It’s been way too long since I last wrote something here. In my defense, being unemployed while trying to be self employed and trying to feel productive and trying to avoid feeling like I’m wrecking my future is all very difficult. I guess my blog posts are going to start sounding like Kerplunkle ‘s now. I’m finally free now and I can do what I want, when I want. All those plans of making a new blog on a personal website and making a detailed plan and then using the new blog to track the detailed plan kinda got put on hold for now. I did make a plan though. It’s spread over two spreadsheets and has my long term goals and the guidelines for achieving them and all the things I could possibly work on and what good they would be and short term goals for all the things that I choose to work on and tasks that I need to finish and everything. I had made this plan on the 25th of May and I’m supposed to review it on the 25th of June. I decided to work on three things for this month, the Online T-shirt store a.k.a Redwolf, a freelancing website development project for the PCR lab at Kasturba hospital, and writing. I’m not going to go into details with what I was supposed to do in a month, but I can say that stuff on the Redwolf front isn’t going badly. I was supposed to finish making the PCR lab website by now but the woman who I was supposed to make it for has been out of the country so far and so I’ve barely begun working on it. Writing is only marginally better. I was supposed to finish writing a short story or a chapter of something, or a single substantial unit of anything but I’ve only written three and a half pages if I remember correctly. Now it’s not bad, and it can be counted as a unit but it’s only three and a half pages and it lacks any direction so I really can’t be satisfied with it. That’s it with the things that are supposed to be measured.

The story with the things that aren’t supposed to be measured is far better. I’ve made myself a routine where I wake up at 9am mostly everyday, and work in two shifts, one before lunch and one after, till about 6pm. I give myself weekends off, at least Sundays. Now you may wonder why I don’t want a regular job when I work exactly the same way on my own. It feels infinitely better to be able to write when I feel like writing and work on Apache servers and SQL databases when I feel like working with Apache servers and SQL databases. You see, writing does count as work since it’s one of the three things I’m working on this month. Also, I don’t have to work in an office with annoying people and artificial lighting and air conditioning everyday. I can work at home, and when I’m bored of working at home I can find someone else who’s equally unemployed and go work wherever they are. I also don’t have to wear full pants. This is very important, in principle. I haven’t worn full pants since my last day at work. I’ve been running or doing some form of physical exercise at least four days a week and that’s definitely something to feel good about. I have been meeting a lot of new people who are doing a lot of interesting things. Actually this meeting new people thing is a recent development which begins with a story of how I met a girl I found cute but never really spoke to which I would tell you about but it really doesn’t make an interesting story. What I realised after that incident was that I’m really bad at meeting and talking to new people. This is despite the fact that I like meeting new people most of the time. I know a lot of people who really like doing something and do it a lot but still remain bad at it but I never thought I was one of them. Then I decided that I should make a conscious effort to talk to new people and so I should try to talk to 7 new people every week out of which at least two should be female. This has been easier than it sounds. I’m allowed to meet people whom I either haven’t spoken to in years or people who I’ve met before but never really spoken to. It’s surprising how many people are doing interesting things around me and how many of them I could be interested in working with. To think, I may never have found out. This went well in almost all cases except this one guy I met in Lokhandwala who I spoke to in quite a bit of detail about what he’s doing but I never asked his name or how I know him until it was too late. After a point it would just have been awkward to ask. He looked familiar and recognised me and knew my name so I’m sure I know him from somewhere. I just hope he doesn’t find his way to this blog post.

And that’s what I’ve been up to since I was here last. It’s not lot but I think it’s enough for a start. I’d tell you more but it’s late and I’m sleepy. In case you read this before I re-read and edit it tomorrow morning and find a lot of mistakes then just correct them in your head.