Sometimes it is difficult for me to tell the difference between a permanent dream and a transitory dream.

For as long as I can remember, I’ve been an “obsessive” personality. I’ve gotten caught up in something new and

There was a time I was obsessive over the Harry Potter series. There was a time when I thought that I could buy a building on nothing but a teacher’s salary, and had big dreams of running a concert venue. There was a time when I was addicted to celebrity gossip, or when I fell into the My Chemical Romance rabbithole. There are a lot of distractions. Most of them are fun, harmless diversions. K-pop is one of those things for me right now, although my levels of obsessiveness have mellowed with age.

Usually, I can tell that something is a transitory interest…after a while. This is part of the reason why I don’t get tattoos. I don’t want to permanently fix something transitory onto my body; permanent decisions need to have a backbone of the eternal in them.

I understand that some interests are transitory, so I don’t act on them.

The problem is that transitory interests don’t deepen into permanent interests unless you act on them.

When everything is still theoretical, nothing is real. Of course it feels fake and bolted on. Learning how to play the flute felt fake at first, too, until I mastered it.

Anyway, that’s all preamble to this:

Lately I’ve been wanting to quit everything and move to a resort town to open a shop that sells letterpress and journals and plants and pens and maybe some old books and some art. In my head, this setup would give me “time” in between customers to also do some writing, and maybe when I made enough money I could hire a shopgirl to take care of customers while I run a business and a publishing company out of the back.

This is all very much predicated on there being a market for what I want to sell, and I have no idea of that exists.

I’ve always wanted to be involved with printing and publishing. Lately I’ve loved (LOVED) taking care of plants, and propagating them. And I’m low-key obsessed with finding the best pens for writing.

If I ran a shop, this would be the type of shop I would run. I’m just not entirely sure that I’m a person who would enjoy running a shop.

That is, I’m not sure if this is a transient desire or a permanent desire.

It certainly dovetails with my desire to buy a building in a town that will work for me financially.

It also dovetails with my desire to learn more about botany and printmaking.

And it dovetails with the fact that at some level, I’m a contrarian. I will always need something to hate. Currently that something is students and faculty, and the university itself. Perhaps in the future it can be tourists that I love to hate.

I love the idea of being a shopkeeper, of curating the perfect balance of goods, and selling it to people who care. The reality is that most people don’t care, nothing is perfect, and I quit my retail job after 6 months.

Honestly I need to start selling things online, to see if I can do it. Then I could build up some capital to open an IRL store.

I need to do more creating so that I have value for people. I need to do the work to create a permanent future.