work is important in that way, i guess. it can be, on its best and oddest days, a reminder that, if we’re lucky, we can have some control over our lives, our own little stories, that we can be willful and brave and self-possessed. i still wish, of course, that i could be lazy and shiftless, independently wealthy and obliged to no one’s clock but my own. but as a way of measuring time and experience, work is useful, alternately heartening and frustrating.