Hierarchies - Chapter 2 (continued) 

(Continued from this morning's installment)

Barb had advised Meg to write down her questions about career and residence choices. She said the answers might flow better if the questions were put down in black and white.

OK, Meg thought, and woke up her computer. She opened a new Notepad document, because she was only making notes. Word expected her to care about spelling and capitalization -- not so good for stream of consciousness to have some application nagging you about stuff.

Just write down my questions, she thought, staring at the blank document. After fighting an urge to do some random web surfing and aggregator checking, Meg typed:

Can somebody help me?

She laughed out loud at herself, then answered her reaction out loud. "Well, it's a question!" But the start did propel her to jot down the real questions at hand:

Do I want to work for another consulting firm?

Are there any good reasons for me to stay in L.A.?

What makes me think I'll tend to new business-getting this time if I go solo again?

Ah, there's the rub, Meg considered, but it prompted another good question.

Do I need a business partner?

She had never even thought about getting a partner before. Maybe there was something to this technique. Not such a crazy idea after all. Let's try something a little more general and see what magic happens.

What is bothering me?

The question derailed her focus, and Meg started typing fast, answering the question by describing her encounter with the Other Building, endowing it with proper noun status. Along with the narrative, she posed some of her questions about the duplicate world, like:

Would my building seem just as distasteful to resident of the Other Building?

And:

The differences were all put there by teh inhabitants, weren't they?

And finally:

Bad smells, and refuse, and wear and tear are OK if they're my bad stuff, but not if they come from strangers. How does it follow that my little community's bad stuff is OK, but a foreign community's is not, if I don't really even know my own community?

Huh! she though, staring at the last question, interested in it, but somewhat exhausted by so much thinking, and wanting to set the whole thing aside for a while.

Meg copied into her computer's clipboard all the text related to the Other Building, intending to paste it into another document and separate it from the career questions. She was tidy in that way, but hardly disciplined in general because she got lost on the way to the new document and opened a browser window.

A tangent for BlogHer? 

I wonder if the BlogHer founders would consider it to be within their charter to organize a collective of women interested in pursuing set-aside contracts for small business, women and minorities. The regs are so thick, you really need partners to make the doing the paperwork seem worthwhile. What a neat virtual company that could be -- a bunch of women bloggers contracting to make websites or set up online communities?

State governments have the programs, too, and I read recently that the Illinois program has slacked off on outreach, so the proportion of contracts let to woman-owned businesses is down from last year.

Better Bad News cracks me up 

Latest

So good. Nice to see older people doing funny smart stuff. Anybody know about the people behind the scenes? They're not all 19 years old, hiring older actors, are they? Impossible. I don't know anything about them. I'll see if I can find out. There's a community repertory company vibe about it, isn't there?

Hierarchies - Chapter 2 

(Continued from Chapter 1)

"Honey, you just don't have enough to keep your mind occupied," Bard scolded on the phone."

"Yeah, got that right," Meg muttered back

"What?" Barb's hearing was escaping her.

"Look, I'll talk to you later," Meg said, and hung up the phone.

Meg looked at the silent phone as if it might tell her something new, but it was not forthcoming.

She had called Barb on returning to her apartment from the eery trip to the other building in the complex, forgetting all about doing her laundry, and hoping for a distraction from the experience. She ended up telling Barb about it.

Barb was past 70, how far past, she wasn't telling, but she'd been married four times, had grown up in Southern California, and had seen pretty much everything, making her a life sage, Meg figured. Meg was half proud and half embarrassed to have such a friend, nearly (or more than) twice her age at 37.

The older woman had come with the package from her last relationship, a five-year, non-live-in affair that Meg had ended two months ago, not long after her job as project manager for an IT consulting firm also ended. Barb was Charlie's third cousin, his family's nutty black sheep and Meg enjoyed her company.

Barb was right, her life was empty at the moment. Maybe the vacuum did allow for petty systems of gloom to settle in on her.

She needed new friends; somehow it worked out that Charlie ended up with all her favorites among their mutual friends after the split. Plus, she definitely needed to get serious about deciding what sort of work she would do. Her cushion would last a few more weeks, maybe three months if she scaled back, but she had to start weighing the options and making some decisions. Another job or go independent? Stay in Los Angeles or go back to Ann Arbor where she could live cheaper?

(Chapter 2 to be continued tomorrow, or maybe later today.)