Hubris

Hubris—excessive pride or self-confidence; arrogance.

I love the word. It sounds so haughty, so blinded by confidence. I loved when it was used as the title for a book on the Iraq War (Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal, and the Selling of the Iraq War). I never thought I would apply it to me. Well, now I can.

We are still moving stuff from our old rental house to the new rental house. Yes, we are taking forever. Yes, we’ve been in serious denial. Now it is go time. We have to be out by tomorrow. So this week we’ve been moving stuff and getting rid of stuff. I took 4 pick up truck loads of treasures to Goodwill on Monday. Lots of good stuff that we hope others will get as much use out of as we have. Among the things I gave away were several slings. I’ve accumulated these over the years as I’ve gone into the emergency room for a dislocated shoulder.

It all started when I was a junior in high school playing football. I had played since I was a freshman and started on the junior varsity squad the year before. Even though I went to a tiny school, I still didn’t start as a junior. My coach that year was famous for being a massive jerk—Al DeJulio. We called him the Italian Stallion. This was 1986 when the Rocky franchise was still culturally relevant. Coach didn’t treat me particularly well. I played on the practice squad against the first team the entire year. I played safety on defense. We were coached to stand legs apart, hands on the hips—ready to react as they play started. On one occasion, Coach yelled at me from the sidelines, “Hey King, you a male model or what?” On another occasion he unloaded this memorable beauty on me during a Thursday practice, “King, you’ve got two chances of starting on Saturday—slim and none and slim just left town.” I really didn’t cause trouble and I worked my ass off. I was just small, slow and lacked self-confidence. I was an easy and safe target in the manly world of small-town high school football. Maybe Coach thought he was trying to teach me self-confidence. I learned lessons from the experience, but I am not prepared to give him credit for consciously teaching me much.

When the first team practiced on defense I played the opposing team’s running back for that week. I was a tackling dummy for the first team offense running behind the blocking of the second team offensive ling. I got crushed constantly. The thing is I loved it. I got to play football with pads, live (meaning full speed with contact). Nothing was more fun. So I’d get creamed and come back the next play to do it again. The greatest thrill was beating the first team offense, which we did from time to time. Of course when that happened we’d have to run the same play over and over until the first team offense could consistently cream me instead of letting me get by.

One day I got smacked down and hurt my shoulder. This was the first time I dislocated my shoulder. In classic movie fashion, one of the assistant coaches grabbed my arm, twisted and shoved until the arm went back into place. It hurt, but I got back up and finished practice. I didn’t play much that year, so I don’t remember it coming out again until I was a senior. By then the Italian Stallion had moved on to a bigger small-town high school and I was a starter on offense and defense. That is when it started to dislocate on a regular basis—usually in games, involving great drama (ambulances, gurneys, etc). In one game it came out, and I was carted off the field on a stretcher and stuck in the ambulance. By the time I got to the ambulance, it had gone back in on its own so I stayed at the game. After half-time the coach let me back in the game to kick an extra point (the only point I scored in my long, illustrious football career). Someone from the other team complained and I was taken from the game and forbidden to play any more games because of the injury. A few weeks later someone bought me a strap-on contraption that kept my shoulder in place. I wore it under my pads and finished the season. It continued to come out, but not as often.

I didn’t know it at the time, but once a shoulder dislocates it is likely to happen again and the more it happens the more likely it is that it will keep happening. Fast forward 24 years and it has come out dozens of more times. At the beach in Thom’s River NJ, in bed while sleeping, while throwing a shot put in a decathlon, at the security gate of the Savannah River Site, and just hours before I was to chair my first session at a big archaeology conference. In that last instance, I was carted out of the hotel on a stretcher only to return a half hour before my session was to start.

The last time it came out was about 3 years ago while my dad was visiting. I ended up in the hospital and they had to put me under to get the sucker back in. My wife came in just as they were trying to revive me. Oh yeah and I hadn’t given the hospital permission to list me as being admitted, so my wife didn’t know where I was. Oh and when she finally found me they were trying to revive me from the anesthesia…and having some trouble.

In the movies is looks all fun, but in real life dislocating your shoulder is not fun. It hurts like hell when it comes out. Once it is out and stays out, the muscles of the shoulder start to spasm and that REALLY hurts. The longer it stays out the more it spasms and the more it hurts. And despite what Mel Gibson shows in the movies, you can’t just shove it back into place after it is out. Sometimes it can take hours. My shoulder introduce me to morphine.

At this point I pretty much know how it comes out and avoid those kinds of motions and positions. I’ve done a pretty good job of limiting the dislocations. My brother has had surgery to take care of one shoulder—turns out this is part of a genetic problem with my father, brother and I. Because it has been a few years since I’ve dislocated my shoulder, I had no hesitation in giving away the many slings I had accumulated over the years.

That was Monday. Yesterday (Wednesday) I moved a bunch of particularly heavy boxes of books. I was kind of pissed, so I was really jerking them up off the ground and slinging them around. When I got to the new house I was pretty beat, but my son wanted to play baseball. We played for a while without incident. While walking back to the house, I did something to the shoulder and it felt like it dislocated part of the way or came out and went back quickly. I’ve since decided that I’ve separated the shoulder. Whether this happened as it came out or not I am not sure. I assume all of this was the result of the amount of lifting and carrying I’ve done over the past week and the fact that I was particularly rough on myself yesterday.

It hurt all last night and I really can’t move it much today. This morning I went to Walgreens and bought a new sling. I won’t be so quick to give this one away.

That same overconfidence has slopped over into my weight loss regime. I weighed in at 187.7 today. That is up almost 2 lbs over yesterday and represents the first day I’ve really gained weight for weeks. I pigged out (pun intended) on BBQ yesterday and ate a lot of ice cream the day before. My overconfidence in the fact that I would continue to lose weight without the effort has put me on the wrong track.

I come to you a humble and focused but still fat archaeologist.

The Friendly Skies

I took a flight to St. Louis about a week and a half ago. I don’t fly all that much, maybe 4 times a year at the most and I really don’t enjoy it. I don’t dread it and I’m not really scared. It is just a lot of work and a hassle. I’ve only flown a hand full of time since airlines routinely started charging to check luggage. Since I see the whole affair as a hassle, I like to check my bags. I don’t like to have to drag a bunch of stuff around the airport and I really don’t like competing with everyone else on the plane for space in the overhead compartments. I just want to dump my bag off and get it when I get where I am going. Call me old fashioned, call me an elitist, and yes call me lazy.

The thing is that the new charges for checked luggage have increased the number of people dragging their entire lives around in stacked sets of small bags on wheels. They clog up everything. Heaven help you if you are in a hurry to get through the airport because you have to navigate the maze of dazed travelers dragging their lives behind them in big stacks. Their possessions are heavy enough that they move slowly and when they tire they start to zig and zag to keep going. It is annoying as hell. It used to be that OJ could use his speed and moves to navigate the airport (before he used the knife and black gloves). Now, you really need a pulling guard and tight end ahead of you to clear the slow moving baggage if you want to run. And somehow when people get to the airport they forget anything their parents taught them about walking to the left hand side so others can go the other way on the right. It becomes a slow moving, load hauling free-for-all with people wandering hither and yon at what ever slow pace they care to move. It is a nightmare.

And going to the bathroom has become a major logistical undertaking—both for those who carry on their luggage and the rest of us. The entry ways to the bathrooms are small enough that the one-man caravans who travel the airport must enter and exit single file. That means you move as slowly as the weary gypsy in front of you. Then they all have to do something with their worldly possessions while they pee and wash their hands. So the pathways through the bathroom are completely clogged with luggage on wheels. It is most frustrating, especially if you are in more of the hurry than everyone else.

The really crazy thing is that in most cases, they drag all their stuff through the airport only to check it at the gate. I just don’t understand this. It costs the airlines the same to put that damn bag on the plane as it would if passengers had the decency to just check it at the front of the terminal. It would save us all a great hassle. Of course, boarding is a nightmare too. Because people try to cram as many of their possessions into small bags that will fit in the overhead compartments, getting into your seat is slow and dangerous. Most people can’t lift what they have up into the overhead compartments and when they do they find that it won’t fit because someone else already shoved all of their worldly possessions into it. This means the rush to get onto the plane before everyone else has become that much more frantic. No longer are people so much worried about getting into their seats. Now they are worried about getting as much overhead compartment room as they can possibly take up with their carried on treasures. Sure, you are only supposed to bring on one bag and one personal item but somehow still it seems like the plane and compartments are swimming with suitcases, garment bags, souvenir bags, sweaters, hats, etc.

From now on, I am taking the bus. Surely the bus is more civilized and comfortable…and I am sure just as fast. Right? Remind me to tell you about the time I rode the bus from Knoxville to Camden.

Society for American Archaeology

Last week I attended the 75th Annual Meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. I’ve been attending and giving papers for my entire 20 year plus career. It is the national meeting for archaeologists who work in the Americas, so it is a big conference. It is usually held in big cities like Seattle, Philadelphia, Quebec city, and St. Louis (this year) and is attended by thousands of archaeologists. This year the attendance was just under 4000. If the thought of being surrounded by 4000 archaeologists makes you uncomfortable, you’ve had the proper reaction. It is a strange and diverse lot.

It takes many kinds to be an archaeologist. The dominant form is still the middle-aged, beer-drinking, slightly overweight, bearded man with precious few social skills. However that form is quickly being replaced by younger types and they essentially come in couple forms themselves. One is the hard drinking, bearded, long-haired, heavily decorated (piercings, tattoos, dreadlocks) young man with few social skills. The other is a young woman, and she seems to come in a variety of forms too. There is the well-dressed, well-spoken, professional woman seeking to make headway in a male-dominated profession. Then there is the hard drinking, rough talking, heavily decorated (piercings, tattoos, dreadlocks) young woman seeking to make headway in a male-dominated profession. Another somewhat rare version is the established, older woman and she also comes in two basic forms like the younger version. The odd thing is that no one seems to really recognize that this male dominated profession is now dominated, at least demographically, by women. This is no doubt a good thing for the future of the profession, both intellectually and socially.

There are other minority types as well. One particularly common form is the technology geek. They have the appearance and sound of your average geek, but all they talk about is technological applications to archaeology. They fit in well with mainstream American archaeologists, because they also have precious few social skills and often drink heavily.

Another very rare type of archaeologist belongs to any of a number of ethnic groups present in our country. It turns out that archaeology is something that, at least in our country, is a pursuit of those that have traditionally had the means for such leisure. In other words, rich white folks and their rich white patrons. Particularly under-represented among the ranks of archaeologists are Native Americans and African Americans. Ironically, those are two groups whose history is studied extensively by American archaeologists. Maybe this is hard to see for some, but it is not for me. It is no wonder that archaeology is considered by many minority communities to be an extension of the same arrogant imperialism that lead to the enslavement of people from Africa and the ethnic cleansing of Native Americans—and other scars on our country’s history.

Of course my friends and I all fit into another rare category among American archaeologists. We are erudite, well-spoken, on the thin side and generally good looking, with plenty of good social skills and most importantly, devastatingly interesting to listen to as we go on about our incredibly important research. Just ask my wife, she’ll confirm all of this.

For some reason I did not enjoy this year’s conference like I normally do. Sure, it is filled with strange types, but they are my people and I am normally comfortable among them. This time I found it more difficult than usual to sit through boring papers and listen to hyper-academic archaeologists drone on about the significance of their “work.” I find that this particularly pretentious kind of archaeologist, so confident of their own self importance, uses “work” in the same way that pretentious, self-absorbed artists talk about their work. You’ve heard them; they talk about the integrity of the work, the craft of the work, and their devotion to the work. It generally makes me want to barf. And it seemed like I walked through too many of those kinds of conversations at the conference. I lost count of the number of times I swallowed back just a tiny bit of barf that had welled up in my mouth.

Fortunately, I was too absorbed in the importance of my own work to worry about anyone else too much. On the flight to St. Louis I had a revelation that lead me to rewrite my paper. I usually don’t do that. I am usually a bit neurotic about papers. I have them done ahead of time and I practice them a lot. This time I was a little behind. I had a version done, but it was only half baked. Then on the plane I had chance to bake the ideas a bit more. The result was that I needed to rewrite the thing, and I am glad I did because the paper came out much better. I really wanted it to be good because the session was organized to honor a very famous and influential archaeologist—James A. Brown. Not the Godfather of Soul, but the Godfather of Eastern US Archaeology. The entire session was the best ever presented at a meeting—as universally agreed upon by the participants—and the honoree was very happy. The result is a testament to our devotion to our craft and the importance of the work.

I did get my one meal of good red meat and a white potato. It came with a pretty good story, too. We were leaving the hotel room to go have a steak at a place near the hotel. We exchanged pleasantries with a man standing in the lobby and he asked if we were headed to dinner. We told him we were going to have a steak and he asked where. We told him and he said it was a good place…but there was a “but” in there so I took the bait. I asked if he knew a better place. He said he did but that he owned it so he was biased. It turned out that he owns a restaurant with Jim Edmonds, long-time St. Louis Cardinals baseball player. He said he would go and get his limo and drive us to the restaurant. He does that for anyone who wants to go eat at his place. Check it out, it is a great place: 15 Steakhouse 1900 Locust Street, Saint Louis, MO 63103, (314) 588-8899. So we got our limo ride and a good steak. We rode back by the conference hotel to drop off one of our party and a bunch of our colleagues saw us in our limo. Honestly, I felt just a tiny bit like I was in a John Hughes 1980s film. Still, we got a good story out of it.

Despite living well for a few days—eating out for every meal—I still did pretty well with my weight. When I got back last week, I weighed 188.5. Today I weigh 187.1. Just one more pound I will have lost 20 lbs!

Its All About the Fat

Today I weighed 189.4 and for the past three days I’ve weighed in under 190. So I feel safe in thinking that I’ve lost just about 16 lbs so far. I won’t lie. I’m pretty happy with that. The funny thing is that I continue to lose weight even though I really haven’t exercised consistently for weeks. Sure, in our new house I do walk more and have been going on pretty long walks with the kids at least a couple of times a week. With no TV I haven’t been able to sit on my butt, shove food in my face and passively rot my mind for hours on end. I’ve been forced into being more active. So maybe all of that helps. Plus I now live in the cool part of town where everyone exercises and is skinny. Maybe the aura of the place is rubbing off on me. I know I’ve become instantly cooler since moving here. I’ve certainly gotten better looking since moving here. So why would I become skinny just as fast?

I am off to the Society for American Archaeology conference in St. Louis today. It will be my first conference since I’ve changed my diet and started losing weight. At conferences I tend to drink a few beers and eat big lunches and dinners (and skip breakfast because I am rushing off to attend papers). That sort of behavior could really mess up my weight loss thing and I don’t want to do that. At the same time, I do want to at least enjoy the conference a little bit. Some of the thrill of going to a conference would be lost if I just drank herbal tea from an eco-friendly metal bottle and munched on carrots for dinner. I’ve got to drink at least a couple of heavy, carbo-laden beers and have at least one good, glutinous dinner filled with fatty meats and white potatoes. Mmmmmm, I can't wait!

We’ll see how I fare. I’ll be back for the weigh in on Saturday.

Gilligan's Island

We’ve been in our new house for over a week now and have gone through some significant transformations. This move is supposed to help us change some things that were entrenched in our lives but that we wanted to get rid of. One of those was the amount of TV we watched…especially our kids. We homeschool and so our kids are home a lot. The TV was too easy to fall back on and took up too much of our collective time. So, with the move we got rid of our cable subscription. The idea is that we can get most of the TV and movies we want using the internet. Sure, it’ll be hard to get professional and college football when the season comes around again, but I have some time to figure that one out. At least I can pay for cycling tv and watch the rest of the season online.

The one problem so far has been the internet access. We couldn’t get it switched from the old house to the new one until tomorrow. So, we’ve been using our Verizon mobile wireless. I generally use it when I work at my office in Aiken or when we are on the road. The hitch is that it has a 5 gig monthly limit. We’ve never had any trouble going over that…but we’ve never used it as our sole internet source, either. Well as of yesterday I had to stop using it because we were coming close to our limit. So….no TV and no internet…it is getting as primitive as can be here…like Robinson Crusoe.

I desperately wanted to watch some of the Paris-Roubaix race today. I was really hoping Hincapie would have his day on the cobbles. I knew I couldn’t watch it on our Verizon account because there wasn’t enough space. I tried to watch it on my wife’s IPhone, but couldn’t get a stream to watch. I started to get a bit frustrated and panicky. Then I realized that the internet was still hooked up at our old house. We haven’t completely moved out yet. I frantically got my son ready to head over there…under the guise of continuing the move. Really all I wanted was to watch the race. By the time I got my son ready it was 10am and I knew the race would wrap up by a little after 11. We got to the old house at 10:30 and immediately I tried to get a stream to watch the race. The problem was that I couldn’t find a stream that was active. I tried and tried but didn’t succeed until just a bit before 11am. By then, Spartacus (Cancellara) already had a huge lead with only 10K to go. I got to watch him mug for the camera and take his victory lap around the track at Roubaix. I missed most of the really parts of the race. It was then that I realized that the charm of my self-imposed electronic exile was starting to wear thin.

That dissatisfaction began percolating the day before when I got an email from my Dad. Most of the email was about sports—Tiger Woods and the Masters, Donovan McNabb, Brad Childress, and Tim Tebow, etc. The problem was that I hadn’t seen anything about sports for days because of my TV weaning experiment and dwindling internet access. I just now learned who won the Masters and still don’t know what he was talking about with McNabb, Tebow and Childress. Hell, I didn’t know who won the NCAA title until several days after it had happened, and up until that point I didn’t even know who had played. I am a bit of a sports junkie, so all of this is disconcerting.

Honestly, living at this new house has cut me off from the outside world. I feel like a castaway…like I am stranded on Gilligan’s Island. We’ve got the one white transistor radio and that is it…no phone, no lights, no motor car, not a single luxury. I am waiting for my wife to break out the coconut cups and suggest we move into a bamboo hut and sleep in hammocks. Before I know it, I’ll be generating electricity using a bamboo stationary bike. I guess that will help me lose weight and prepare for long bike rides.

Tomorrow the cable guy is supposed to come and hook up our internet. My link to the outside world will be restored at last. I am just a little worried that there will be some problem and he won’t be able to do it. The last person to live in this house left when she was 90 and had lived here for decades. For all I know, the cable line I see poking out of the floor goes to that antenna on the roof and no where else. We’ll need to wire the damn house for cable and that will take a different work order, a different kind of technician…and another week. As I think about this possibility, the walls start to close in on me, my breathing gets labored, and the Gilligan’s Island theme begins to play in my head….I’m sweating a bit, too. If this keeps up, I might be forced to do the unthinkable. No, not get the TV hooked back up. I might just have to go to my office (gasp). The coffee sucks, there isn’t any food, and the nagging obligation to do work is always there, but at least there is internet…and news of the outside world.

Moving Out, Moving In

So I realize that I haven’t posted on this blog for well over a week. I am sure if there was anyone reading it, I’ve lost them. I’ve been working on moving our household and keeping up with all the other irons I’ve got in fires. Moving has not been the miserable experience I expected it to be. Before this move, we had just moved back in August. We had been in that house for 5 years and it was big enough that we could collect a lot of stuff and spread it out. In that move, we consolidated the junk and boxed it. We really didn’t get rid of much. This time, we moved into a smaller house where there isn’t room to spread accumulated junk out. We have to get rid of stuff. As I sit in my new breakfast nook/homeschool room typing (with the rest of my family sleeping peacefully), we still have stuff in the old house. It is both a blessing and a curse that our previous landlords have allowed us to “stay” in the other house until the end of this month. It is nice because we have the freedom to move over at a sane pace, allowing us to keep up with school and work. It is bad because it allows us to leave stuff there and feel nice and comfy in our new house….even though we have a lot of purging to do.

Let me digress because the name landlord just struck me. My wife and I owned our home for 9 years (living the American Dream and participating in the ownership society envisioned by the neoconservatives) and have only recently returned to the status of renter. The term landlord has a real feudal vibe to it. That is because it is a term that came out of feudal systems like that of medieval England. You, know that system where the few that owned land allowed the landless masses to work on it. The peasants were bound to the land of their landlord and usually paid rent in the form of produce or labor. The landlord had a paternalistic responsibility—to provide peasants protection and justice. I am sure the way it all worked varied from lord to lord, but in many cases the peasants were powerless, exploited, and effectively functioned as indentured servants or slaves. Well, the situation has changed somewhat. I am really only bound to my lord’s land for the tenure of my lease and the protection and justice I am provided in return is pretty narrowly defined. Still, that name makes me feel uneasy.

So back to moving; I feel like I was smart about it this time. Instead of renting a truck and relying on my labor and that of friends and my ever loyal graduate students, this time I hired a couple of movers and a truck. They moved all the big stuff out of my old house and into the new one. They were big, strong guys. They did it all in about 3 hours. The cheaper way (friends and graduate students) took a few more hours, but most importantly it was very taxing on me. This time, not so much. I watched, I directed, and I shoved stuff in their direction. It was a lot easier. Sure, it may have cost a bit more, but it was different in a very important way. I didn’t break a sweat. In case anyone has forgotten, everything always comes back to me, me, me.

Now, my chance to sweat will come. We still have a basement full of boxes and bins that need to matriculate to the new house. The thing is, we don’t have as much room for them in the new house. That means before the next migration, we need to go through all that stuff and get rid of as much as we can. Now, I am hoarder by nature. I don’t think the main reason is because I don’t want to get rid of stuff. I know what I want or need to keep and what I don’t. I hoard because I am incurably lazy. It is easier to throw stuff in a pile than throw away the useless stuff. It is easier to shove junk in a box than it is to go through it and figure out what I really want and don’t want. If you let this approach go long enough, stuff builds up. At this point, my lazy nature is attacked from both sides. I don’t want to have to go through all that stuff, but I don’t want to have to bring it all to the new house. And I really don’t want to have to shove it all up in the attic. There is lots of room in the attic of the new house, but the problem is that you can only get it up there by using one of those folding ladders. That means getting heavy stuff up there or big stuff up there is going to be hard. As a general rule, I avoid hard if I can. In this case, I am forced to choose the lesser of two efforts. It will be easier to throw stuff away than it will be to move it into the attic. And, if I play my cards right my wife will do most of that work anyway.

I may not be obese anymore, but I am still fat and I am still lazy.