I have a little greeting card company called Early Bird Publishing and paid to have a booth at the National Stationary Show this week at the Jacob Javits Center in New York. For me the purpose of the show is to generate sales, network and search for potential business opportunities.

To accomplish most of these goals, you just have to stand in front of your booth from 9 am to 6 pm and smile engagingly at every person who walks by. This isn't a skill they cover in business school; in fact I learned how to do it from watching a hairless Chihuahua work the room during pet adoption day at the pound. He lives in my town now and whenever I see him walking regally alongside the lady who selected him from that sea of adorable competitors he gives me a little wink. His name was Ray when he was in the pound but now it's Eduardo. If he's ever reincarnated and comes back as an insurance salesman, watch out.

You have to have thick skin to work a trade show. Often people walk by without so much as a glance and if you're not careful you can start to feel like a bruised pear in the produce section. Experiencing rejection at tradeshows is as guaranteed as rain during a family picnic but always tempered by conversations about the big deal - think Willie Loman meets Cinderella which translates into hope2 for you math buffs -- and you'll have a pretty good idea.

Usually the big deal pitch comes from a tag team of impeccably dressed people from foreign countries who descend upon your booth like paratroopers, examine all your samples in great detail, and speak to each other in urgent hushed tones before turning their attention to you.

I've been in the publishing business for many years and the really big deals always had something to do with foreign distribution and translation.

"I represent 47 countries including their Epcot Center counterparts and we'd like to translate your product into every known language including one that is only communicated by using hand puppets and tapping on a hollowed gourd with a monkey's fibula. Unfortunately, we do not have a pen at this time but will be back tomorrow at 9:30 am to finalize everything before our flight at 9:35 am."

They never come back. For years I used to rush around looking for them in vain until wisdom finally intervened and I realized they were the gabardine clad equivalent of fool's gold. One day scientists in search of an elephant graveyard are going to burst through a clearing in the jungle and discover thousands of South American businessmen in blue suits wandering aimlessly with briefcases and screaming into cell phones with dead batteries. "You don't understand. I must get out of this place now. The Americans are waiting for my order!"

So in between the big tradeshow deal there is lots of time for just waiting. Lots of time for reflection and thought. This week I started to obsess about how thoughts actually appear in my head and who or what was responsible for creating them. The obsession began as I was standing in the middle of the aisle thinking about the opportunities that could be derived from forming a cooperative with other small greeting card companies when an instant later I began to wonder whether God gets offended when women second guess His creative genius by shaving off their eyebrows and drawing them in themselves with pencils.

Where does an unsolicited thought like that come from? To go from a very logical internal conversation well within the context of what I was doing to suddenly be interrupted with something so far out of left field, psychiatrists wouldn't know what to make of it.

The only explanation I can think of is that I had not had a chance to eat anything substantial and might have been suffering from some sort of food related dementia. The woman who was scheduled to work the tradeshow with me became ill and I had to work the whole show by myself. Since I could not leave the booth, I was forced to eat all six pounds of the Hershey Kisses we had originally purchased to pass out to attendees to avoid starvation. I must have been hallucinating because I vaguely remember slapping the hand of a woman buyer from Target, who attempted to remove one of the candies from the dish I was clutching protectively to my chest like Humphrey Bogart in "The Treasure of the Sierra Madre".

The effects wore off instantly however, when I received the biggest order of the day. Someone purchased twelve dozen of every design in my card line. I had the first big deal of my career. And to top it off, the guy who made the purchase lived in my hometown so I didn't have to worry about him disappearing into the jungle.

He introduced himself as Eduardo but told me his friends call him Ray.