all my lies are always wishes.

I spent a long time today at work reading the galley proofs of a book we're putting out called A Day in the Life of the American Woman. It's a photography collection of women from all over the country partaking in their daily activities: taking care of a sick relative, working on their farm, lighting Shabbes candles, and the like. There are a lot of cancer survivors and women who start their own nonprofit or charitable organizations.

I wrote to Michael once that there is a time of growth and a time of pruning back. Plants can't bloom all the time. You cut your hair to make it grow back faster. Right now I wish I was going on a long vacation or writing for three days straight, but I have to think of my time differently. At work I take on extra manuscripts to read over at night or on the train. I cultivate work relationships and keep up with industry publications. This is the training period, the rehearsal, the research. I almost force myself to write on weekends, rather than sleep more or rummage around for a sample sale. Right now I am not deserving of inclusion A Day in the Life..., but I hope that someday I will be. After all, the surgeon had to go to medical school, and the entrepreneur spent years working at a company where she learned a trade. It has to be my time sometime.

I took a class sophomore year that we nicknamed "How To Sound Good at Cocktail Parties," because the professor was obsessed with us learning one or two lines from every poem we read that would make a good pithy toss-out at a party or dinner someday. I don't want to accumulate a lifetime's worth of pity toss-outs. I don't want to work like the doomed brides in the story of Hades: carrying buckets full of holes to fill bathtubs full of holes. Although I won't get the winter beach this year, last night I charted new parts of Murray Hill, found a new favorite jewelry shop and saw the Empire State Building from ground level. In the meantime, my life has not halted. This weekend there's a going-away party, a barbecue, a dinner, new books from work, and additions to a chapter. The trick is that stillness has its own rhythm, that even in what seems to be stagnation there is a quieter, subtler growth. No one sees the growth as it happens, they only see the result.