Another Day

Today was ordinary; I knew early on there would be nothing to overwhelm it. Time was like a stubborn fog over the city – unmoving, spreading its grayness so evenly that morning felt like evening. There was a staff meeting to begin with in which we talked about goals for the museum’s different departments in terms of the ‘communities’ we’re trying to reach relative to our mission – a typical, but I guess necessary, discussion for all museums. As someone else talked, I sensed myself falling into a hollow trance, robotically nodding in agreement to ideas I only half heard. I had no ideas of my own on this matter, but felt like I used to. I looked at people talking. Noticed the practiced way of their speech. How certain culminations of sentences predicated subtle shifts of the head and inflections of eyes. This was the most interesting part of the meeting.

Nothing could be gained and nothing lost today. Emails trickled in unenthusiastically, many starting with “Happy new year!” There were a few invitations to Lunar New Year functions I should probably attend. Every email seemed to come from an anonymous ‘we’; personalities were subsumed into bland, protective affiliations. I lingered at the coffee spot in the late afternoon talking to my man behind the counter about Real Madrid’s predictable collapse against FC Barcelona. I wanted to stay a while longer to hear more about his soccer agony, but was pulled by a vague force back to the museum, back to my desk. I listened to my colleagues slap away on their keyboards producing that familiar “tick-tick-tick” sound in offices that, when you concentrate on it, sounds like a wild symphony of dysfunctioning clocks.