We’ve all had to take jobs we can’t stand just to make ends meet, and one guy with big dreams is currently slogging through true hell to try to make them a reality: This aspiring Egyptologist has been forced to take a soul-sucking Assyriology job to pay the bills.
Hang in there, buddy—don’t lose sight of your dream!
Twenty-seven-year-old Preston Cullen has always dreamed of examining mummies and descending into ancient pharaohs’ tombs as a bonafide Egyptologist, but unfortunately for him he’s stuck toiling away on mind-numbing excavations of massive Babylonian ziggurats for the bullshit Assyriology gig he had to take to support himself. The endless grind of researching Mesopotamian antiquities is clearly taking its toll on him, and there are days when the promise of one day analyzing the Giza Necropolis’s masonry for insight into contemporary Egyptian quarrying practices is the only thing keeping Cullen from blowing his brains all over the Neo-Assyrian bas-reliefs he’s reconstructing to keep food on the table. Of course he never expected the road to becoming an Egyptologist to be easy, but the monotony of staring at depictions of the same human-headed winged bull lamassu day after day as a faceless drone in the Assyriology machine is definitely pushing him to his limit.
Keeping his mental health intact amid the relentless tedium of Assyriological study has got to feel like trying to keep a match lit in a hurricane—Cullen’s pretty much had to become an expert at switching between browser tabs when his boss walks by so it looks like he’s trudging through some dull account of King Sennacherib’s grand construction at Nineveh when he’s actually memorizing the bloodline of the Egyptian Middle Kingdom’s 12th Dynasty ruler Amenemhat III. You know the poor guy would give just about anything for the dumbass cuneiform tablets he’s translating to be honest-to-god Egyptian hieroglyphs, but a guy’s gotta eat, and the quiet humiliation of working an Assyriology job while he strives to break into the Egyptology world is still better than going hungry, if just barely.
Anyone who’s ever taken a shitty Assyriology gig knows how soul-killing this must be for him.
Sifting through the ruins of millennia-old Sumerian temples obviously isn’t where Cullen hoped he’d be at this point in his life, but it’ll all be worth it when he finally gets a foothold in the Egyptology game and can leave this insipid nightmare job behind him. He can hardly wait for the day he gets to tell his overlords in the Assyriology department to cram the fucking Epic of Gilgamesh all the way up their asses and choke to death on the Mesopotamian sun god Utu’s dick. Who wouldn’t after putting up with their pointless comparative linguistic analyses of Akkadian dialects for so long? Cullen has grit his teeth and born the indignity of this awful Assyriology gig with aplomb, and with any luck he’ll soon be out the door to start his dream career studying the language and practices of the Nile River Valley’s ancient inhabitants.
Man, all respect to Cullen for sticking it out through this trash Assyriology bullshit. Here’s hoping his big break in the Egyptology world is right around the corner!
