Halfway Through College

Alright. Well. I thought I'd start off by saying I'm halfway through college, and despite all of the writing I've done (yay, humanities...), I've hardly written about my own life, not even enough to remember 10 years from now what exactly happened during the last 2 years (and the next 2). Hell, most college students can't remember any of their weekends in college, but they're pretty sure they were the best 4 years of weekends of their lives. All in all, I've decided to start a blog simply for the sake of recording aspects of my life, and those who I spend my life with.

At the moment, I'm sitting in my room after a very long Tuesday at UC Berkeley. It's raining for one thing, which makes everyone feel tired regardless, but Jeff told me today that I actually look really tired... so it must not just be the rain.

The most interesting thing about today was probably working in the ARF (Archaeological Research Facility), transcribing texts from Quaker meetings in a very small colony on the Virgin Islands, more specifically Little Jos Van Dyke (a tiny island in itself). Why, you may ask, am i doing this sort of tedious work? Well, for one thing, I get credit for it, which has a whole story in itself how I got that to happen... And also, I really wanted to get a foot in the Anthropology Department here at Berkeley, meet people in my field, and build some sort of experience, however miniscule.

So, I was down in the basement for 2 hours, 2-4, and I only got 3 paragraphs of that 1760's smeared handwriting transcribed. The actual document is from the 1750's, but it was rewritten in the 1760's by hand, and whoever was copying it forgot to sand some of the pages... so the page i was reading today was blotched beyond belief. Luckily I'm working with microfilm, which, although is hard to get used to, can change the contrast of the writing and actually make it easier to descipher.

Anyway, I won't get too much into detail since it's pretty boring stuff, but those 2 hours tired me out, and relaxed me at the same time. It was awesome doing something besides memorizing information and thinking absractly for a change. Luckily I get to do 45 hours of this work throughout the semester. Joy. Please pray I don't get bored with it.

And as always, Go Bears!