the dig for a run. I’m pretty sure when she’s out on the field working she doesn’t need a pickaxe, because she can crack rocks with one glare of the evil eye, and I’ve seen her crumble boulders with her bare hands to sprinkle over her salad of precisely 3 leaves and ¼ of a tomato. And she is all of 4”9 or something like that.

So after pickaxing, desperately trying to keep my mouth shut tightly to avoid swallowing the flying bits of dirt, I take to using the well little trowel and the big trowel, plus small pickaxe to dislodge stubborn pieces of pottery. This means I have loads of time on my busy hands to utilize for thinking. I dig near my roommate, Alicia, who is working on STE-06-588. We both sit (oops, kneel, archaeologists never sit) there, troweling away, and contemplating the bitter, harsh reality of life. After hours of troweling, we punctuate the silence with such profound, insightful observations and questions such as:

“Boys are weird.”
“Man, this sucks.”
“Outer space must be cool.”
“Which character would you be on LOST if you could be a girl or a guy?”
Or
“Dammit, my underwear is showing again.”

CLEARLY, people, Aristotle and Plato came up with their most brilliant ideas while they were excavating.

And that’s that. After a snack we go to wash pottery, label, and classify them. I won’t go into what an unholy pressure on my patience this was, but I’ve gotten a lot better with retaining my frustration.

I’m quite enjoying myself. It’s kind of fun that bathing regularly is not only not required, but not exactly recommended. What’s good about it is that you spend so much time dirty and ugly that it takes hardly anything at all to become astonishingly beautiful compared to what you were. Why, Nick’s eyes nearly pop out of his head when all the girls shower, BRUSH THEIR HAIR, and *gasp* PUT ON SOME MAKEUP. There were a couple of times when Alicia and I would get dressed and all dolled up, and then sit down for a full 5 minutes to compliment one another in hushed, awed tones, overcome by the other’s miraculous transformation, with such things as:

“Why, Alicia! I never noticed your hair was blonde!”
Or
“Adrianne, I always thought that huge brown smudge right next to your eye on your left cheek that’s been there for over 2 weeks was a birthmark! You look so much better without it!”

Because it’s so foreign to see the other actually trying to look like something other than a mound of dirt.

Tomorrow there is a TV crew coming over to the site to make some sort of a documentary on the site, and we’ll be recorded in all our finery digging diligently in it. We’re not really special, but as someone put it, Menorca is just a huge rock with some trees that just happen to be on it. They have to report about SOMETHING on the island.

One can only hope that I will be civilized enough to wear a shirt for coverage instead of contenting myself with the dirt caked onto my body.