So imagine that a 20- or 30-something friend tells you: Two years from now, we want to have a baby.

What would you say?

• Oh my god, that’s a lot of work!
• Are you sure? You’ll never have a weekend off to yourself again!
• Guess you won’t be sleeping anymore!
• What if you can’t support the kid and you go bankrupt?
• Well, that’s nice, but *I* for one would never have a baby — too much work!

Of course not.

But this is what people tell other people who want to leave the corporate world and start their own business ALL THE TIME. Why is that?

Last night at my Geek Girls Meetup, we discovered that one of our new members had quit her 60-hour-week day job to become a glass blower (and to run a website on all things glass blowing.) She was doing well enough to support her daughter and live a comfortable life with tons of flexibility.

Since I’m reading “Escape from Cubicle Nation“, I gave her huge props. I asked everyone to go around the table and say what they would do if they could quit their day job. I started with my own business idea* (creating competitive-quality websites EXCLUSIVELY for underdog political candidates.)

Would you believe that nobody else at the table had a dream outside of her day job? So that became what we discussed. Why don’t more women have big aspirational dreams? Are we socialized to be “realistic” and pragmatic? Perhaps we are encouraged to take life paths that heavily place other people in the equation, though I can’t think of anything that help people more than giving them good-paying jobs that they love.

(Come to think of it — every Meetup I belong to is run by a self-employed person. Kelly Ford is a DotNetNuke god with a top-5 software product. Becky Wyatt has her own real estate business (and a great website). Dilsah Tercanli is a successful self-employed Web developer/designer. Hm.)

The entrepreneurship drumbeat is not everyone’s to follow, but once you hear it — it’s impossible to drown it out! Does anyone else reading this hear it, too?

*NB to coworkers — Will absolutely not walk away from the awesome opportunity I have been given at my current day job. Self-employment is a long-term goal.

Tough act to follow.

Tiny Mormon housewife. Nice lady. She had to make a 5-minute speech on how to do something, and she chose “How to Make Chocolate Chip Cookies”. She told us how to bake, followed by a quick lecture on the importance of having a year’s supply of food, then gave everyone in the class a homemade chocolate chip cookie.

Then it was my turn. My topic was “How to Enbalm a Dead Body.”

Everyone turned greenish and stopped eating their cookie.

That was when I was 19, in a speech class at Mesa Community College. I was a teenager and thought that sparing no gristly detail was totally awesome.

Since then, I developed this amazing thing called Empathy and reworked my topic into a more subdued, slightly-more-tasteful Ignite Phoenix presentation called “What Happens to Your Body After You Die.”

(I really wanted to talk about how you got your Congressman, but some topics are really too disgusting for Ignite.)

My Web princess informed me that you use different parts of your brain to make speeches vs. having a conversation. I believe it. Doing Ignite is like getting up and singing a song and having the audience make you feel like you’re not only a perfectly competent singer, but the most amazing singer in the world. Even if you’re singing about severed heads. Never had a conversation like that.

A few people asked me how I got interested in the topic of the body after death. My mom worked in the mortuary industry and we had a lot of dinner conversations about it. Usually while eating chicken. It was perfectly normal to talk about just how gory you had to be to warrant a closed-casket funeral (answer: extremely).

At any given time, our house contained hundreds of dollars worth of funeral flowers. Someone had to take them or they were going to the landfill.

But back to Ignite. What an amazing experience. Even though I was starving, really had to pee and was the only presenter who didn’t wear anything to clip the lav mike onto (good job, Stace), I was stunned by the fantastic audience, great Twittering, perfect venue, and awesome crew who made everything glide effortlessly.

If you haven’t experienced it… get a great topic and do it.

1. You are smart, but you are not Touched By God, PhD In Everything Smart. Off the high horse, princess.
2. Everything is contextual. Nobody cares what worked for your last job or some other company, the only thing that matters is what’s going to work here.
3. The hazard of whining about everything is that nobody listens when you finally do have a Real Problem.
4. There are places where strong individualism is an asset and places where it is a liability. When it becomes a liability, find a place where it’s an asset. They’re out there.
5. The company doesn’t need you. [Took a RIF to figure this one out.] Everyone can be replaced, up to and including the president. If you’re unhappy, put the rubber to the road.
6. The most powerful thing you can possess in a company is empathy. A lot of people do not vocalize what they’re going through, and that doesn’t mean they’re okay.
7. The butt-kissers you loathe always get ahead, everywhere. Know why? Because they’re genuinely interested in their boss’ mission. Get interested in your boss’ mission, not just your own.
8. You are trading a certain amount of creativity, expressiveness and directive capabilities for not having to deal with everyone’s problems. Enjoy this while it lasts. Revel in it.
9. Learn how to help people with their problems – personal, political, creative and technical.
10. It gets better.

Everyone is shouting, “Save money! Don’t spend! Batten the hatches! Frugality now!”

Here’s my plan for economic recovery: Hire a contractor to fix your leaking pipes. Or tile your hallway.

Bring in a small landscaping business to mow your lawn.

Get your hair done by a local salon (not a chain).

Have dinner at the little Chinese place owned by the immigrant family.

Governments and corporations provide jobs, but so do we. Support local entrepreneurs!

“Ex-boss” Carol Sarler writes that us childfree women not only have failed at our biological destiny, but we’re bad workers, too:

Research conducted over six years shows that far from bosses and colleagues always being suspicious of a working mother, the opposite is becoming true: it is the childless woman who is regarded as cold and odd.

As a result, it is these single-track careerists who are increasingly likely to be vilified, refused jobs and denied promotion because many employers believe them to lack what the study calls ‘an essential humanity’. And I know exactly what they mean.

HOLD. THE. PRESSES – Someone who doesn’t conform to what society expects might be regarded as odd? Oh no, we can’t have that! We’re going to get cranking out the kids RIGHT NOW!

By the way, this is the kind of woman who is a marketer’s dream. So easy to manipulate. So afraid of being the nail that sticks out, vulnerable to being hammered down. How dare anyone choose anything off the One True Path?

We feel desperately sorry for those who yearn for children they cannot have; the unwilling barren, if you will. But when we meet a woman who chooses her childlessness in the belief that there is something out there worth more, we smile politely even while – once again – our guts whisper: ‘Lady, you’re weird.’

Wanna bet Carol was the Mean Girl who took her clique over to the bookworm at lunch and laughed at her for eating alone? This is what they grow up to do — still justifying their superior existence to all who will listen. It’s pathetic.

Moms and non-moms need to co-exist and accept the others’ choices and stop acting like a bunch of seventh-graders. Period.