Dreams unfulfilled, graduate unskilled
Yesterday I butchered an elk with a rock. It was a good time.
Lizard's in the archeology department at the U, and every year all the archeology students have a paleo picnic out in the boonies somewhere. She invited me to go along with her last weekend, but, as luck would have it, the new schedule came out at work and they'd changed my hours from last week, setting me down to close Saturday for the first time in ages. Knowing full well there was no chance at all of getting one of my coworkers to cover a Saturday night (having tried in the past, and with far nobler cause) I did the sensible, and slightly juvenile thing: 9:29 Saturday morning, I called in sick. At 9:30 I was sprinting out the door to catch the bus that would take me to Lizard's to catch the carpool that would take us to the picnic.
I was feeling a little bad about calling in sick, partly because I don't, as a rule, do it if I'm not sick, partly because Kate was the opening supervisor. Kate is a mildly vacant sweetheart who would probably accept it as God's own truth if I called in to say I couldn't come to work because I was Spiderman and had to fight crime on Venus. I was loath to take advantage of that. Fortunately, it was Mary who answered the phone. I would lie through my teeth about the end of the world just to spite that old bat.
Lizard and I both tried flintknapping, which so far as I can tell is basically just hitting a rock with another rock and watching all the other people somehow do it a lot better. I think we just picked a crappy rock, I really do, because I was really whacking the hell out of that thing and it wasn't flaking at all. It had some weird conchoidal fractures along one side, and they weren't willing to work with me. That's my theory. It was the rock. Anyway after we flintknapped our very own stone tools (or, y'know, took spares off the table) we turned to the elk.
Rarely have I encountered a sight so morbidly fascinating as that of a pack of overzealous nerds, hands wrapped around sharp bits of stone and jeans spattered with gore, grinning weirdly as they hack and carve through the legs of an elk. I'm told last year it was an ostrich, not an elk. Maybe that would've been stranger.
Then we ate bone marrow and pizza and went home.
Lizard's in the archeology department at the U, and every year all the archeology students have a paleo picnic out in the boonies somewhere. She invited me to go along with her last weekend, but, as luck would have it, the new schedule came out at work and they'd changed my hours from last week, setting me down to close Saturday for the first time in ages. Knowing full well there was no chance at all of getting one of my coworkers to cover a Saturday night (having tried in the past, and with far nobler cause) I did the sensible, and slightly juvenile thing: 9:29 Saturday morning, I called in sick. At 9:30 I was sprinting out the door to catch the bus that would take me to Lizard's to catch the carpool that would take us to the picnic.
I was feeling a little bad about calling in sick, partly because I don't, as a rule, do it if I'm not sick, partly because Kate was the opening supervisor. Kate is a mildly vacant sweetheart who would probably accept it as God's own truth if I called in to say I couldn't come to work because I was Spiderman and had to fight crime on Venus. I was loath to take advantage of that. Fortunately, it was Mary who answered the phone. I would lie through my teeth about the end of the world just to spite that old bat.
Lizard and I both tried flintknapping, which so far as I can tell is basically just hitting a rock with another rock and watching all the other people somehow do it a lot better. I think we just picked a crappy rock, I really do, because I was really whacking the hell out of that thing and it wasn't flaking at all. It had some weird conchoidal fractures along one side, and they weren't willing to work with me. That's my theory. It was the rock. Anyway after we flintknapped our very own stone tools (or, y'know, took spares off the table) we turned to the elk.
Rarely have I encountered a sight so morbidly fascinating as that of a pack of overzealous nerds, hands wrapped around sharp bits of stone and jeans spattered with gore, grinning weirdly as they hack and carve through the legs of an elk. I'm told last year it was an ostrich, not an elk. Maybe that would've been stranger.
Then we ate bone marrow and pizza and went home.
posted by Betsi at 9:06 AM
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