As you might know I’ve got quite a few items on the agenda, mainly related to completing my glow-up and traveling.
As of this month I’ve been to the best cosmetic dentist I could find, and I’m undergoing my long-awaited teeth whitening regimen. Yay me! After about a week I’m already seeing results from those trays they’re giving me, but I’ll keep it up until I get that pearly-white Hollywood shade. The supply of bleaching fluid I have now lasts for two weeks, but the place I got it from will issue me more if I want it, until I get the shade I want.
Alas, it’s not quite that simple: I’ve got one tooth I chipped in half as a kid and has since been held together by dental composite…which has stained even more than my natural teeth have. The best solution is, as I suspected, a veneer, which will be in the neighborhood of $4000. I could, however, have all four of my front top teeth done for $13,000 total, which is more expensive, but it will correct some slight angle issues that have long bugged me, and will assure that the shading of the teeth all match (they’ll do their best with one veneer, but with all four being veneers they’ll be the same from the get-go, you see; one and done). Lucky me, I recently paid off my credit cards, and my credit score has increased, so I might be able to get installment financing for them without much trouble.
I’m living above my means, but it’s critical that I take care of this issue before anything else; anything I’d like to do I have this psychological block stemming from being ashamed of my front teeth, afraid to smile, and so forth, and I just can’t stand it. With my face rejuvenated by $2000 worth of filler to where the years have been taken away and it looks better than it did when I was a teenager, I’ll be in good shape.
I’ve put my hair on a regimen of permanent waves, where I’ll have more length and also more curls; a beachy and luscious look. I’m considering investing in suntanning (courtesy of tanning booths) to accentuate that, since in my current abode and lifestyle I don’t get much sun on my skin. Add microneedling treatments to take care of stretch marks, and more diet and exercise to get to my goal weight and muscle tone, and I’ll look about as good as I’m ever going to.
All this will likely be wrapped up in time for May 2024, which is a red-letter month for me: my trip to Europe. Not only will it be the first time I’ve ever traveled overseas, I’m planning to also make it my first time in another respect: by getting myself “the virgin experience” in Amsterdam. That’s not the original reason I wanted to go, but I figured “why not?”. At 30 and with no dream girl in sight, that’s the best chance I’ll have to know what it’s like to date and bed a beautiful refined woman while I’m still young, considering it’s legal, affordable to me now, and I’ll be in the area anyway.
Besides goals of an erotic sort, also on the agenda is skiing under the midnight sun in Scandinavia, seeing its northern tip, and going to Svalbard. London will also be worked in, along with Paris. Beyond that my goals, aside from “see as much of the continent as possible”, are nebulous, but I’ve been thinking I’ll add Italy onto my agenda.
Everyone I know raves about Italy, saying it’s the best place ever, and the other day I even met someone who’s from Italy, north of Milan, who told me I absolutely should go to the south and to the beach on the Mediterranean coast! It was the strangest thing; fate clearly wants me to go there, so I’ll do it. A large portion of my ancestry comes from Italy anyway, so I’ve always been curious about the idea of visiting the place, and going on the Padmé Amidala tour (i.e. all those lovely locations they used in “Star Wars”) sounds like a great time.
I actually quite like traveling; counting my upcoming trip to New England, and a trip to the desert over Thanksgiving that I’ve recently added to the agenda, I’ll have spent upwards of 40 nights out of the house this year, and it doesn’t feel like enough, making me suspect I might as well liquidate everything and move myself permanently, even if I can’t relocate to a place I’d like to live in a financially secure fashion.
A place like…the South Coast of California. I’ve touched on this topic before on here, but now that I’ve visited the area along with most of the United States I have the fortune of knowing where I want go…and the misfortune of it being one of the most expensive places in the world to live! Which means that I’ll need to actively earn income to pad my pitiful stock portfolio and home equity.
Dance lessons aren’t going to cut it. Having set up my website, set up my socials, and handed out dozens of business cards, including leaving them out at dance and arts venues, I’ve got no reply back. True, it’s early yet; I only started roughly a month ago. But early signs don’t look promising; there doesn’t seem to be a large market for dance lessons where I live. Ugh; all the ideas I think of for a business are services that only have a market somewhere big and expensive, like Washington or San Francisco. Oh well; at least I’m getting experience. Through more direct social connections I’ve got two students so far. Maybe more will come. Just the two I have, at $80 an hour and no overhead (I use my house to deliver lessons!), are helping a bit, but will it be “pad your portfolio to get to Santa Monica Beach” sort of money? Uh…no. Not unless something drastically changes.
So be it. As an entrepreneur, that means my time is freer than I thought it would be to focus on other projects I have in the pipeline. Real estate agent work seems to have a huge market for it where I live, and I’m sure I could do that; as a bonus it fits into my current lifestyle very nicely. I might could get somewhere with that. A more off-the-wall choice I encountered was being a travel agent; believe it or not these services are still popular, and people I’ve talked to say I have a real talent for planning trips (I find it inordinately stressful when doing it for myself, but hypothetical scenarios for other people don’t faze me in the least, hehe).
Real estate is the most promising path, considering there’s unlimited earning potential; an eventual relocation to the South Coast of California fits in very nicely with it. Lots of rich real estate people out there, after all. I can’t help but wonder, however, if liquidating everything I own and just taking the plunge into the deep end in California might be the best option, since the “grind locally so I can earn enough money to relocate in financial security” path doesn’t seem very promising. Might taking the biggest risk of my life be the last best hope for me to be successful?
In that case, an even more off-the-wall option presents itself: joining a startup company in some capacity. These organizations, at least the truly lucrative ones, basically don’t exist anywhere near where I live, and it recently struck me that while my very unconventional credentials and experience might make it unlikely for me to be hired in a climb-the-corporate-ladder sort of role, at least anywhere except the bottom where I’d be ten years behind everyone else my age, I might be a very desirable candidate for a startup. My living off my investments for so long demonstrates sound financial management in an organization with limited resources, my ballroom performances demonstrate creativity and public relations acumen, my background as a dance instructor demonstrates strong communication skills, and me earning two degrees (including an MBA) in less than a year demonstrates smarts and a strong drive to reach goals even if it’s through unconventional means.
I might have a lot to offer such an organization. And even better: a large amount of startup employees’ pay is in stock, which means there’s unlimited upside; one liquidity event, one company I work for that achieves a successful IPO or acquisition, could make me independently wealthy, and far earlier than I’d ever have the chance to be otherwise.
Better still: startups are most common in the Bay Area and…the South Coast. OMG.
But there’s little reason to pursue that while I’m still working on my glow-up and focusing on traveling, seeing all 48 contiguous states before my thirtieth birthday and taking that big leap overseas, not to mention returning to the Southwest. It’ll give me more time also to see how my current businesses are panning out, given more time and effort applied to them. I suspect it’ll come out a big fat blank at this point, but I have the runway to give it all a chance over the next six months or so.
It might sound bleak or challenging, but I for one find all of this rather fun, and certainly exciting. It’s like my life has a sense of direction that it’s hitherto lacked, and I have some vision for the future that I can actually work towards.