Sweet, Sweet Freedom!

I finished comps last Tuesday. I'd like to say that the intervening time between that accomplishment and this post was spent in drunken debauchery but, well, this is me we're talking about. There was some alcohol consumption, but unless you count spending way too much time reading Fark or watching Adult Swim as debauchery, there wasn't so much of that.
For a profession that supposedly involves fighting Nazis, encounters with supernatural/metaphysical beings, hot chicks, and snakes, I lead a surprisingly tame existence.

So, now I just have to wait for word on how I did. I'm not feeling especially confident at the moment. Actually, I'm not clear how anyone comes out of comps and still has an enormous ego. Susan assures me that one regains it with the dissertation, so I guess I'll be all pretentious again in a few years. Seriously, I spent most of last week with a thousand yard stare wondering why my brain felt like it was wrapped in honey-soaked cotton. Actually, that' s mostly how I felt while I was taking the exams too. This does not bode well. Maybe oral exams would have been better. At least then I could have attempted to joke my way out of my predicament. Or been intimidating enough to avoid answering things. It's hard to be intimidating with a laptop unless you're threatening someone with it.
I'd like to add that trying to do translation while also trying to make sense of how Heidegger, Husserl, Gadamer, Bourdieu, Habermas, Weber, Ricoeur and a bunch of other dead or nearly dead white guys relate to archaeology is not something I recommend.
Also, hieratic sucks. It just sucks. I can't read my own damn cursive handwriting, how the hell am I supposed to read cursive handwriting belonging to some dude who's been dead for a few thousand years? And who couldn't be bothered to sharpen his damn reed pen? "Duh, I see a p, w, an m, and what appears to be a comma...screw this shit and hand me my trowel!"

Sigh. Someone remind me why the hell I thought grad school was a good idea again?
At least I should actually be able to do some honest-to-goodness fieldwork again soon. Mmmm, dirt and vaccinations! Whee! Reach in that backpack and hand me my trowel, it's the one that says Badass not-hieratic-reading motherfucker on it.
I'd add a bad joke about "You know what they call a QuarterPounder with Cheese in ancient Egypt?" here, but that would involve me actually figuring out the equivalent measurement and I'm not looking at my grammar books again for a few weeks until the emotional pain of having bombed a perfectly reasonable, downright kindly test leaves me.

So, now I get to prep for the upcoming field season and relax a bit for a few weeks. At least until after I get my shots for the trip. Then I may be making offerings to the porcelain deity for a few days. Just so long as I don't come home with a mystery illness that makes me the most popular patient at the hospital again. "No, you goddamn vampires, you can't take blood from both my arms at the same time for 3 days in a row again. I'll beat you with this laptop and then stab you with my trowel!"