Sh*t or Get Off the Pottery

Looking for an exciting career in archaeology?  Looking to become a museum curator?  Well, you best sign up for one of Selkirk College’s late night pottery classes and start getting passionate about pottery.  I mean seriously passionate.  I’m not talking casual interest in vases or ugly ashtrays, I mean the whole kit and caboodle, like chips of pottery that you rebuild with plaster into more vases to demonstrate to everyone how the ancients carried things like water or wine before your ancestors flooded in across the Danube and Rhine and laid absolute waste to the Roman Empire, and then spent 1000 years wallowing in mud and plague before sheepishly admitting that maybe the Romans had a good thing going.  As a result, it became absolutely imperative to glue back together every single piece of pottery within a one-quarter kilometer depth of the surface of Europe as a sort of purgatory until every last piece is made whole again and your country can legitimately claim a classical heritage. 

That seems to be the order of the day: today’s European countries are just remnants of the Germanic and Asiatic hoards that ravaged the Roman Empire, and did everything but contribute to its flourishing.  Yet you can’t enter a so-called “national” history museum without having to first go through two rooms dedicated to prehistoric and classical antiquity and inadvertently wake up an old lady dozing in her chair who jolts up abruptly and waddles over to turn on the light, visibly annoyed that you interrupted her nap, or her Sudoku puzzle, or perhaps due to her burdensome self-awareness of the contradictory elephant with whom she shares the room.  But I really think she’s just annoyed that I interrupted her Sudoku.  And then I am annoyed that I have to spend at least 15 minutes looking at each display and feigning interest to conceal the fact that I have seen 14 similar vases in Tunisia, Spain, Albania and Ukraine (oh?  Didn’t you know the Romans were in the Ukraine?), the latter 13 leaving me jaded.  So I look, she waits, and we sporadically glare at each other with mutual contempt, a sort of loathing devoid of passion, neither daring to compromise this brinkmanship and expose the hypocrisy of one’s own position.