Dig This Bird

In the few months that I’ve been living in the English Countryside (excluding the two months I was back in America), the only real problem I’ve encountered is the constant poor internet connection. Right now I’m sitting in a pub with my boyfriend at 4 in the afternoon on a saturday purely for the use of their wifi. Job hunting in this modern age, when you don’t yet live in the area you’re looking to work, is utterly impossible without internet. Perhaps that’s why people were so much less mobile before the advent of internet job sites? Unless you got transferred or knew somebody who knew someone you rarely left a place with a job already waiting for you in the new place. Though, to be honest, it’s unlikely I’ll have a job waiting for me when my boyfriend and I finally move to a tiny rental somewhere in London. And it will likely be the depressingly new Docklands. Which I’ve never been to. And am expecting to hate.
So who in London wants to give me a job?

I’ve been bad.  I’ve left America once again and only marginally achieved my goal.  I finally sorted out all my junk, but never saw the plan through.  Rather than selling all my clothes and STUFF, it is all sitting in bags and boxes in a spare room.  Things I want to keep but could not bring with me on my plane flight back to England are in boxes and suitcases in my old bedroom, waiting to slowly make their way across the Atlantic.

So now I’m sitting in a pub in Chelsea, having finally submitted my visa application and officially a Master of Arts, trying to finish up job applications and send out e-mails I’ve been delaying sending.

And while I desperately want a grownup job, I instead foresee myself working behind the bar in a pub just like the one I’m sitting in right now.  Or back in a shop somewhere.

In the constant battle to better myself, I have taken up the weapon of writing Christmas cards for the first time. 24 is an appropriate age to start this habit, no? It’s one of those things that our mothers try to teach us, but in the age of e-mail and instant messages we forget that people still appreciate getting things in the mail. A few friends gave me Christmas cards in England last year and they all made my day. So Christmas cards it is, especially since it’s one of the few things, in addition to knitting, I have energy for at the end of the day now that I have a job.

Oh yeah, so that’s why I haven’t been posting. I’ve been commuting into the city everyday to work in my old boss’s new shop. Got a call from my wonderful ex-manager asking me if I wanted to work for the season since she knew I was home and I figured ‘what? cash? yeah, why not’. So I haven’t been doing much cleaning since that started up. I DID finally finish my room– three large bags of clothes for sale, and a few boxes of books and nick-nacks later, and I can finally see the floor. My closet is tidy, though Thanksgiving proved to me even a tidy closet can’t fix everything. Every time I tried something on to wear to Thanksgiving dinner with the ‘rents, I had trouble fitting it over my massive rear-end. 145 pounds and I am DONE with gaining weight. No more eating crap food I say. More jogging, less sitting on my ass (though I am putting off a run while I write this). I need my clothes to fit, especially since my boyfriend and I are now planning a trip to the BVI for New Years. Bathing Suits = TROUBLE.

So I have a lovely closet with clothes I love, but cannot wear. The Chanel suit? definitely won’t fit over my rear end. Danger Will Robinson.

In an effort to continue efforts directed towards improving myself, I went and bought new running shoes yesterday.

New Shoes- ignore the fact that they're lime and turquoise- they're COMFY

Boy, do they feel good, and boy are they pretty… or at least they were until I went jogging today and thought ‘why not cut across that field there?’ Short answer? Because that field was evil mud hiding under grass. Shame on you, secret mud. My sneakers were nice and white. Now they are covered in mud. Ugg.

I have, however, made progress on the cleaning out my life front. After helping a friend go through old clothes in her closet the other night, I mercilessly went through my own. If it didn’t fit or I haven’t worn it in over 2 years, it went in the ‘to sort’ bin. ‘To Sort’, because I have to go through and figure out what I will try to sell on here and what will end up in the garage sale/charity bin.

Of course I’ve also made more work for myself by moving all my sewing/knitting paraphernalia into my room. And I’ve gone and bought things, like said running shoes, and new converse, and a hat, and my friend gave me a scarf she got me in Guatemala…. friends, I think I have a problem. I’m addicted to stuff.

Today I’ve been bad. I have failed to accomplish anything but buying two new pairs of tights and yarn for christmas gifts. Well, I did also finish the crocheting project I started last night- a silly little bag just to show myself that I can actually crochet. Goodness, I spend my time knitting, crocheting, and snuggling my cat. If it weren’t for the fact that I have a boyfriend I’d worry I’m on my way to being a cat-lady. We’ll ignore the fact that he’s in a different country for the moment.

When it stops raining I’m planning on buying new sneakers so I can start jogging again. Hopefully that will ensure that I get out of bed before noon. The first two mornings I was back in America I was up by 8 am. I seem to have gotten over my jetlag quicker than I hoped. So I’m off to bed at a normal hour in hopes that I will get up early tomorrow and get back to sorting, binning, and boxing and all the self-realization that comes with it. Or I’ll just spend the day knitting. So long as I’m out of bed before 12 I’ll consider it productive.

It is officially late Autumn in New England. Leaves litter the ground and rain fills all the dips in the pavement and ruins my plans for the day. I had planned to continue my clean-out of the garage, but the dampness makes the work incredibly unappealing. Instead, I made the decision to start cleaning things out of my room- mainly my armoire. That was a mistake.

Only a few of the books I've collected over the years...

I hadn’t yet realized how much of my life I have yet to come to terms with. The day after my birthday, at the end of last month, I received my results from my MA in archaeology. To say that I was disappointed that my dissertation ruined my average and didn’t earn me a distinction is an understatement–I was distraught. Luckily I was in London with friends and they took me out for drinks. But one night of champagne cocktails did not undo my disenchantment with the world of academia. Any thoughts of applying for a PhD program vanished and instead I look to be gainfully employed. So today, in my mess of a room with past dreams pushed to the rubbish bin, I have to come face-to-face with my pack-rat nature. My room is filled from top-to-bottom with books from my undergraduate days. Anything that I thought might be useful I held onto, making my move back home after I graduate exhausting. With the boxes I sorted in the garage yesterday, I began sorting and putting away my books. And then the tears began and I wondered why old archaeology text books would make someone cry…

And then it hit me.  Cleaning out your old life, to someone with goals they never achieved, feels like admitting to failure. Everything that sits in my room feels like a testament to everything I never did. I know it’s a silly thing to say, as I’m only 24 and still have plenty of time to do so much, but there are so many things I’ve done that didn’t do how I should have. I was never top of my class like I had wanted, and that was always because I was too lazy to work harder. I have books only half-read that I finally have to admit I will never read. By the time I might actually get around to it, in a subject like archaeology, they will be old news.

Every book that I box up is screaming at me “you’re not good enough.”

And I think that’s why so many people have problems throwing things out. We keep things not only because we say we might do something with them, but because, to us, they grow to symbolize plans and ambitions we don’t want to give up.

And there’s the funny thing about plans. As good ol’ Robbie Burns said, “The best laid plans…”. Time doesn’t wait for us to get our acts together. Time continues and we must all accept that with the movement of time we must move and change as well. I’m not a failure because I’m not pursuing archaeology as a career or because I’m finally selling all these books. I’m actually doing well because I’m moving on. I’m accepting that what I want can change over time. I didn’t become a marine biologist just because I said that’s what I wanted to be when I was 8, now did I? I’ve never even considered that I might be a failure because I didn’t follow through with the wishes of my 8-year-old self.

So I will sell these books, be it online or in the garage sale, and not look back with tears in my eyes. After all, they’re books. If I find that I want to use them again, I can always join a library.

So, um, anyone want Donald Kagan’s series on the Peloponnesian War or books the Dead Sea Scrolls and the site of Qumran? No, seriously…. I’ve got like 100 books to get rid of now.

Once upon a time, digthatbird.com was started an ‘academic’ blog about archaeology.  Since then I have earned my MA in archaeology from the ‘prestigious’ Durham University in Durham, England, and am entirely sick of the academic world.  While I still retain hopes of eventually making it in the world of academic publishing, the current financial climate leaves me with little hope for an immediate future there.  As such, I have tucked my tail between my legs and have left my wonderful boyfriend back in England to return to my parents home for 2 month while I work on cleaning up my life.

In the year before I moved to England I cleaned out my wardrobe no less than 3 times.  Everything I decided I no longer needed or wanted went to goodwill, while other items like old denim went into my big bag of fabric for sewing projects.  Since then I have left two very large suitcases full of clothes at my boyfriend’s mother’s house, and still had two pieces of luggage to check on my flight from Heathrow to JFK.  Even now I have in my childhood room more clothes than I care to count (but I will do very soon).

The Horror of my childhood room

My parents have a barn, an attic, and a basement filled with almost 40 years worth of junk, old toys, and clothes, not forgetting books and records and the remains of 5 children (yes I am the youngest of FIVE) coming out of every orifice of their 6-bedroom house.

My goal?

Clean out this house and have a massive Garage Sale.

When I first got back to the states (yesterday) I had hoped to ask for a part-time job with my old employer, a wonderful boutique shop, owned by the designer, with stores on the Upper East Side and in East Hampton.  In the time since then I have realized that a part-time job is an unlikely dream.  The more I look at the piles and piles of items around this house I can see that this is a full-time job, especially as I am pretty much doing this on my own (with some help from my brother and near-by sister).  Despite the lack of income I will be receiving, I know that purging the remains of my old life (and helping my parents with theirs) will be a much-needed cleansing…  though how am I supposed to purge when every time I look in a closet I find vintage Coco Chanel and Oscar De La Renta?

On the TV we see incredible rebirths of houses freed from clutter, but in all of those there are professionals who know exactly what to do with things like a blueprint copier from the 1980s that has been living in the garage for 20 years.  Seriously- what the heck am I supposed to do with an old blueprint copier from my dad’s architecture office?  Do I get my brother to help me bring to a disposal center, despite the fact that we probably can’t lift it?  IS there someone I can call who will come pick up for an affordable price?  Or do I list it as “free to whatever schmuck wants to come pick it up” on the Fairfield County section of Craigs List?

And then there’s the clothes.  Oh the clothes.  Here we have a whole ‘nother kettle of fish (which makes me wonder when we ever boiled fish in kettles… ugg, I blame the Brits).  We have some clothes older than my parents.  We also have some, well, lots actually, that can be given straight to charity–and that is what we do every few months where my mother or I convince ourselves to do a small purge.  But some of these clothes are things like a vintage Coco Chanel suit, designed by Coco herself, that I will never ever ever part with.  There’s my mother’s wedding dress from her first marriage in the 1960s, and the amazing dresses she wore during that time.

My mother's wedding dress

Detail from the bodice of one of my mother's vintage gowns

The kimono my father had made for him when he visited Japan in the 1960s during his time in the Navy.

My father's kimono

Or my great-grandmothers burnt orange silk flapper dress from the early 20s with more beads on it than I can count that is slowly being devoured by time.  These are things we can’t just sell at some garage sale (especially one that will be asking for cash only).  I am on the quest for answers, another opportunity to learn through trial-and-error, and the perfect small wardrobe… though my clothes horse tendencies and my mother’s old wardrobe predict the last one to be unlikely.