Maybe you're crazy

What a week...and tomorrow is not going to be any easier.

I can't even begin to say what I've done this week, I've just been a total mess. Somehow I've managed to go to every class and turn in my assignments and keep my appointments, but it's been this ridiculous haze that I've been meandering through.

Today I just had 510 but I had to present my thesis proposal (and I was randomly assigned to go last...butterfly-inducing!) so I spent hours working on the damn powerpoint last night and today. I did have the Benfica game streaming on the internet for a couple hours this afternoon (thank goodness for the internet - it's the first Benfica game I've seen for years), but I was mostly fussing with the powerpoint by then, trying to decide what was too technical for my culturalist classmates to understand/find interesting/not fall asleep listening to.

Then the NFL draft was on at 5 - I don't really like the new format, they have one round on Thursday and then more on Friday and Saturday...why can't we do that on Friday, Saturday and Sunday? Thursday is so awkward.
The Vikings picked at #12 and I was absolutely appalled that they picked Christian Ponder, FSU quarterback. APPALLED. He has some serious injury question marks and he played in the ACC for crying out loud!
But we've chosen him and I am going to support him...and I'm SO glad we didn't pick up Newton or Locker - they're both horrid.

But I went to class in a VERY bad mood. It took all four presentations before mine for me to calm down, paired with frequent mental reminders of "We didn't pick Newton. We didn't pick Locker. We didn't pick Newton. We didn't pick Locker."

I think my presentation went well - I found myself slightly discombobulated because I've been mildly coughy lately (I think it's just seasonal allergies) and my voice was cracky and creaky. But I got through it and when it was over Dr. Quintiliani said how mine in particular was a great example of how you do a thesis proposal where you've already done preliminary work as I have. So that was nice and I think I did well.

Of course, during the Q&A session that followed when Moises asked me to define seriation I was totally thrown for a loop - we had just defined seriation in class a couple days ago and there I was struggling to make a clear definition of it! I crudely defined it as a way of organizing things by their attributes, and outlined an example of painted pottery. I redeemed myself slightly by mentioning it was James Ford who started seriation in the United States and how he thought of it - by seeing different colors and types of pottery in cut banks of southwestern pueblos when there examining the local tribes.

Dr. Quintiliani asked me some tough questions about the "noise" in my data, and I hope I answered creditably. I haven't quite worked out how I'm going to do all that yet, but I'm pretty sure it's going to take a lot yanking my hair and yelling at my computer before I figure out exactly what I can simmer down into a coherent and broadly useful protocol - the whole POINT of my doing this is to pave the way for others and make this technique useful.

One of the girls - I forget her name - asked me if the theory behind my work was the same as Judy's (Judy reserved a large portion of her presentation for theory, but I cut it from mine as I only had 10 minutes to go through my entire project and what I hope to improve about it) and that was another poser. I certainly believe in evolutionary theory (in more than just archaeology), but the entire reason I focus on stylistic attributes is because functional attributes have performance values for the vessel and how and what it's used for, which is subject to frequent and unseasonable change what with changes in life and situation and trade/interaction. Therefore while the attributes of the temper I study must change over time to be any good to me, it isn't to change in an evolutionary manner - that is, in a functionally positive way. It can (and I hope and pray it does) evolve neutrally, like genetic drift, but the minute any attribute I study gains a performance value I can't use it anymore.

I tried to explain the difference between functional and stylistic traits by suggesting that some people may grind their shell with mortars and pestles and others may do so with manos and metates, and those would produce very different attributes (I assume) especially along the lines of form factor, compactness, roundness and aspect ratio, which are the ones I study. Functional traits would be area (the bigger the pieces, the thicker the vessel wall that can be supported) and perimeter (same principle due to surface area) and all that. I explained I would never actually grind shell different ways and examine them to try and assign ways of preparation to archaeological materials (talk about junk science), but I could find ranges and "modes" of attributes and group them with my statistical analyses, whether it's a similarity matrix or a principal component analysis.

Hmm...so this post is a lot more complicated than I intended it to be. Oh well. I should really get to bed, I have a lot of things to do tomorrow. Yay Thursday...