THE SEARCH BEGINS.

Yesterday I went to the Consulate of Country X to attempt to find some contacts for my research. This required one and a half hours of negotiating LA-area freeways, overpriced parking, and an unfortunate realization that said consulate was housed in the same quarters as Larry Flynt publications. It was only after I saw a busty chick with a Hustler T-shirt that I realized this--I had been blissfully oblivious to the purple flag imprinted with "LFP" flying over the building.

Despite my having made an appointment with the General Consul of Country X, and reconfirmed this appointment via email (reconfirming being an essential component of any formal meeting to take place among members of Country X and other Latin American countries), the person at the window informed me that, lamentably, Sr. Consul was out of the office on a meeting and would I be so kind as to wait ten minutes?

The ten minutes stretched into an hour and a half, at which point I was ready to give up, go home, and fume over some literature. At this point Sr. Consul entered the building with profuse apologies and explanations about the traffic. After brushing me off for another half hour we finally spoke about my dissertation topic. To my great joy, he was interested in the linguistic behavior of indigenous peoples, having received some of these indigenous people in his office. "They are so--clean, so hardworking," he mused. He determined that he and I were going to go next week and track down some clean and hardworking indigenous people for my research. I inwardly winced at the possibility of bringing the Consul General on my first field research opportunity, but who knows, it may help.

Whatever the case, I intend to reconfirm and re-reconfirm with Sr. Consul. And have a plan B, which will involve tracking down indigenous people on my own, even if they are unkempt and enemies of honest labor. And, perhaps, take the Metrolink into town, since by the time I got back on the freeway it was 3:00 and I was forced to descend into the specific kind of hell known to L.A. residents as Rush Hour, which as far as I can tell lasts three hours in the afternoon and usually involves the shutting down of some major transportation artery due to a crash, or, in the case of yesterday, a gas leak and a man in an RV with explosives.

It's going to be a long couple of years.