Well, do you know what I am terrible at? After 'keeping in touch', the runner-up is definitely blogging. My serious-person blog and my LJ have been languishing. Work is still seriously draining, and when I get home my thoughts are more on how I'm going to fix my hands than what I did that day.

Because my hands are wrecked. No fooling. Clutching that shovel 6-8 hours a day has given me some kind of premature arthritis that I've been trying to correct with wrist braces, advil, magnetic bracelets and so on. Right now they aren't so bad because we had a lab day, but in the mornings when they're at their stiffest they make a creepy clickety noise when I open and close my hands. Just about everybody else on the crew has similar issues so I'm not too worried, but still: the joints on my pinky fingers look jacked up. This is the longest and hardest I've ever worked on an archaeological project, so I knew there'd be some damage, but I'm starting to worry a little about the long-term ramifications of what I'm doing to myself.

The other reason I've been out of touch is hopefully solved though: there seems to be a sweet spot for stolen internet up on top of the bunkbed (yes, bunkbed- it's not exactly the high life) of the guest room I'm renting. The connection is still 'very low' but it isn't so much of an ordeal to connect to gmail and other websites. Down closer to the ground it takes ages of repairing the connection and refreshing the page to get anywhere. Formerly I'd usually just give up and wait for the weekend then go out on an internet binge at a cafe or library. Progress!

For the past 24 hours and counting, I've been totally obsessed with Fright Night. DO NOT ASK ME WHY. Sometimes something just goes down the right way, okay? I started reading reviews, I saw a few pictures, I saw the trailer and one person's fan trailer (below) and the seed was good and planted. I took a 10 mile excursion (because I am living in nowheresville where the only local theatre has been shut down) just to see it today, and it was AMAZING. And not just because I haven't seen a movie in theatres in ages! In fact, that should add weight to my endorsement: I've turned down just about every hit movie to come out in the last year on the grounds that my budget and I can wait for it to come out on DVD, but I could barely wait another day to see this one.



And yeah, it's pretty slashy, I don't even have the decency to be embarrassed about it. The author of that video called it similar to "a slash variant of Twilight with a lot of blood and violence" and I don't know if I'd go that far but Jerry (Colin Farrell as the evil vampire) definitely seems to enjoy chasing Charley (Anton Yelchin as the frightened but determined young hero) a little TOO much if you know what I mean.

And Peter Vincent (David Tennant playing a hilarious cross between the 10th Doctor and Russell Brand) blatantly hits on Charley more than once, so there's that. Farrell is incredibly hot, Yelchin is just cute as a button, and Tennant looks great in eyeliner, so I recommend seeing it for the shallowest reasons. I LOVE THIS MOVIE. Fellow former Reaper fans: it totally scratches that itch of watching a cute boy fight monsters while there are also funny jokes. And David Tennant takes his shirt off a lot. I hear some people are into that.

Go it alone like I did, or trick your boyfriend into taking you (the action scenes ROCK) but you really ought to see it.

Oh my God, why do I even try to organize my pictures folder. I'm lucky enough to have more space on the D drive than I can use (without compromising the tiny little C drive) so I just dump stuff en masse in a 'pictures' folder. Sometimes I want to find a picture, and I go in there, and let me tell you: it's a terrifying infographic of what nonsense my brain is filled up with. Every article that's ever caught my attention, I usually grab a picture from it. Time marches by, context fades, and yet the pictures all remain. All those scifi stories/articles about the importance of forgetting? My 'pictures' folder has never heard of them. It remembers everything I've ever felt looked interesting.

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That's just the *first* 10 pictures that made me go "...where the hell did that come from?" If anybody else has a similar folder, I wanna see.

Like so:


It's been a long time, working world, but I'm back! I got a job offer for the project going on down in East St. Louis, with all its mixed blessings, and took it. There are some reasons to be wary about it, but at the end of the day I'll still be able to put a non-volunteer archaeology job on my resume, and add a few more months to my count.

I do have something helpful to add: this was my first time test-driving a very bare-bones cover letter, which basically boiled down to bullet points of their requirements/expectations followed by bullet points of how I met or exceeded them. So if you're applying to a job with a clear idea of what they want done, be super clear about how you can do it... Is the career advice that 99% of job sites will give you, but it really hit the mark for me this time so it bears repeating. I ended up at the top of the possible pay scale, earning $11 an hour, which my dad charmingly termed "intern wages". Ha ha! Silly dad, in this economy nobody pays the interns!

I wish I was more excited -- I'm trying real hard to be more excited -- but it hasn't totally sunk in yet that I won a fight in the job wars.

Live K-pop performances are on the Most Viewed page again, so I've got the sharing bug! And I got an inch (your fault, CKO) so I'll take a mile. In fact, I'm helping you: with these two mass-mixes of all the top songs from 2010, in 6 minutes you can get caught up on a whole year of music from an entire country.



These mixes are from Spain, courtesy of DJ Masa, who's produced a whole bunch of seriously awesome audio/video mashups. You can (and should) check out his YouTube channel, or his website (where you can download all of his mixes for free).

If you have had to stand next to me for 5 minutes or more in the last few months, I've probably made you watch a K-pop (Korean Pop) music video. I couldn't tell you why; maybe it has to do with the last, lazy remains of my old otaku-dom. It's definitely the fault of my iPod touch (which is tragicomically one of my best friends... I call her 'Alice') that enables me to show people whatever I'm thinking of, whenever I want. No longer is my YouTube obsession confined to somebody getting their laptop out at a party! (It happens!)

And you can't really have a YouTube obsession these days without finding out about K-pop; YT loves K-pop. More and more videos are popping up on the 'most-watched' page, sporting hilariously xenophobic comments along with the hysterical fan praises. And you know what? It gets lonely, because you want to share music, and YT comments just aren't enough for a sense of community, but all your friends listen to decidedly NOT pop music. (And will humor your interest, but only to a certain extent.) It makes you want to listen to an angsty yet crowd-pleasing mash-up of three of K-pop's most popular boy-bands with Nirvana's 'Smells Like Teen Spirit'.

NB: Some people are way better at making cool/sexy faces in close-ups than others. Don't judge too harshly.


Now that's better.

Early on this week I took a day off from being unemployed to head up to Wisconsin to check out the site where a friend was working as a graduate student/research assistant/assistant site director. I've been trying to figure out a way to say on my resume that I'm trained in digging test pits, despite the fact that I've never done one. The way I see it, a lot of the worst jobs in archaeology (and therefore entry-level friendly) are walking long distances in the middle of nowhere and then digging a test pit. I've been putting in a few days volunteering here and there, and trying to get somebody to show me one, but at this rate I've decided I'm just going to say I know how to do one. I've read the books, I know how to dig, draw, and measure, and going backwards to *officially* pick up one of the most basic practices in archaeology just really isn't worth it.

It should have lifted my spirits at least a little bit to show up on a student-dug site and find I had nothing much to learn, but to be honest, it was just really annoying. It had taken a lot of hassle and hours of driving to get there, for the sole purpose of learning to dig a test pit, and I pretty much got all I needed to know down in the first hour. Then we participated in some seriously bizarre wet screening for the entire rest of the day. I was getting ready to drown myself in the wash tub. They had invented an absurdly precise method of wet screening that was rendered completely irrelevant by the fact that the screens had warped so there were large holes around the edges. I can't even describe it here, it's really just pretty stupid.

I'm falling into the trap I noticed on site though which is that no matter how unqualified they are, archaeologists will always bitch about how incompetent someone else is. Usually it's pretty true, and I've been in situations where it was richly deserved (as victim, perpetrator, and spectator) but it was in full force out on that site. Everyone hated the intern who was essentially the graduate assistant's assistant, because she had no idea what she was doing, but then she would come over to lecture various people about what they were doing wrong. I thought the professor-in-charge had invented the stupidest wet screening process I had ever seen, but he still shared a laugh with my friend over the sloppy work and poor methodology of another archaeologist they both know. It's enough to make a person wish for some kind of rulebook for archaeology where the good or poor decisions are clearly laid out, though I'm guessing everyone would still find a way to feel superior to everyone else-- just look at the folks on Star Trek, who memorize the regulations for every conceivable circumstance and still end up fighting about it.

I've been pretty devoted to goodreads since I started with it, and its pretty much scratched any itch I've had for talking about books. I don't generally need much, usually it's enough for me to get out a paragraph or so of my thoughts on a book and then I can move on, so leaving a goodreads review and checking a book off my list does it for me. Usually.

Then there's the Mabinogion.
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I stayed away so long that it was easy to stay away, and returning to LiveJournal was a frightening prospect; reinvesting time and words into an old exercise. (Too much like going backwards.) All the adults have a blog these days and I want to be an adult too, writing smart, important things on my nice blog. Then I tried having a blog, and being smart and important was way, way too hard. I still have it, but it's like doing pushups: the concept of what I can do and the reality just don't match up. Then LJ got smart and set what I secretly believe to be spambots on me, randomly flattering a couple of old entries, and boom-- here I am, back again. Happier, freer, less worried about whether I'm using punctuation correctly.

I've been trying a lot of different things lately, out of necessity; post Master's degree I'm still unemployed and starting to believe myself unemployable. And while the nanny state has been sweetly nurturing me through this sad phase, it still sends me letters reminding me that unemployment insurance doesn't last forever. I like talking about these things, and it takes some practice before these things sound smart and important. So LJ is now my practice blog, I've decided. I might even write some ill-advised fanfiction while I'm still here, and stop worrying that if the earth is destroyed and the aliens rediscover only the LJ servers I'll be remembered in their histories as 'that weirdo who overused commas'. (Seriously, my fear of being remembered badly by history has only been sharpened by studying archaeology.) Now I intend to check my friends' page, so that I can be horrified by the passage of time.

P.S. LiveJournal can "detect" where you are now? Terrifying and convenient!

I checked out hotel prices for Newcastle, and found 'Roselodge House', a weird mix of hostel/B&B/renovated church. 20 for a night! Obviously, despite the terrible reviews, I couldn't say no. Plus, it's not far at all from the airport (if the website's to be believed), meaning something as luxurious as taking a cab is on the table. Hooray! People have been describing how on the Newcastle metro you have to take the right train, or else you'll just sail on by the airport. I am exactly the kind of person that happens to, so I'm very happy to have other options.

One last thing to do: find someplace in Durham market that sells 'suet'. Mom's decided she's making traditional Christmas pudding, but I have to find the stuff first.