Professors are people too.

Last night my PhD advisor (who is my secondary/back-up supervisor) invited her students and postdocs to her house. Her students are all Assyriologists (as is she) and all know each other. As a non-Assyriologist who had only met a few of the other students, I have no idea how I got on the invitation list but I was REALLY EXCITED to go. Visit a Cambridge professor's natural habitat? Cool!

My advisor has just moved into a "cottage" in a little town outside of Cambridge, called Waterbeach. I often cycle to Waterbeach along the river path just for fun (although my suggestion that my friend and I cycle to the party got rejected by a hailstorm) and it's a beautiful little place with narrow streets lined with rowhouses. My advisor's new house has a garden with a pond, and her ceilings are low and stairs crooked. There's a shelf full of nail polish jars in her kitchen, and every wall has a bookshelf. But instead of academic books, these shelves are absolutely full of novels, alphabetized by author's last name. For example, only A-C fit on the first floor, and the rest, she told me, are on her bedroom shelves or in boxes.

My advisor lit a wood fire for us, and we all chatted about new projects to digitize clay tablets with cuneiform writing on them (which is what everyone there studies). A few people independently promised me, smilingly, not to make jokes in Akkadian (the ancient language written on the tablets, whose jokes I obviously wouldn't get). I didn't know whether to feel welcomed by that or feel like this joke ban was killing their fun. We talked about the crazy things people do at academic conferences (last year's Assyriology meeting had an impromptu pole dance?!) and the dire job market. We talked about Germany, where my advisor has just spent a year and where several of her students are from, and France, which was having its national election yesterday, and the US, whose national election campaign promises more future comedy for European (and all other!) observers.

Funny that we study people who span literally 20 millenia (ancient Babylonians to my preparators), yet we as academics have a lot in common.