Trailed by Paper

Tea: White Grapefruit

Music: Black Tape for a Blue Girl, "Across a Thousand Blades"

Time: Night.

I am surrounded by business cards, gallery price lists with scrawled email addresses, coffee-stained notebooks also bearing same. At nine o'clock, there's a pile on the floor, sorted only in the sense that I have weeded out everything that's already in my electronic address book. At eleven o'clock, a stack of cards filched from the pile. The information on these is to be entered into said address book, after which the cards are moved to a stack at one o'clock. Once all the information is secure, they're recycled. (I'd love to keep them all, but I need the storage space for tea -- which, unlike email contacts, cannot be stored online.)

Each time I think, "There. I've caught up on my correspondence," I find I haven't -- not because people keep writing to me, but because there are those to whom I have not yet written.

A card, used as a bookmark, falls from between the pages in a collection of ghost stories. Worse still, a jacket pocket yields a scrap with a name and an @ symbol -- and no context. Who is this person? Where did I meet him? Is she an artist or an editor? Am I supposed to be sending images for a possible photo show?

As Charlie Brown would say, "AAAAAUGGH!"

I know people who are expert networkers. I envy them that gift. Oh, I'm fine at meeting people. Keeping track of all the threads after that? (Pause for rueful chuckle.) Not so much ... yet.

I'm working on it, though. Patterns, though long-held, can be altered -- and in this case, must be.

So, back to the pile.

I'm going to need some more tea ...