10/18/00: You Sleeping. Starfish. Gone.
The table at the business meeting is a long oval. It takes up the majority of the oddly shaped room. There are a few of us here and we're talking business.
There are things I'd rather be thinking about. For instance, how you look nice when you're asleep. When you're asleep you're at anyone's mercy. You need mine, but not for any of the obvious reasons.
Digital strategy, reassign, proactive, moving forward, chain of command. Not enough coffee.
There is a dry erase board on the far wall, but no dry erase markers. In the middle of the table is large speaker phone straight out of Star Trek. It has no handset, just large speakers and a touchpad to dial the numbers. It is like a three legged starfish. Starfish actually shoot their stomachs out to surround their prey, then digest them, then take their stomachs back in. There are things I'd rather be thinking about.
I studied your hand once when you were distracted. The veins show and I can see how they make a criss-cross across the back of it. I look down at my hand now and see that my veins don't do that, and I wonder which one of us is unusual, and where you came from. I don't know where you are. But I know you so well otherwise. Though there are worse things to think about than your hands, I am smarter than that.
Billable hours, intelligent intranets, delegation, client responsibility. Billable hours.
There are lots of things on the long oval table. Things, left over from someone else's important meeting. Colored pencils and official looking yellow grid paper and the little stapler removers that look like crocodile mouths.
I miss talking to you. You always beat me to the punch. You have a talent for that, and it saves me the bruises. All the reasons we've outlined make perfect sense, but sometimes I wish there weren't these other people involved so we could just go on in peace. And I do feel peaceful when you're around. But maybe more so when you're gone and I'm floating in your wake.
There is that general leaning back in chairs that precedes the real ending of the meeting. No one can be the first to stand up. We're all being absorbed. I could use the crocodile jaws to stab my way through the membrane but I find that it gives easily when I simply pick up my notepad and leave.
other musings about being sick of my job and stuff