Despite knowing better
Despite getting older
Despite rationality

Deep down

I still secretly believe that Nicole Kidman can do no wrong.

Rachel, our conversation tonight can be summarised as thus:

An unexamined life is not worth living
- Socrates.
-Christina Chung concurs.

An unexamined life is not worth living

?

- So said Rachel Hui.

I understand that at some point, this just becomes hopeless, mad rambling, but I'll be damned if that isn't what I'm good at. I read today that Assyrian relics in Northern Iraq are being chipped away and used as target practice. I teared up. It doesn't seem apparent, but I sincerely believe that what I'm studying and aiming for is important. It's not just something novel that I'm studying just to be counter-culture or just because it's a hobby of mine. I really care about it regardless of how much I may downplay it or feel sorry that I'm not doing something practical and hence support my family or hell even myself when the time comes to it.

News like this weighs too much on my conscience. So much so that I don't think I could comfortably lead my life just floating along and fulfilling some cash cow societal niche whilst things that are this important are eroded simply through ignorance. I can't even begin to imagine how some people can actually wish to destroy a historical monument just so that they can show it off in their homes and fulfill some sadistic little insecure want to possess. More and more. Right?

This makes me so angry, and I write this possibly in vain that there will be mass recognition in how I feel. But I can't stress it enough. This is so important. This is our history. As a world. Just because lives aren't taken doesn't mean it isn't genocide. I don't know how many of you get worked up over Darfur, but those of you who do, this is its equivalent. The French 'Oubliette', the Egyptian abolition of names; they all work on the same principle. They all aim to have certain people or certain events to be forgotten. And although it doesn't sound as horrifying as it should sound, it was once considered the worst kind of punishment by their respective cultures.

When you get down to it though, it makes sense. We die, and we don't want to die alone. Not just because we don't want to feel loneliness even at death, but that we want to be remembered. Epitaphs, grave stones, steeles all work to the same effect. We want to be remembered. We write and we record history, etch it into stone, work our lives into something worthy of immortalisation. The final and ultimate goal. And to have all physical records of these people and these events destroyed after nobody of the time are left to remember and keep these souls alive in their minds is cruelty. It is the worst kind of punishment we can bestow upon others, and when it comes to artefacts, it's the worst thing we can do to ourselves.

This is archaeology. It has nothing to do with dinosaurs. That's Palaeontology. We don't look like or get work anything as exciting as Indiana Jones. I have a trowel, not a whip. We don't just dig, we theorise, we protect, and we discuss, just like any other faculty. In fact, some archaeologists don't have much field experience. And what we do, is record. We record and we build and we remember on behalf of a world that doesn't remember. And occasionally, when people take notice of what we want to share with them, we're happy, and it fills us up more than material wealth can. We see world history as a connected unity, even from the very beginning, and we will continually feel this way about the world, regardless of what we want to specialise in.

And when something in Northern Iraq gets callously destroyed, it hurts over here in Hong Kong.

Stina.

Because you are called an outcast,
Zion
for whom no one cares.

After spending all night watching medically inspired television shows (Scrubs, Grey's Anatomy) I suddenly said to myself, "Damn, why didn't I choose to study medicine?" I laughed hysterically for about ten minutes after that, imagining myself holding a scalpel over someone and vomiting into the orifice that I just created because I can't handle the innards coming out of it. Not pretty? I thought so. I just couldn't stop smiling at the fact that watching television just made my brain say something that was so completely untrue and impossible. At the end of the day, I just don't have a head (or a stomach) for medicine. But after the laughter subsided, I felt regret and a sort of pity that I couldn't be someone who's a part of something so active and just meaningful.

I caught myself right there. I realised that I started thinking like 'them'. Those people who I've always been chagrined by, who belittle me because I study Archaeology and not something 'meaningful' like Law or Medicine. Like one of them who ridicule me publicly for the 'digging' aspect of Archaeology and compare me to the other people headed for air conditioned rooms with ocean views. I thought back to why these medical shows attract me so much and well, aside from the eye candy cast or the crazy psychedelic scenarios, I like the process of medicine. You get a problem, you diagnose, you solve it. You move your hands and are active about it and it's a project after a project. So... when I broke it down to basics, Archaeology is the same.

Looking at the interns and what they were going through reminded me of my practical week where they basically crammed everything we needed to know with our hands in and gave us exams at the end of each topically themed day. It was some of the most fun I've had in a long time. I love getting problems and then tackling it. Sadistically, I actually LIKE working. Piecing a real human skeleton together, identifying lithics, using a theodolite, even the infuriating act of locating a dig site through evaluating moss and other traces of God knows what was fun when I think back to it. I must confess it wasn't exactly how I felt when I fell in the mud pit, but thinking back, I can nod my head and say 'good times, good times'.

For a moment I forgot about my passion for Archaeology, how I've always believed that people without their history and without looking at their history are just empty shells without their soul. I forgot about how fun it is just to sit there in the classroom and being grilled by the tutor for some blatantly obvious answer to some obscure question on topography raised by some Archaeologist in his insufferable 25 page journal on Maeshowe. I forgot how important it all is, and why I do actually feel an honour in studying it, and hope one day that I could work for UNESCO and contribute something. That maybe someday the public knowledge of their past, even their ancient past, could be so advanced that people no longer walk around feeling meaningless and purposeless, like they do things for no reason and they don't know why. Learning about how we act and how we've always acted, and how we came to be gives it meaning, and it makes us grateful for all the things our predecessors went through.

People, we don't act randomly. Almost everything we encounter and do links back to something that takes us back thousands of years. And it's not a bind, it doesn't mean we're tied down, because if so we would never have progressed or would ever continue progressing as we do now. To me, it means solidarity, it means intimacy and warmth to know that I'm so closely linked to my ancestors, whoever they may be. It links all of us together, and it makes us gasp in awe and wonder of what we've come to be now. And don't say that we're not interested in history. If so, the orphaned child would never have the urge to find its parents. This is all history.

Right now I'm just filled with gratitude. I'm so happy that I'm free to study really what my heart desires, that I'm able to join excavations in places like France and Israel and Iran. That I have this opportunity to be involved in something so important.

I can care less for the naysayers.

Love,

Stina.