Week 0: Oh God What Have I Done

Man, I was stupid. What had I gotten myself into? Eight weeks of hard labor under the blistering Attic sun. I mean, in some respects, the Agora Excavations are the cushiest archaeology job you could get. You get a weekly stipend, free lodging, no tuition fees and you're in the heart of a city, rather than Bumbleheck, Nowhere. Any archaeologist would be crazy not too try and get in on this. Of course, I'm not an archaeologist. Heck, I haven't done actual, legitimate out-of-doors manual labor since I learned to exploit my mild-moderate allergies to basically everything outside when I was 8 years old. I am a student of History and Literature, by trade, only dimly aware that there is, in fact, a world outside of the library.

Supplies of Morale, which, as it would turn out, is something they very rarely mention on the list of things to pack, were already severely low when the "sounds nice when you apply" turns into "you know you actually have to do it now." This growing realization was made all the more apparent once my brother, having just graduated from Georgetown, left on his summer travels in East Asia, which, by his own admission, consisted largely of flying off to various countries on the Pacific Rim and the China Sea, bumming around hostels, bars and cafes and occasionally getting psychologically scarred by genocide memorials. Y'know, normal bourgeois things like that. Meanwhile, I, exhausted from the always excruciating Trans-Atlantic Flight, the nigh imperceptible toxicity of jet lag, and the all too noticeable noise of 3am Athenian Traffic, lay in bed dreading the fact that in a day's time I will have to get up at the crack of dawn to weed, sweep and dig, supervised by a cadre of veterans zealously opposed to any kind of restful posture between the hours of 7:00am-2:00pm.

Under warnings of my supervisor, Prof. Gawlinski of the LUC Classics Department, I had prepared as best I could for any eventuality. Even so my own lack of understanding of potential eventualities rather limited me in that respect. While I was prepared for the hot weather, the need to stay shaded and hydrated and to have relatively comfortable footwear (I am a Coloradan after all. I know the basics of outdoor care even if I rarely employ it), I was unprepared for the noise of the city, the confounding alien-ness of the Greek expectations about food (it sounds trivial until you're exhausted, starving and just want to eat something without going through the fuss of getting groceries or ordering at a sit down restaurant in a foreign language), and the fact that basic medical supplies (stuff like bandages, painkillers, and topical ointments. Important stuff when you are breaking in to manual labor) are only available in specialist pharmacies that close a half an hour after you get off work, especially since our lodging was a half hour's walk away (you see the problem here). I can't speak for others, but I would say that for me, logistics was the main drain on my morale than anything else. With the benefit of hindsight, simple things like knowing which train to take so you don't have to walk uphill for half an hour after digging for eight hours straight, knowing which pharmacy stays open late enough to actually be able to buy things before they close, and knowing where to get a substantial meal without any fuss improved my morale much more than than "Positive Thinking" or "Teamwork" or "Perseverance" and all the other stuff that this blog uselessly advised to me, as I failed to assuage my despair. It turns out, it's much harder to put on a happy face when you have actual, physical down to earth things to be miserable about.

Having learned "things suck more if you don't actually have access to things that could make them suck less," it strikes me now how easily this lesson has been forgotten. There has been much talk of late, much of which conflates "the poor" and "bootstraps," the most vehement of which usually comes from people who are not actually poor and, I assume, very rarely wear boots. From this perspective, I, who very briefly became poor not for lack of capital but for lack of a support system which could value that capital, gained a better appreciation for how value and access to resources actually works. It is not simply the lack of capital that makes one poor, (I had no lack of euros in my wallet), but also the lack of a system with which to turn that capital into actual value (I had no knowledge of the Athenian evaluation system because I was an idiot βάρβαρος trying to figure out everything by himself).

The "stop being poor" approach to poverty advocated by those who use the words like "bootstraps" with disproportionate frequency fails to appreciate the fact that all the work in the world will get you nowhere if there's no useful context to put that capital in. In terms of intrinsically valuable goods: food, good and preventative focused medical care, access to support networks, time for resting, things that make individuals more productive just by themselves, poverty restricts it through food deserts, extortionate medical expenses and endless work. Meanwhile, the investments most commonly available to the poor: payday loans, credit cards, auto loans and subprime mortgages, are degenerative in nature, meaning that both the debtors and the creditors lose money on the deal. The debtors, because the loans are predatory and basically vacuum up capital faster than the debtors can make it, and the creditors because they fail to see that they could get a better return from a debtor who has enough wealth to pay back the loans in full with interest and reinvest with a now trusted creditor. The "Protestant Work Ethic" which is beloved by so many people because 1): it makes people who haven't already made it immoral and therefore explains why they're so weird and scary 2): it absolves the people who have made it of guilt because the reason people are poor is because they're lazy and immoral and not because we really don't have any idea what we're doing and 3): it's a Protestant work ethic, and so anyone who considers themselves Protestant will probably say somewhere in the back of their minds: "hurrah for team Protestant, my group which I more or less arbitrarily consider myself is better than the other groups, yeah!" I'm sure that if it were called the "Muslim Work Ethic" or the "Juggalo Work Ethic" you probably wouldn't get so many Southern Baptists preaching the prosperity gospel.

Anyway, the point is that the first couple of nights before I actually started I was pretty miserable. I would continue to be miserable until sometime after that, and grow increasingly less so after I figured out how to exist on a day-to-day level without being a hungry sunken-eyed, blister ridden mess. Funny how that works out.

Until next time,

Michael Coffey

Week n: The Adventure Continues Apparently.

I've never been particularly sure how to kick off a new blog series, so I'll just roll into introductions without any substantial build up at all. My name is Michael Coffey, a senior History and Latin major and this blog is about my time at the 2016 Athenian Agora Excavations, organized by the American School of Classical Studies in Athens. Among my readership I am sure some of the more observant sorts might recognize that it is no longer, in fact, 2016, which certainly puts a damper on the dramatic illusion a bit. Yes, I must admit that this blog will be an exercise in memory rather than direct experience. I did indeed go on the 2016 Athenian Agora Excavation, I have photographic evidence demonstrating as such, but due to some administrative wonkiness before and after the event, I ended up in the Spring 2017 class. A bit of a head-scratcher, I admit but I find that it's generally better to just roll with it and to try not to ask too many questions

That is me on the right in the Turban. Nobody can rightly say I wasn't there. I totally was.

The structure of this blog is going to be a sort of a reliving of my experience as it happened. I doubt my memory of the events will be completely perfect, but it should be good enough to get by. In addition to that, I think that the fact that I've had about six months time to let the experience slosh around in my subconscious will provide for some interesting insights which I did not have at the time of the actual doing. With all that preparatory build up in mind, off we go! The adventure begins (again, though for administrative purposes it has been continuously occurring for the past 6 months)!