Freelanciversary

It was 20 years ago today Sgt. Pepper taught the band to play…no, wait, that’s not right.

*sound of backwards tape loop*

It was 20 years ago today that the Holyoke (MA) Transcript-Telegram laid off half its newsroom, including me. It was my second post-college job; I was all of 23.

I celebrate what I call my “freelanciversary” today because I started beating the bushes for freelance work within hours of losing my job, and in fact landed a couple of assignments within a week or two. I didn’t truly commit myself to self-employment until the following spring, when I turned down an offer from a newspaper in semi-rural Pennsylvania. In the depths of a recession it was the only offer I’d gotten in nine months, but I knew if I moved there, this city girl would be stuck in the sticks, possibly permanently, so I said no. And that, as they say, was that. I’ve neither had nor looked for a “real” job since.

I’m going to be honest: I was a shitty employee when I was one. I wasn’t good at prioritizing the paper’s needs — in fact, I’m pretty sure I was first on the layoff list not just because I was the last hired, but because the previous month, I had refused my editor’s request to cancel my vacation on two days’ notice. He wanted me to stick around to cover what I vaguely remember was a predicted severe storm system. I was young, stubborn, and too poor to eat what I’d already spent on a non-refundable airfare. In retrospect, it was probably a test. Did I fail? Well, yes, in the sense that I lost my job three weeks later.

In the larger sense, though, I think I passed the test with flying colors. In 1993, the T-T laid off everyone else, too, and joined the long list of defunct newspapers. By then, I had moved back to the Boston area, was writing weekly features for the Boston Herald’s careers section, and had earned my first national byline with a piece in Cosmopolitan. Money was excruciatingly tight — I was sharing a three-bedroom in Somerville, filling in the gaps between assignments by temping as a legal secretary, and eating a lot of rice and beans — but I no longer had to work long hours, navigate confusing office politics, or, some days, get dressed at all.

A lot has changed in 20 years. The Internet has come along to make some things easier (I do not miss the days of snail-mailing printed-out manuscripts a week before deadline to make sure they arrived on time, nor — much as I love libraries — do I miss hours of fruitless research there), but it’s also deeply fucked up the publishing industry as a whole. Writing for consumer publications is less glamorous and more grinding than it used to be; as my friend Mary Beth tweeted just this morning, “Recently rejected prestige assignment for no pay & lucrative one from mag that treats writers like shit.” On the other hand, while I never imagined I’d spend about half my time writing web content, case studies, and other marketing communications for high tech companies, my bank account finds it very satisfying — and I can actually understand what my techie friends are talking about. I’ve written a book for which I still get the occasional thank you email eight years later. I still get paid to do fun stuff now and then, like talking to pizza-obsessed entrepreneurs and learning to make chocolate truffles. And I still don’t have to get dressed if I don’t want to. (You’ve heard of Casual Friday? I like to have Pantsless Wednesday.) All in all, I love my job. And how many people do you know who can say that?

So here’s to you, editor who now seems to be working for a newspaper on Cape Cod. Thanks for canning my ass 20 years ago this afternoon. It didn’t seem like it at the time, but it was actually the greatest thing anyone’s ever done for me.

Filed under progress, triumphs, Uncategorized | Comments (5)

Sherd you? Why not!

On an archaeological dig, everything is a feature or a context (and sometimes both). A dark spot that might be a filled-in pit is a feature. The stuff that you dig out of it is a context. Anything from a context gets recorded as coming from that context. So if something gets dug up, kicked “out of context,” and trampled down elsewhere, or bulldozed out of the way to get down to the next layer of archaeology, or whatever, it’s basically trash — it no longer has any archaeological value, because you can’t relate it to anything else. On the dig I volunteered on, anything that was out of context ended up on the big mound of dirt which will eventually be used to backfill the site once the excavation is over and construction starts. So we were allowed to sort of kick at the dirt to see what we could find.

Over the week, I plucked out three small souvenirs. One was a thick chunk of iridescent glass which one of the archaeologists immediately identified as the bottom of a beer bottle from the brewery that was on the site in the 1800s. It makes a very nice paperweight. Another was a fingertip-sized bit of blue and white ceramic that was obviously part of a dinner plate (probably also Victorian), which I think I’d like to set into silver to wear as a pendant. The third was a piece of fired red clay pottery with a bit of greenish brown glaze at the edge. I snagged that on my final day on the dig and didn’t have a chance to show it to anyone there, so I had no clue what it was. I figured since my other two souvenirs were Victorian, this one probably was, too. Maybe a bit of a clay roof tile or something.

Before I left York, though, I visited the Yorkshire Museum and ended up chatting with one of the employees, a nice young guy named Barry who, as it turned out, happened to be an archaeologist specializing in old pottery. When I told him about my mystery object (which was already packed away in my luggage), he gave me his card and told me that if I sent him photos of it, he’d try to identify it for me. So I did.

And lo, this afternoon, I got this very exciting email from him:

What you have there looks like a sherd of locally made Post Medieval Red Coarseware, with a crude splash glaze decoration. Roughly 1450 to 1600s, it was a ‘functional’ type of pottery, similar to Humberware, made at a time when metal vessels had become fashionable and pottery cheap.

Unfortunately it’s hard to tell what it would be part of without part of the rim, base, or handle (and it’s hard to judge the curvature from a photo), but in the absence of any distinguishing features, it’s most likely from a jug.

So I now have a roughly 500-year-old bit of broken pottery sitting on my mantelpiece. How cool is that?

Filed under triumphs, Uncategorized | Comments (6)

Making things up

I came home from vacation with an idea for a mystery novel.

Yes, I fear I’m going to commit fiction.

You might ask why someone who writes for a living feels fear at the prospect of writing something. Simple: part of me thinks if I’m going to spend my precious time on writing, it should be guaranteed to produce income. I can noodle around with some other hobby that won’t suck away the writing energy I need to make a living.

And let’s face it: I’m a nonfiction writer. I studied journalism; I worked as a reporter; I write about true things. All the pieces are there, I just have to put them together in a way that’s both logical and attractive. When I think about writing fiction, my first reaction is, “What do you mean, I have to make things up?”

Of course, I have friends who are novelists, and their reaction to the idea of writing nonfiction is basically, “What do you mean, I can’t just make things up?” So clearly, the part of the brain that writes fiction is not attached to the part of the brain that writes nonfiction, other than some overlap in the actual language-producing regions. And maybe, if it’s a different part of the brain, the act of writing fiction won’t diminish the energy and motivation I need to write the things that pay my bills. Maybe I can think of it as creative play, the way I think of photography or cooking, two other things I do with no expectation they’ll lead to anything but enjoyment.

I also have a hard time with quitting. I have “winners never quit and quitters never win” burned into my synapses. I feel like I have to push my way through things until I’m good at them or they’re done, whichever comes first — even if doing so makes me completely fucking miserable. So maybe it would be a salutary experience to try something, just for the hell of it, and give myself permission to quit if I realize I’m not enjoying it.

Because I have this vivid image of a woman in a tattoo artist’s chair. She’s having a small but intricately detailed skull inked onto her left shoulder. She’s explaining to the tattoo artist that a girl needs something by which to remember her first skeleton. And I need to know what happens next.

Filed under fears, progress, Uncategorized | Comments (5)

Flying and landing

I got home three days ago from my trip to England, and my brain and body are finally back in the same time zone. It was a wonderful adventure on so many levels that rather than try to write a narrative description, I’ll make a list of a few things:

I spent a week surrounded predominantly by people who plan a career in archaeology, if they don’t already have one, and yet I didn’t feel stupid, intimidated, or shoved off to one side. Everyone I met was absolutely delighted to have curious amateurs in their midst — I certainly wasn’t the only one. Better yet, people were thrilled when my questions weren’t nearly as clueless as they could have been.

I spent a week surrounded predominantly by grad students, undergrads, and even one or two kids in secondary school who were trying to decide whether they wanted to study archaeology at university, and yet I didn’t feel like an old fart. Granted, I acted like one, at least in terms of complaining about my aching muscles and politely declining invitations to hit the clubs or stay out drinking until last call. But I knew I was doing all right when a 17-year-old replied to the revelation that I was nearly 43 by saying, “Damn, you’re pretty cool for someone my mum’s age.” (Thanks, kid.)

I somehow became the Voice of Wisdom for a young woman who was having, shall we say, interpersonal drama. I can’t claim to have any special insight into relationships, but I’m pretty sure I was giving good advice when I told her that in general, someone who says “I’m not looking for a girlfriend” isn’t just being coy.

I handled a piece of 1200-year-old human shit. No, seriously. I was taking my turn at the table where dirt-covered finds (the objects dug up on an archaeological site) get a gentle hand-scrubbing in tubs of water with old toothbrushes. It was obvious we were cleaning the contents of an old trash pit, which the experts had already decided was probably from the Viking era. It contained oodles of animal bones, bits of broken pottery, the occasional oyster shell, pieces of antler core. I had picked up what I thought was a dirt-encrusted chunk of pottery, but when I dunked it in the water, it started to crumble. The woman supervising us glanced over and said drily, “You might not want to wash that any more. It’s not going to get any cleaner.” Well, where else would Vikings throw out their trash if not in a handy loo? And it turns out Viking shit is an important find. (I note for the record that “my” piece was only about an inch or so in diameter.)

I also dug out two pits of my own, one of which contained half an ulna. I was all excited to have found a human bone, and even more excited when the supervising archaeologist said that based on its color and condition, it probably dated from the Roman era. With known Roman burials elsewhere on the site, surely the rest of the Roman was down there somewhere, minus half a forearm! But given where it was, it turned out, it had probably been disturbed when a later inhabitant (those Vikings again!) dug a trash pit through the burial, then thrown into another pit as backfill, and the rest of the skeleton was most likely elsewhere on the site waiting to be found by someone else. Ah well.

I learned that my knees and lower back do not like the digging part of archaeology. If I were to throw over writing for a new career as an archaeologist, I’d be much happier in the conservation lab, scraping corrosion off coins or something while sitting in a nice office chair.

Most importantly, I wouldn’t have known any of this had I not decided to make my vacation an adventure, and I’m damn proud of myself for doing it.

Filed under Uncategorized | Comments (5)

The big picture

In almost a year of pottering around with this blog and the concept of confronting my fears, I’ve discovered, to my delight, that the list of things I don’t dare risk is short indeed. Sure, there are things that make my pulse pound and my stomach flip. Heights. Spiders. Inexplicable rejection. Incurring someone else’s bad opinion. (That’s a tough one, that is. I have to remind myself daily that what other people think of me is none of my business.) But it turns out not much intimidates me so much that I literally can’t bring myself to do it.

Which is good. Because I’m beginning to realize that the things I really need to worry about are the things there’s no point worrying about. The ice in the Arctic is melting faster than even the worst-case scenarios had predicted, and the new worst-case scenarios now involve coping — figuring out which disasters to respond to, which hungry mouths to feed, which thirsty people to whom to provide safe water — rather than trying to keep the worst from happening.

Sigh.

Now that’s intimidating. And yet what can I do but accept it, do my tiny part, and hope it adds up?

Yes, I feel guilty about getting on a plane later this week to go halfway around the world. All that CO2 wasted for my whims! But I’m not going to cancel. The people whose artifacts I’ll be digging up could never have imagined what life would be like 1000, 1500, 2000 years in the future. They may not have imagined life would still exist; the medieval ones, at any rate, expected the end of the world to come a lot sooner. Standing in a ditch, digging up their ovens, their rubbish pits, their skeletons, and their … um … fossilized poop is a good way to remind myself that I have no idea what life will be like 1000, 1500, 2000 years from now. The world may all go pear-shaped in my lifetime, or in the next century. Then again, it might continue on in some way I can’t even begin to imagine. All I know is that by the time I’ve receded into history, the world will be as unimaginably different as our world would look to the Romans, the Saxons, or the Vikings.

Looked at that way, what, really, do I have to be afraid of?

Filed under Uncategorized | Comments (4)