"Honey, you just don't have enough to keep your mind occupied," Barb 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 eerie 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?
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 the 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 thought, 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.
The Google start page loaded at a crawl. It was personalized with too many junky, slow-loading widgets. She'd have to take the time one of these days to get rid of some of them. Maybe replace them with a to-do list widget! Right now, she wanted to search for a Blake quotation she'd run across.
Without thinking, instead of typing in the gist of the quote, she pasted the contents of the clipboard into the search box, and hit enter.
Shoot. She realized what she had done the instant she hit the button, but decided to wait for the results instead of canceling the search. How would that huge block of text about the Other Building behave as a search query?
Taking on awful long time, Meg thought, nearly ready to stop the churning. Then the search results began to appear on the screen. Only three results -- why did that take so long?
The results display looked slightly odd to Meg's eye; the font size seemed bigger than usual, and a decorative border framed each entry. It was the sort of singled-out treatment you would see for a sponsored link, but it was not a callout style the practiced searcher ever remembered seeing.
In a cursory skim, it seemed that each of the three page excerpts did have something to do with the query. Pretty smart search, Meg silently complimented.
She glimpsed William Blake's name and blanched at the realization that she had only thought about performing a search about his words.
Meg's heart wanted to pound right out of her chest when she read further and realized Blake was answering her question directly, and personally:
My Dear Miss Meg Harkin,
Our place is where our fellows dwell, and the degree of our acquaintance matters little. Yours very sincerely, William Blake
Holy shit! Eyes wide, Meg skipped to the second search result entry:
Meg, remember we used to say we were twins because our houses had the same floor plan, only mirrored? And you tried to get your mom and dad to give you the corner bedroom so it would be just like mine? Sometimes I wonder...
"Paula?" Meg asked out loud. She had not heard from her childhood neighbor since Paula moved to Saginaw when they were eight. There was more to the missive, but Meg had to check out the final search result before trying the link.
Half afraid, but madly curious, she dropped her gaze to the last entry on the screen:
I'll tell you what to do. Save the HTML source of the search results right now. Make a blog post about all this alternate universe nonsense, and e-mail a short note with a link to the post to all the habitual players on TechMeme. You get yourself a little exposure that way, and then you run with it.
best j
Oh, that's probably a good idea. To save the source, Meg agreed. But who is "J?"
Meg's chin was trembling, in rhythm with her hands, which she snapped away from the keyboard and into her lap, afraid to touch anything for fear it would vanish.
I'll copy the URL, and also take a screen capture. Just in case. But I want to know who wrote that. Meg had to talk to herself like that, making little verbal short-term lists, because she knew herself; she would wander off.
Following her list, she copied the long web address, pasted it into a Notepad doc and saved it to her desktop and to her My Documents folder.
But Meg was impetuous and she simply had to see who "J" was before doing another thing. She pointed her mouse at the link in the last search result, meaning to right-click and open it in another Firefox tab to be safe, but she was so shaky that the link opened in the same window.
Markup code, an XML file? What is it -- a feed, no OPML. What the hell, she puzzled. Scanning the file, filtering out the tags with her brain, she looked for a name or some kind of identifier. There it was, an e-mail address.
jason at calacanis dot com
Calacanis was an internet entrepreneur who sold his collection of popular blogs empire to AOL. He'd an executive position with the acquiring company, but had just announced he was leaving for greener startup pastures. Huh! Funny he'd bother with this five days after he announced he's leaving AOL.
What the heck is going on here, Meg wondered for the hundredth time in the last 10 minutes.
Now I'll grab a capture of the results page so I can prove this nonsense, she said to herself. She clicked on the browser's back button expecting to see the search results page again, but:
Page not found
"No..." Meg groaned. God, I'm such an idiot. I'm a reckless impatient four-year-old.
She buried her face in her hands, shook her head, stood, and walked away from the computer.