It was one of Carrie’s days off and she was in her apartment, looking at her nail polish and musing. Her roommates were at work. She loved her roommates, she really did, they were dolls, but she even felt it from them. She was the kind of person who liked to feel comfortable with people. She couldn’t help it, it was her personality.

It was like, she thought, she just wanted to let all of these women know that there was no shortage of ejaculate on the planet and that they could, you know, share it.

“That’s gross,” she said and shook her head and stood up from the couch. She walked around the apartment. She walked to Janet’s door and nudged it open with her toe. Carrie thought Janet was some kind of a genius. She walked to Janet’s closet and poked through her clothes, then walked back to the couch and resumed the examination of her nail polish.

No one ever wanted to share clothes anymore.

She wanted to make a database. When she thought of the database, she became slightly nervous. Not overly nervous, but a little nervous. It was an idea she’d had in the back of her head for almost two weeks now and she wasn’t able to pin down what, exactly, the database would be, what it would contain, or from where it would be accessible. But it would be some kind of database. She’d stopped looking at her fingers and was staring in the direction of the bay windows.

About once a month she felt nervous and when she felt this way she had to remind herself that what she was doing was important. It’s hard to put yourself in historical perspective, but it can be really helpful, too, and you really need to do it. She was a part of a cultural movement and a part of a community that was directly responsible for the way the world would work in the future. She repeated this idea. There, now she felt better.

Maybe the database would have something to do with her ideas on the American workplace. Those were ideas she hadn’t been able to use in her artwork yet. She loved those ideas and knew they were important. People were living in traps of their own habits. People should get up and walk around in the office. They should be able to move their desks, switch cubicles with a friend, use the floor as a chair and the chair as a desk, lie down on their stomachs to stuff envelopes, review the quarterly earnings on a park bench, weather permitting. She knew this kind of re-imagining was essential to the vitality of the American people, and she was lucky (but was it luck, or had she worked to get where she was?) to work for Jill, who would definitely let her try any and all of these new techniques.