Paying Attention Doesn't Mean I'm Going To Move The Four Phonebooks I Use To Prop Up My Calculator

You know how sometimes you don't notice things around you because you see them everyday? Like, you know logically that empty coffee cup has been in your bathroom for probably three months but you don't move it to the kitchen because you just stopped seeing it? For instance, I have a roasting pan, for turkey cooking and such, in my closet full of unused kitty litter. I do not have a cat living with me. Just the roasting pan. And I totally forgot about it until Becky's dog decided to eat half of it yesterday as her dessert after inhaling a trashcan-full of used Kleenex. (Just so you know, I had it there for the night James spent with me right after we moved back, it's not like I just put it there in case a cat happened to wander into my room one day and I wanted to be ready, or in case I got lazy at night and couldn't make it to the bathroom.)

Anyway, my office is the mecca of things you just don't see. Piles build up and new stacks are made, and files from 1976 are found under a plant that gets watered every single day, yet no one thought to even check what that file was doing there. "Oh that? That's just the file under the plant, it's fine."

Then, today as I was coming back in from the restroom I saw this little gem.




Oh yeah, that's a framed photo of space. It's not only a framed photo of space, but it's a framed photo of space as the main piece of artwork you see when you walk in. It's been there the past thirty years, but I just realized that that's it. That's what our clients see as an intro to the accounting firm. We have a framed photo of "The Spiral Galaxy in Antilia" because what says taxes better than the universe.

I'm not sure who put it up there or where we got it; we have some artwork that people who work here have painted, we have a sad clown black and white right above the candy dish, we have photos of my three youngest cousins holding musical instruments that my grandma hung because she loves them the most. (No kids, no other grand kids, just the three special ones.) So it's anyone's guess as to where Antilia came from. Maybe someone who works here took it.

And yes, it does feel like I work in a log cabin sometimes. That wood is not deceiving you.

I'm not even going to think about the things I'm leaving out of this post, but I will tell you what I can see in my immediate vicinity is a pillow in a filing cabinet; a cell phone like the one Zack Morris had in the early 90s; not one, but two Guinea pig calendars (hanging side-by-crazy-side); a book about Egyptian Pharaohs, and a small Guatemalan man crouching in the corner.

He probably has no idea how he got here either.