We turned a corner last month, and I didn’t realize it. I should have known when one weekend this blog organically got 58 views in a day.

Previous records had always been set my specific referrers, like when I tagged an inspiration on Twitter. That would cause a spike in traffic.

Lately though, there’s just been an uptick of folks. The daily average is higher. It’s that slow, steady growth.

This month, we’re going to pass 500 views.

It’s nothing compared to what can happen with website traffic, but it’s a huge win for me, starting from zero.

The growth has been steadily increasing these past few months, which is both flattering and humbling.

I want to make better content for y’all.

Thank you for stopping by. I hope that you get something out of this little blog.

Here’s to the future.

It could be the change in seasons.

Maybe it’s the fact that it’s Sunday night,

or that I’m on the cusp of moving house,

but tonight, I have the feeling like I’m going to sneeze, but instead of a sneeze it’s productivity.

It feels like I slacked off over the summer. What I did was summer stuff–I went on trips, I made new friends, I lolled around sometimes. Nothing is wrong with a little summer slacking.

(I also finished and published my first novella, so there’s that too.)

The time has come to return to the land of DOING THE WORK. I’ve been slowly gathering my thoughts over the past week or two, reminding myself of what I’ve been working on and what I like.

It’s time to stretch myself again. Posting in this blog daily has become habit enough to where I’ve slacked off on the quality of my content. I need to challenge myself again. Refine my skills.

Time to grow muscle (through workouts) and content (through writing and research) and relationships (through curiosity and time).

GO GO GO.

Disclaimer: introvert.

I went to a party tonight. CRASHED a party, even. The only people I knew were the hosts.

It was a party for small business owners.

And I gotta tell you: I actually had a good time.

Normally when I go to parties it’s excruciating. Small talk with people I don’t know, trying to decipher the culture of the group, feeling disconnected and socially awkward. That goes double for parties where I don’t know anyone.

Maybe it’s because I’m getting older and I cease to care, but socializing with small business owners was way more fun than a normal party.

There was always an ice breaker (“what’s your business?”), and everyone had an interesting story around what they do. Add in some small town do-you-know-this-person bingo, and you’re golden.

It probably helped that not everyone knew each other, so everyone was more than willing to accept new people into their conversation circles.

This is a much smaller deal than I’m making it, but I kind of want to start a small business so I can hang out with other small business owners.

The productivity wagon, that is.

Back in July, I pushed real hard to finish a task. A goal.

I did it!

Then I didn’t do anything else.

This summer has been a terrible time for productivity based on just about every metric.

• Very few books read
• No “weekly” entries in my bullet journal for like 6 weeks in a row–that means I didn’t have enough going on to bother writing it down
• Out of town every other weekend
• Says she need to stop watching so much YouTube while simultaneously opening another video
• Lots of low quality 300-500 word blog posts

I DID start working out regularly and I DID do some more work on my diet, so that’s something. But it’s not the yuge plans I dreamed up last May.

This fall I need to leverage the change floating around in the air and make some solid, concrete plans. Set some goals. Dig in deeper.

If I say I want something, but don’t work toward it, do I really want it after all?

Or do I value lounging whilst reading and cheap laffs on Youtube more?

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.

This seems like such an elementary thing.

When I say, “Someday I’d like to work for myself,” it’s with an abstract view of work. Somewhere in my mind has been a vision of all the work that I do for myself being fun, and something that I naturally want to do, and everything being easy and motivated and inspired.

However, for some reason today of all days I think about how hard it will be to shift from a “paycheck receiver” to a “money generator.” That’s a big shift.

I think about all the things I hate doing at work, but that I continue to do because they make me an effective employee. Those are the things that I have to continue doing if I want to build up a side business–I have to bring the work attitude home and just do it.

Only it’s just me this time. Nobody’s going to scare me into doing the work, because I set my own deadlines.

That’s incredibly empowering, yet incredibly terrifying.

Basically I just realized that working for myself is not necessarily going to be “fun” and the chafing that I feel like my time is obligated is not going to go away. Time is still going to be my frenemy. It takes time to get things done. A business creates obligations on one’s time.

It’s not going to be a fun escape for a while. It’s going to be work on top of work, and work where I have to be the boss as well as the employee.

At this point, I need to stop thinking about it and start doing it.

I just said “that’s not worth my time.” And I meant it.

Last time I tried doing freelance work, I undervalued myself. I was very young, just starting out, and honestly, maybe I was right. The quality was not yet up to snuff.

Now, I know what I’m capable of. And I know what my time is worth.

And I think to myself, “I just put 2 hours of my life into this project. Would I rather have those 2 hours back, or the money that I’ll make?”

Honestly, I’m not sure I’d take the money. Not for the current going rate.

I understand that to get a foothold in the freelance world, to get a name for myself in an entirely different sphere, I’ll need to go retrograde for a bit. I’m making solid mid-tier money at my day job and I hear it’s rare to catapult industries and land on the same rung of the ladder.

But man, this is a weird feeling. I’ve never turned down a job before.

Not saying I will 100% turn it down, but I’m considering it.

Strange.

About two weeks ago, I began propagating some succulents. For 10 days,  the fleshy little leaves just sat on the sprouting tray, inert.

I diligently sprayed them with water every morning and again at night, to keep them from drying out.

They did nothing.

At one point, I thought that somehow they were all dead.

Then one day the little buggers show up with some tiny little whiskers.

Not dead after all.

Sometimes other areas of my life feel that way too. Like I’m doing all this work for no results, no feedback, no nothing.

I just need to remember that sometimes there’s a germination period for things. Sometimes, you just have to wait.

Sometimes, the beginning is so small that you might miss it.

Maja Wronska

Is it finished?

Yes.

Is it perfect?

Hardly.

Will I go back and fix some things?

Probably.

But it’s done.

In other news, I’m now interested in architectural drawing.