Wow did last week just utterly fly by. There is just so much happening right now, so many balls to juggle (giggity). But! Very few of them are glass! The trick of course is identifying which ones are glass and making sure to keep those up and moving. But if I drop one of the others, no big. And here we are on the other side of things, no broken glass. Somehow.

I’m very slow to respond to messages and emails right now. If you’ve sent a fragile glass email I need to make sure I don’t drop, ping me. Otherwise I’m afraid my multitude of inboxes have been downgraded to “bouncy rubber ball” status until some calm is restored.

Irma’s lab results came back and some things have improved but some things have gotten worse again, so it’s a mixed bag. And I say “worse” but really it’s that certain lab work results (namely her ALT) show levels that have returned to outside the normal/ideal range; nothing is critical right now, it’s more like… something isn’t working properly, and we need to figure out what that is or else the whole machine will break down. Over the past year there has been frequent mention of atypical Addison’s Disease; Cushing’s has largely been ruled out but Diabetes Insipidus is on the table too I suppose, as is a potential adrenal condition or a tumor or some combination therein. So we get closer to figuring things out, but also… not really closer at all.

Situations like this, I’m very glad for my comfort with reading medical texts, as it does help assess in assessing the information I have and making connections the vet might miss due to distance from Irma’s daily life. As frustrating and stressful as it is to not know, I can instead focus on what I do know: Irma is a good dog (the Best dog, actually), she’s happy and energetic, wants for nothing except whatever it is I’m eating, and—bloodwork notwithstanding—she appears otherwise healthy and normal.

So yeah. I dunno y’all there’s not been much else going on for me lately! Work work work, check in on the militarized war zone I live in, get disgusted by the state of things in the world at large, tune out for a minute with a dumb phone game and then and go back to work. While I do enjoy the sense of accomplishment from a full week, I’m still building new routines around the new work, and still having my weeks interrupted by dental appointments, so I’m not surprised time is passing quickly. Always so much to do! Always so little time to do it in!

The days are getting shorter and I’m sleeping a bit later as a result—I’d say I don’t use an alarm clock because I wake up to natural light, but really I don’t need to because Irma will tell me when it’s 8am and time for breakfast. I do enjoy my introverted hermit autumn nesting habits, but if I’m not careful I’d never leave the house for any fun reasons, so I’m making sure to have some fun penciled in on the calendar. It always helps to have something to look forward to.

In the meantime, I’m more than happy to return to a daily life of blankets and tea and listening to the rain.

☑️ Done and Done - Started the week with an exhausting dental appointment (fixing a wide gap between teeth and replacing a cracked filling). Also reorganized and tidied up all my lingerie and soft wardrobe items, went for a big walkies with Irma on the last proper warm-and-sunny day of the year, slept a ton, got rid of the broken washer/dryer and installed the new used ones (thanks for your help C!), cammed, ordered some makeup/skincare items, did a Bunch of dog health research, rearranged stuff in response to new W/D unit, slept some more. Also made a solid tom kha soup, and not one but TWO pizzas.

📋 Coming up - TWO more (final?) dentist appointments to do repairs, my last week of camming with the NEW tag, and maybe just maybe, some more social time? Or some more functional hobby and chill time? With some movies, perhaps? Oh and I just got a reminder that I have an optometry appointment next Saturday and idek what this one is for. Also gonna be doing all the laundry. All of it.

I feel like my journal entries have been full of questions in recent months. A sign that life is rife with change and uncertainty. Which on the one hand is good but on the other… all this Not Knowing really gets to me. So many Questions With No Answers, at least for the time being. Perhaps in the future the answers will reveal themselves? I learned a couple months ago that a lot of people who participate in “journaling exercises” never revisit what they wrote, which doesn’t make sense to me because what will you learn if you don’t revisit your past?

Existing while chronically ill is an exhausting experience. Maybe this is why it seems so natural to me to review past events, always looking for a pattern of action that could bring ease and efficiency to my future. Bullet journaling helped me identify that I can do two Activities per day, but doing three Activities one one day means only one Activity the next. Four Activities leads to zero Activities, and so on. So prioritization becomes a very important thing. The problem with that is that life has no manual, and I have no idea what to prioritize.

It becomes difficult to tell if a window of opportunity is limited in its existence or simply limited by my availability to take advantage of the moment. It’s not that I hate spontaneity, but my life simply requires a greater adherence to intention. I say, “I’m tired,” and very kind people encourage me to get some rest but what they don’t understand is that I mean I am existentially exhausted by managing *gestures vaguely* all of this. (Maybe that’s part of why I don’t enjoy playing D&D; my life is already measured in Hit Points and Perception Checks and Spell Slots; masking as a low-support needs autistic person being not that different from role playing a normal Human.)

So I manage what I can, tend the gardens what I can, and I wait, and I watch. I get ideas that excite me and that I want to act on immediately but I know the timing isn’t right, that others things must come first. Finish one thing before moving onto the next, at the least. Wait for the right sun, the right weather, the right song, surely there will be a sign that it’s time to move forward with the next. Sometimes, the timing of things does matter. But maybe sometimes it does not?

Inasmuch as I know there is no “right” or “wrong” answer to all these questions I keep asking, I can’t help but wish someone had a clear and definitive answer. But I also know that there’s no peak efficiency for life; the whole point of living is that its flawed, and we do it anyway. I don’t think there’s a person alive who hasn’t had their heart broken, and yet we love anyway, inefficiently, flawed. Somehow, we actually love even harder the next time, and the next.

Maybe over time we can learn to track the seasons and the tides, but we can’t predict the floods, or the fires, or the hurricanes. There is no moment more opportune than the next; perhaps the desire to act is enough to make it “right”.

I guess I won’t know until I do it anyway.

I hope you’re ready to hear more about my experiences returning to camming! Because it’s pretty much all I have to talk about right now! 😀 Life these past few weeks has been very head down, get it done, keep moving. Social media just isn’t doing it for me lately, which is good in its way but it’s also how I interact with most of my friends, so not being on social means not being social at all. I don’t terribly mind for the moment, but I am being mindful of how much time I’ve spent working, or working on working (always so much to prep and plan!). Burnout is always a risk, especially when embarking on (or returning to) something new.

But being back on camera in a live capacity continues to be good times. Streaming is having the intended effects of 1) earning money and 2) funneling people to my socials and, more importantly(?), to my paid fansites. This is giving me a much different perspective on not just how to use my fansites, but how to consider them in the framework/ecosystem of my overall business.

An unexpected twist is how many people say they wish I was on Twitch. Me too buddy, but. I don’t directly make any money from that but it is good marketing, so maybe. I could also stand to upgrade my CPU before trying to stream AAA titles again, but that’s neither here nor there. So Twitch is a solid “maybe,” as is Joystick (which is like Twitch but spicy).

I am worried about spending too much time live and not having enough energy to “produce content” in the more traditional sense of doing photoshoots… after all, I’m A Photographer, right? But I’m also weighing that against the fact that just doing self-shot photography (with bits of video thrown in when I can) hasn’t been paying the bills, nor have I been able to create to the degree that I want, to the degree that makes me feel creatively sated. So perhaps camming is the “job” that I pick up to make sure my bills are paid, and my photography moves into the position of “side hustle”. Kind of bums me out to look at it that way, but also making a decent income again is really nice.

I actually haven’t done a single spooky shoot yet this month, which I feel bad about on a creative level, but. Last year I had a really ambitious content schedule and published 10 unique sets (mostly photos but also 2 videos) and I made maybe $100 in tips on that work (outside of any earnings from monthly subscription fees). And to be honest, that was a big disappointment; when I look back at 2022 and 2023, I did very little Halloween content but what I did create I went big on and still landed around $75 in additional profit for the effort. And it’s just… the math isn’t mathing, y’all.

I know that from a business perspective, it doesn’t make sense for me to invest a lot of time in Halloween content this year, which should in theory assuage any guilt I have over not doing it. And yet. As a creative person who just loves playing dress up… I do feel compelled, on a personal level. Alas. I want to do work that is fun for me! But I also can’t afford to work for free, you dig? I’m hoping that I can find some ways to bring that spooky energy into my cam streams, that I can find some way to change the direction of things and get to a place where I once again feel adequately supported for not just the creative work I want to do, but what I actually deliver. And things are shifting, slowly but surely, with every livestream, every post, and every payout.

Actually. I am trying to figure out how I can maybe livestream the occasional photoshoot…? It’s a very rough concept and it would need either more camera gear—oh no, not another lens! (I’ve actually not bought a single lens since getting my new camera so let’s all clap)—or more time (which I don’t have) spent fiddling with the tech I already have. But, knowing that I can get sucked into the technical process of maximizing/perfecting something without actually actualizing on it, I know that for me it’s sometimes worth it to spend some bucks for an easier workflow and more flexibility down the road if it means keeping my focus on the work that’s generating income. The old adage about how “you have to spend money to make money” surfaces once again, because time is money, energy is money, and perfection is the enemy of progress.

Change is uncomfortable; so are hard truths. One simply cannot run a business based on ego and vibes alone. So the change is maybe disappointing in some ways but it’s easier to stomach when I can see the positives that will be gained (Irma’s health, reduced debt, more flexible income for travel and fun stuff, et cetera). I remind myself that one of the best strengths of sex workers is our ability to pivot and adapt; ‘tis but a season in the calendar of life.

🎬 Watching - My only movie this past week was Love & Monsters (2020), which was not quite as “horror” as I would have liked for an October movie, but it does have some very good monsters, and it was fun! Also stars the same guy from last week’s Caddo Lake. A rather light-hearted flick, this one builds tension but in a safe way, with a lot of “life is hard, do things scared” mentality; spoilers/reassurance in advance that nothing bad happens to the dog in this movie.

🎵 Listening - It was a banger week for music IMO, and I grabbed a few things off Bandcamp. Dino dungeon synth band Diplodocus dropped a new single, and the lovely Hannah aka Hellige released Malebolge, an album that toes the line between dungeon synth and female-fronted raw black metal. But the real standout is the new Age of Aquarius from Perturbator; it’s very different from his neon synth of the past. Bass-heavy and growling with a few unexpected guests (such as recently mentioned Author & Punisher), this release is an outlier in Perterbator’s discography, but it’s an instant fave for me.

🍁 Wearing - With the cooler temps comes warmer scents, and I’m once again back to one of my favourite perfumes: Torn by Henry Rose, which is Michelle Pfeiffer’s line of ethical perfumes with transparent ingredients. Torn is just… an utterly delectable scent I could easily make my signature perfume. When my rollerball gets low I’ll be ordering a full bottle (and maybe also a sampler pack to catch up on all the new scents since their initial offerings ~five years ago).

☕ Drinking - My apartment was just too hot for frequent tea through the summer, but the cooler temps also mean I’m back to brewing on the reg. My go-to black tea right now is the Tower of London blend from Harney & Sons; with a similar ingredient profile featuring vanilla and currants, it’s no surprise that this tea tastes as good as the above perfume smells.

🌶️ This week I discovered that one of my friends has a salty little side hustle! Since it’s definitely cooking and hosting season, it’s the perfect time to hit up HotSalts.com! As much as I want to cook with these, I’m immediately like… but what if jalapeno salted rim on a home-made Bloody Mary…

🎃 I do enjoy a bit of an etymological romp, so I was excited to learn about the origins of “pumpkin”. But I do still wonder how it’s extended use in casual language evolved from an insult to a term of endearment? Curious!

📉 Seems I’m not the only one moving away from social media, at least for the current moment, as time on social platforms is trending down. While the Financial Times article linked in this blurb is paywalled, it’s still interesting to see a breakdown of peak use trends across different age demographics.

🐸 Relevant to current events, and in an unexpected twist it’s not from The Simpsons!

Someone asked recently if Irma and Penelope get along and they do, but… it’s like Irma got used to being an only child and then Pen showed up. It’s very much been a “jealous big sister vs. oblivious younger sister who is literally an idiot baby and doesn’t understand anything”. They “play” together more in the way that children play on a playground i.e. chasing each other around and roughhousing a bit. Sometimes, like this moment from last week, Irma not only tolerates Penelope’s proximity but seems to acknowledge it more directly. I feel like eventually they’ll be good buddies; perhaps if I keep the heater low this winter they’re be more inclined to snuggle?

Best of luck out there my friends. Enjoy the rains while they fall, enjoy the cooler temps and changing colours of the foliage. There’s no rush.

xox,