A few weeks ago, I went on a little tear about how much I hate being sober.
People had thoughts.
Ric V——-
about 5 hours ago
Baby, you have to try Kratom. It's an Asian herbal that's very popular in the USA right now. I buy branded powdered leaves already made into capsels. When I get all crazy like you were when you wrote this I open a Diet Coke and swallow 12 of those caps. In 10 minutes I'm evened out better than two stiff drinks. I'm a blackout drunk who almost dies every time I drink, so I know about the pressure. Try the Kratom, but stay away from the concentrates, those act like an opioid
I replied that I was open to the idea, but that I’d need to research it.
To which Ric replied:
The leaves ground up do the trick. Buy a branded product, not the loose leaf stuff. I got Salmonella from some loose leaf once. Brand name caps are the safe way to go
A little salmonella from some unlicensed psychoactive vegetation wasn’t going to stop Ric.
I have to admit that I have a problem with people who spell their name “Ric” without the “k”.
When I see the name “Ric”, I see fertility horn necklaces and an abundance of chest air. I see maroon silk shirts opened to the waist, from which wafts an almost visible cloud of Drakkar Noir, my generation’s version of Axe Body Spray.
To my mind, “Ric” raises linguistic questions. Is the “c” actually hard, or does only the addition of a “k” make Rick “Rick”, rather than “Rich”?
[omg, get to the point]
My point is, questions like this used to interest me (and obviously still do). So when I got to college and they asked the million-dollar question, “What are you going to major in?”, I considered semantics.
Now, I thought I knew what semantics was, but I did not. Honestly, I still don’t. I knew it had something to do with language, and I like language.
Language good.
I mentioned to someone in casual conversation that I might take semantics and they shot me down like a Chinese spy balloon.
“Semantics isn’t what you think it is.”
I took their word for it and immediately majored in political science.
But now that I Google it a little, semantics actually looks pretty interesting and I wonder how desperately different my life might have been had I taken that one class, just to see if I liked it.
But of course, that’s not a luxury you’re actually afforded. Or at least, you weren’t when I went to school. There were only so many hours in the day, and they were filled with mandatory French classes (four years of high school French and non, I still could not test out of it) and mandatory this and mandatory that. Exercising intellectual curiosity was actively discouraged.
I also wanted to be an archeologist. Badly.
This is what comes of watching Indiana Jones and The Temple of Doom way too many times.
In fact, my college offered archeology as a major. But what eventually dissuaded me from that particular career path was the incompatibility of contact lenses and curling irons with a harsh desert environment.
I’m not a camper. I’m more of a “does this hotel have room service?” kind of girl.
Things would have been a lot different had I known there were subdivisions of archeology. That it wasn’t all Nazis and bullwhips.
That I could have become, say, an experimental archeologist.
This came to light one recent evening as I watched PBS at my mom’s house and slowly lost all feeling in my hands because she won’t turn the heat on (why did I get assigned to the ONE old person who doesn’t like oppressive heat??).
As I watched a crunchy, professorial sort press fabric into a soft clay bowl (reason still unclear) I suddenly realized that clay — yes, that clay, the kind used to make pottery—actually comes out of the ground.
This is one of those facts I’ve always theoretically known, but didn’t really know.
I mean, I know clay is, well, clay.
I know clay exists in the ground.
But somehow I never equated these facts with the process of actually digging up the clay and turning it into, say, a water jug.
And as it turns out, it takes a lot of work to turn clay, which is just a particular kind of dirt, into adult Play-Doh.
ANYWAY.
This guy was out in a field digging up clay and making primitive pots and pressing patterns into them with a piece of hand-woven fabric, and this was his job.
Nary a cursed pyramid in sight.
A little research on my part (a day late and a dollar short, as they say) finds that experimental archeologists try to replicate the techniques past civilizations used to create or use objects.
They often recreate the whole shebang. They’ll build an entire ancient abode and imagine family life and all the things that made it possible and even pleasant. Including the decoration on a water jug.
I didn’t know this at the time, but one of the most famous examples of experimental archaeology is the Kon-Tiki, a large raft built by Norwegian explorer Thor Heyerdahl.
In 1947, Heyerdahl sailed the Kon-Tiki from South America to Polynesia to show that ancient seafaring peoples could have successfully navigated the Pacific Ocean.
Even in the 1970s, this was all anybody talked about. “Kon-Tiki” this and “Kon-Tiki” that. I was not particularly enthralled, and I certainly didn’t equate a big ugly boat with archeology.
But I certainly would’ve been interested in forensic archeology (think “The Killing Fields”), paleopathology (the history of disease), or even industrial archeology.
And now it’s too late to go back and change the entire course of my life.
I probably wouldn’t have been able to decide on just one thing anyway. I’m too curious about everything. God bless the documentarians.
I think kids today have it better because they have the entire internet at their disposal and they’re exposed to so many other ways of life and fields of study.
Of course, they all take marketing. But still.
“Semantics isn’t what you think it is” ... I’m definitely using that!
*"I’m too curious about everything."*
Great! Never change this attribute, tomorrow another subject and another study, another revelation.