I've cleaned everything I feel like cleaning. Other than laying around watching rom coms and eating bon bons, there's not much to do except fret over how long my savings will last. With the fear monkeys on my back, I've felt inspired to gingerly poke my toe back into my self-employment adventure. I forget what I was working on, though: it's been three months, my brain is a sieve, and information is water. I have a jumbled to-do list, and every time I try to sneak up on an item—update PayPal account, for example—I find myself sitting at my kitchen table drinking coffee and reading vampire romance novels under the soothing glare of my new shop light.
I'm sneaking up on my to-do list while I wait to revise my dissertation. I'm starting slowly, with the easier stuff. For instance, I redesigned my personal website. One Wordpress page, displaying a photo of me, plus a terse explanation of who I am and what I do. That sounds so simple, doesn't it. Not. It's hard to write about oneself. I'd rather write about you. Who are you, by the way?
I also peered (through my fingers) at my two business websites, afraid for some reason that they stop functioning when my attention is elsewhere. I saw some formatting problems (I need to update my themes). Mostly I lack of content. There's a reason for that. It's because I don't know what I'm marketing to whom. It's hard to write spot-on content when you don't know your audience. Lack of clarity leads to ambiguous messages. Sigh.
On top of all that, I find I have forgotten how to do technical things I don't do very often, like uploading files to the server in the sky. How do I...? Oh yeah, I have this little ftp program, I remember now. But what's my password? Where do I upload the...? Oh, nuts. I don't want to admit that I understand why my mother has opted out of the modern technological age. At 84, she regresses a bit more every year. She gave up email and then the internet. Soon I fear she will give up her computer all together. Too expensive, too much trouble. Next to go will be her (nonsmart) cell phone. Back to rotary phones, coffee percolators, black and white TVs, letters written on paper and sent through the postal system, and—dare I say it?—face-to-face conversations, replete with body language, cigarette smoke, farts, halitosis, and hugs. Yikes!
