After five years of archival experience, I was in a room with the development officer and the man from the company who was persona non grata. Only last week did it slip in the last meeting before the department head left for vacation that I’d be handling a meeting for someone who was restricted access to a collection we had.

I sat in the cramped room full of cast-off teal chairs with a holdover from the seventies who really was a researcher that want to know how to be an archivist.

What gets my goat, and my goat is more spry lately, is that I don’t get paid, nor recognized for the profession’s work I do, yet here I am, refocusing this man’s excitement about sub-woofers into archival procedure. FOCUS PEOPLE.

Priorities in a project. Audience being addressed. Why am I telling a 50 year old man, a many decaded engineer, how to manage a project at the very basic level? This is not rocket science people. It is figuring out an audience for PAPER. Google can educate you in this.

He swung the door open like a gentleman, leaving room for me to slide in front of his body into the restaurant. As I walked in, all action stopped for a split second. The two older weathered men looked up quizzically and the large family at one end stopped in mid-chatter. The man behind the bar was wiping down a glass with a rag and he tilted his head.

I felt like the cowboy walking into the Mexican bar. It was actually a seafood restaurant.

GS told me it was pretty much a replica of the same restaurant of the city across the border. As only Spanish floated into my ears, he ordered accordingly.  I didn’t even need to cross to get the authentic experience – terribly convenient. I opened the menu and burst out in laughter.

The description for a salad: “a kind of fresh”. An appetizer was advertised as “tastely hot”. I appreciate that type of honesty.

The texts between J and I went something like this:

J: Hey guess what’s sitting at the muffler shop on our street?
Me, spinning in my chair at work: Oh, a DeLorean?
J: Oh damn, I didn’t think you had seen it yet.
Me: HOLY SHIT THERE IS A DELOREAN?!
J: You just guessed that? You didn’t see it?!
Me: NO! JEBUS! A DELOREAN!

I convinced, er, ahem, drug J over the half a block after I got off work. Specifically, drug him over as my cameraman.

The grizzled old mechanic, with a cigarette hanging from his lips, rolled his eyes and told me to open the door for the full effort. Don’t have to tell me twice.

I still giggle, and sometimes whisper in hushed tones, when I drive by it, especially aided in the last week when they’ve kept it on the outdoor lift, like a trophy to my lame obsession.

Leu chansonetta e’vil by Guirault de Bornelh (1138-1215)
[Ed. note: Emphasis mine.]

A little song, swift and free, is what I should like to compose,
which I’d then send to Dalfi in the Auvergne;
and if, as it goes on its way, it should find my Lord of Eblo,
it may help him understand that saying something obscure
is not all that hard, but with clarity is.

Because I know how to distinguish the basest man from the best,
I do not suffer reproof, nor am I weakened with worry.
But there’s one thing that gets me for I can’t send it away;
it cuts me to the quick when a man neither shines in discourse
for some little while, nor understands when to leave off.

Nor will I humble myself to my Lady so dear;
she’s someone I cannot describe but to say that I’m killed by her love.
Ah, more sorrows assail me;
I do not know how I can quiet them so that now I’m unable to rest;
And now my art is close to being destroyed.

Thankfully, there were Coronas.

I might have failed giving GS an authentic American fourth of July, because who has trout and wild rice for dinner on 4th of July?

At least, it’s a healthy fail.

I had noticed it a few weeks back, grumbled, and continued on with my day. It was the chipper and hyperactive student was stopped in her tracks as she blew through the break room. I leaned against the counter, watching her as she observed the magnets on the fridge and asked, “Who stole the Southwest?”

Earlier in the year I had inherited the bag full of magnets my Mom had collected around the country. Each state had their state saying or state flower. Texas and Delaware were mysteriously the same size. New Mexico was very similarly sized to Rhode Island. To my knowledge, this is not true, but a sliver of a magnet probably wasn’t the best at bolstering state pride up in the East Coast.

As my home fridge is covered with postcards that I goad my friends into sending me, I decided to take the bag o’ magnetic state pride to work.

“California, New Mexico, Texas, and Arizona… are gone?” She peered up and down and to the sides of the fridge much like I had.

“So is Nevada,” I said, munching my crackers.

“Who steals states?” she proclaimed.

“This is why we can’t have nice things,” I mumbled.

“Perhaps they ceded back to Mexico,” she said contemplatively and I laughed. Later, as we were working on a project together she leaned over and mischievously said, “I should put a sign up on the fridge.” She told me what she would write and I howled in laughter. “Please, please do. I totally condone it.”

Happy Fourth of July!

I had been getting the running heckles from my lack of writing. I guess fading into oneself is a tad harder when people watch where you tend to mentally yodel to yourself.

The questions were always a mix of the following:
Working for The Man has gotten you down hasn’t it?
Something horrible and tragic must have happened?
You’re spending your time consumed in the throes of a new passion?

There are some variables to create a finite answer to these.

Breaking the mold of stereotypes, let’s give the middle child of these questions some love first. No, nothing dramatically horrible has happened in a span of the last few months. Saying this shouldn’t, hear me now Universe, alter that course too much, suffice to say that I’ve been enjoying the routine of my life. Finally, I’m being forced to contemplate things that I’ve pushed away due to manic action, three too many margaritas, or serving up a can of crazy relationship madness. I’ve realized that there is such power in my subconscious that when in trickles down the stalactites into my consciousness I’ve tended to blot it out.

I’ve had to learn to be less afraid of my own thoughts and desires lately. It’s a dangerous territory because it confronts what things you do that are wrong and recognizes those routines you’ve woven form yourself that might trap into something that you know you still have the power to change.

“Watch your thoughts, for they become words.
Watch your words, for they become actions.
Watch your actions, for they become habits.
Watch your habits, for they become character.
Watch your character, for it becomes your destiny.”

I’ll devote some space here to going into the details of my thought, ['allo, blog purpose!] so I’ll not get too much further right now.

How’s about The Man? Oh, it’s all gravy. It’s currently the period of the year where the nine-month faculty takes off and everything becomes more relaxed. I was seen with flip flops the other day. I’ve had a learning experience as being the Unfun Boss who fires people who toss lip into the professional environment. Oh, and they read books and listen to their MP3 player when I walk by. I tolerate less and less blatant dumbassery.

Those who get to experience Indecisive Peach as a live person have also heard me rambling on about intrinsic and extrinsic motivation at work. This also shall be a separate post.

How’s about the throes of passion then? Yes, there is that too. And I’m currently pleasantly consumed. Enough said.

Friday’s Feast is still a link on my sidebar, but it’s been defunct for a long while now. I had this prompt kept for a rainy day. And…it is humid here today.

Using 20 or less words, describe your first driving experience.

I was fifteen and had my shiny new driving permit. On a late spring Saturday morning, I watched my Dad pull out my car out of the garage – a large, brown Cutlass Caprice Classic with a luggage rack that I later termed my ghetto spoiler. I hopped excitedly from one foot to the other, my Mom standing next to me. Leaving the car running, my Dad got out and gave me the trademark Serious Dad Face.

I got behind the driver’s wheel, my Dad in the passenger bench seat, my Mom sitting behind me in the backseat. I tapped the wheel at ten and two and I was lectured quickly about the power of the vehicle I was given the ability to control. I eyed the radio. “Don’t even think about it,” he growled.

I shifted the brake, pulling the handle behind the wheel forward and slipping it from Park to Drive. I pulled slowly, ever…so…slowly…out of the driveway. Turning to look behind me, I then looked up and down our achingly boring street. We inched out.

“CAAAAAAAAAR!” my Mom howled into my ear. I slammed onto the brake, slapped against my seat belt, watched my Dad brace himself against the dash and spin around eying my Mom who had flown forward and was clutching the brown couch of the seat with death white hands. “Where!” I yelped, spinning in my seat. My Dad gave my Mom a dirty look as if he already knew what was coming.

She leaned back, readjusted herself, and proclaimed, “Well, there could have been one.”

Out the hazy dream my consciousness was beginning to leak out of this morning, I heard the familiar sound of my alarm – a single gentle beep. Automatically, I ricocheted my arm diagonally upward pounding my Kleenex box with rigour. I had inadvertently placed my alarm clock on the wrong side of the nightstand.

I am a creature of habit. I sometimes wish I were someone who created traditions that held a weaving of intimate meaning, something akin to lighting incense before morning mediation and yoga. I, however, only usually just stumble blearily toward my TV and pop the necessary buttons.

Did you notice that I walk to my TV to turn it on? The TV in my bedroom is a relic from my childhood; it’s the very first TV I got when I was 12 or 13. Now still in my bedroom, it is the very first thing I do in the morning. I have a quiet, yet sincere belief that bits of the world might have fallen off the map while I was drooling on my pillow. These things I must know, you know, for travel purposes.

NBC is my favorite. The local news has a genuinely mellow, yet upbeat female anchor saying names of streets and intersections in the larger town they broadcast out of about an hour away. Traffic jams, bridge waits, all things I have absolutely no need for – entirely soothing as I readjust to the land of the living. About a year ago, they introduced a young, black weatherman that you just knew was not from around here. Chester Lampkin. They don’t make names like that around these parts.

But he certainly had chutzpa for the lingo when he started the job. He had taken upon himself to enunciate the Spanish in our town names to a cloying degree with an unsure clamor of Aaaaahs and a throaty El. I would mimic them back to him and chuckle. I off-handly told a co-worker about my sincere affection for Chester and his slow spiral of toward Gringoization of town names. “I love him too,” she declared, “Chester – what a name!”

The tell-tale grandeur of seven o’clock would then ring out with the arrival of the Today show. Matt Lauer’s fluctuation between mid-life crisis to utter contempt was my version of morning coffee. His clear demonstration of contempt for Roker or his unhidden apathy for celebrities he interviewed (only to be playfully aroused by a feral Tom Cruise), this was the snark of the world that I loved and found strange, strange comfort in.

The digital conversion had been coming and looming and was then pushed away like me procrastinating a blog post. But it did arrive and there I was, regretfully opening the package of my converter box. Several cords, a plug into the outlet, and I hit the scan button.

My NBC was gone. I scanned several times. I sat on my bed eyeing the converter with hatred. I scanned again. I attempted foil, just in case.

Good Morning America…is just so damn perky.

So, I’ve joined NaBloPoMo’s July month long blogging. It’s theme: Routine. Given that my blog has lacked a lot of that in the last several months, I’m taking it as a call from the universe to get myself back to pound the electric keys for a bit. With Diane Sawyer, it’s going to be a hell of a long month.

And there was another trip to plan, perhaps for next year or the year after that, for this continent or another, but undoubtedly there was some place to go because once you’ve been elsewhere it is hard not to return.

- PastaQueen