Zero files were harmed in the making of this afternoon

Alex came over at noon with the stated intention of helping me organize the next phase of the heritage archive coordination. I made coffee. We sat down. I opened a folder. And then somehow it was 2:45pm and we had covered: the weird pacing of the last season of a show neither of us even likes that much, whether it is physically possible to over-ferment sourdough starter (relevant to my week, don’t ask), and a fifteen-minute tangent about whether hospitals will ever fix their scheduling software or if that’s just the condition we all agreed to accept when we took the jobs. The folders sat there. Untouched. Patient. Judging us.

Zero files were harmed in the making of this afternoon

In my defense — and I am fully aware this is not a defense — I have been in a weird suspended-animation kind of headspace since yesterday. The Fourth of July heritage hosting last year cracked something open for me, the way sharing Abuela Rosa’s recipes with people who hadn’t grown up with them made the food mean something different. And now I’m sitting with all these boxes and folders for the multi-family coordination piece and I think I just… needed one afternoon where I didn’t have to be the person organizing anything. Alex, bless him, is very good at being the person who also doesn’t organize anything, with excellent company.

Productive afternoon. Very productive.

We did eventually look at three documents. Progress. The archive project is not going anywhere — Margaret’s family contacts alone have sent me enough material to keep me busy through fall — but today it could wait. Tomorrow is the Fourth, the apartment is going to smell like whatever I’m attempting to cook tonight, and for approximately two hours this afternoon I stared at the ceiling and let Alex tell me his entire theory about why recreational volleyball is secretly the most political sport. I did not solve anything. I did not archive anything. I feel weirdly great about it.