stormyhearted

In which I ramble about my haircut, current work, future work, a possible future subscription box, and blogging.

(Hopefully I have punched the correct buttons to make this cross-post from my self-hosted WP blog to my DW journal! If so, hello DW people!)

I chopped my hair off! (Well, I paid a nice lady at the salon to do it. Infinitely better choice than taking scissors to my own hair again.) I am considering highlights or something similar- not all over color, because I hate keeping up with my roots. But something for a little bit of dimension. I think I have narrowed down the direction I want to take my wardrobe in, though it’s going to take an age and a half because good quality clothes are so goddamned expensive. But it’d be nice to not look like I rolled out of a Target bin, and maybe look my age for once. I am also wearing eye makeup again regularly, because my hair looks nice and then I look at my face and I go “….well, I should probably do something about …that.”

(Me to my reflection.)

Work continues to be enjoyable. Not much to say there, really; I’m working, I’m happy, I’m tired. I want to stay with the company for at least 3 years total, I think- I was saying to one of the assistant store managers last night that 5 years is also a good number- and I think I’d like to try my hand at a management position (probably an ASM). I definitely want to go up to full time before season, if I can manage it.

But I’ve been giving some thought to what I want to do beyond that, because I think 5 years from now I would like to not be in retail anymore. I have no desire to be chasing a corporate quota for the rest of my life; what I do want to be doing, though, is a lot harder to pin down. I like working with books. I like the endless variety of people I come across working with the public. I like to find things people are looking for and watch their face light up with happiness or relief when I put it in their hands. I like being on my feet (though a bit more sitting down would also be acceptable!) and I like having a general task list but also enough change and fluctuation that it’s not monotonous. Things I don’t have that I would love- a regular work week with two consecutive days off and predictable hours from week to week; benefits; a paycheck I can actually live off of; a space that is at least partially specifically mine that I can go to and close the door when I need ten minutes to decompress; the ability to make suggestions of “hey, I think $thing could work better if we tried $idea” and have some chance in hell of it ever being heard, much less considered or even implemented. (The joys of working for a national chain!)

My friends have suggested being a concierge, which is an interesting thought that I will certainly look into; my only fear is that it plays a little too deeply into my tendency of taking care of other people, at the risk of burning myself out. I do like that aspect of my job, and I think I’m good at it. But I also need to be able to take my work hat off and take care of myself and my loved ones without being “on call”, as it were. Which is ultimately the reason I will never implement my various bookstore/cafe/yarn shop/pagan supply store ideas; I need to be able to leave work at work. I watched that inability destroy my mother and I just won’t.

I am toying with the idea of making a witchy bi-monthly or seasonal subscription box going through the tarot. So the first year would have boxes for the Fool, the Magician, the High Priestess, and the Empress, and possibly also the Emperor and the Hierophant. I’ve curated a mock-up of a box for the Fool on pinterest and it’s a solid $100, so I’d have to either get really good wholesale deals/freebies or replace one or more items with cheaper options, as most boxes go for the $25-40 range. The pouch I picked out is the most expensive part, equal to everything else combined, so I could knock the overall price down quite a bit if I find a different version or if they can make it in a cheaper material, or I could make it an optional add-on. At any rate, thoughts are percolating, as they often do. Whether anything will actually come of it is another story- but I definitely won’t even be reaching out to anyone until I’ve got all six of the potential first year boxes sketched out. The exact items wouldn’t have to be locked in, but I want to know the essential details of what I’d be looking for.

(Why yes, I follow a proclamation of refusal to permanently exhaust myself with an “always on-call” kind of job with an idea for a home-based small/part-time mail order business. Contradictory? Me? Never.)

I’ve deleted my livejournal, which feels a little weird but not terribly so. I hadn’t posted on it for a long time, but having an LJ has been a Thing in my life since I was in, like, middle school? So there’s a slight oddness about it. Nothing that won’t pass, however. On the other hand, I am once again frustrated by my failure to blog on a regular basis. (I originally wrote that as an inability, not a failure, but it’s not an inability. I am not inherently incapable of doing it, I just let myself get distracted and procrastinate.) I want to blog regularly. I enjoy it- it makes me feel better, if nothing else. It lets me talk to myself to work things out without feeling weird unloading in a private journal, because here I at least have the possibility of external feedback. So starting with today’s post I am going to aim to blog every Saturday, rotating through each of my three blogs. I have already noted the next three Saturdays in my zib (short for zibaldone, what is essentially the 15th century ancestor of the bullet journal, and is more accurate in naming as the bujo is not particularly journal-like) so I will hopefully remember them.

Miscellaneous other bits and bobs that I’ve been poking at of late:

– knitting Hummel’s sweater (I’m going to say it’s about 85% done?)

– despairing at the sheer quantity of crap that I own

– making an honestly fairly feeble attempt at Camp NaNo

– trying not to flirt with my gorgeous coworker

– trying to figure out how to make this AU HP rpg idea actually work

So! All the news that’s fit to print, or at least all that’s clung to the holes in my brain-sieve after a rough shake. Same difference?