The schedule drift is real. I went to sleep at around 6AM this morning, and woke up around 4PM. It’s 5:30 now, I just finished a walk and shower.

I think I need to do something about this schedule drift, or I’ll spiral into depression again. Well, I think the biggest thing is that I need to allow myself to feel things. When my dad gave me a hug yesterday and said he loved me, I didn’t allow myself to cry like I felt like doing. I buried the feeling and I went for a run.

Ugh, feeling vulnerable sucks.

My Jamuary jam 27 is getting some love via Soundcloud. It got a repost!

I just sold my Miku Expo glowstick for $78. I’m laughing because I bought it for $20! I will have to throw in some extra merch for the buyer because I just got an investment return that dreams are made of!

Today my plan is to do a bulk sort of all my Precious Memories cards. They have been sitting on my shelf for too long and I want to get them out the door. The non-Hatsune Miku cards that is. The only reason I bought two bulk lots of Precious Memories cards was for the Hatsune Miku cards that were within. It has a bunch of non-vocaloid cards such as ShiroBako, Nisemonogatari, Madoka Magicka, and many many other anime series which I haven’t seen and can’t remember.

I don’t think they will sell individually, so I’ll be putting together bulk lots. 50 card for $15 or something like that. I want to have a dropdown menu that buyers can select their favorite series from, and they get 50 cards from that series. I’ve seen a seller on eBay do this with Weiss Schwarz cards, and they have quite a few sales.

125 sold @ $12.99! That’s $1623.75 gross! It probably cost $3.25 to ship each lot, so that’s $1217.5 net! Oh wait, eBay seller fees.. 10% of each sale.

$14207.5 net is what I’m coming up with. You can see that I am very bad at math!

Ok so 10% of $1623.75 is $162.375. This is what eBay will take as their fee. Then there’s shipping, which will cost $406.25. $1623.75-$162.375-$406.25 = $1055.125.

That’s a good number. I wanna reproduce that for myself! How fun would it be to buy up people’s P-Memories collections, keep the cards I want, and sell the rest at profit?

🤑🤑🤑🤑🤑🤑

I doubt the margins are very good. But the effort that goes into making the listings is IDEAL compared to what I have been doing up to this point. Up to this point I have meticulously spent hundreds of hours photographing and cropping and listing and keeping inventory. A bulk lot of 50 cards requires a one time listing, and then restocking as I get new cards in.

Ideal!

So that’s what I’ll do today. It’s saturday so I’m not going to go very hard on eBay, but I am planning on getting 10+ listings added. 10 listings is my new golden standard. With the subscription level I’m at, I can list up to 1000 listings a month without having to pay an insertion fee. 10 per day won’t even get close to that, so I think every now and then I should list twice as much, or three times as much… But 10 is a new minimum to keep on track.

I’m all about baby steps. 10 per day is good now, and in the future I’d like to raise the minimum. This all will take a more considerable time investment, but that’s okay because eBay is my job now. I gotta make this work if I am to live a live worth living!

I put a similar sentiment in the letter I wrote my dad. I have to live courageously if I am to be happy with the life I’m living. Courage means following my dreams with vicious intent, not falling back on my parents to take care of me.

I want to jump on eBay right now and get listing!

I think I want to do so, so I don’t have to feel. If I refuse to feel, refuse to be vulnerable even when I’m alone, I will surely not live happily. That’s why I place so much importance in this journalling every day. I need to get my feelings out, I need to understand what it is that I’m feeling so I can deal with them. I have to feel to be happy. I have to give myself permission to be alive and be human.

I just gave myself that permission, and permission to be vulnerable.

Sangha service tomorrow at 10:30 AM! I’m going to be there. I only kind of want to go to CoDA, but I really want to go to Sangha service. Oh did I mention I missed CoDA this morning? I totally missed CoDA. I wonder if that’s part of the reason I stayed up so late last night. I stay up late as an excuse for missing things that are scheduled in the mornings… Bad habit and I do it because I’m not comfortable with my feelings.

I do it because I don’t allow myself to feel vulnerable in many situations. I do it because I don’t want to spend the gas money or incur vehicle wear and tear. I got vehicle problems! Ugh! The suburban is making buckling noises when I turn the wheel. I’m afraid that front left wheel is just going to break at the axle and my wheel will go flying into someone’s car in the other lane and it’ll be a huge shitshow and I’ll get sued and have to pay someone’s medical bills for the next 10 years…

And the suburban’s brakes are not in good condition. Nothing is in good condition on that suburban. I think I’d be hard pressed to get $1000 out of that hunk of junk at this point. Maybe I should list it on eBay with all it’s problems, and just put the reserve at some ridiculous value so I can see how much it’s worth. That’s probably a bad idea because I’m sure the listing cost for eBay motors is way high compared to the rest of eBay.

I’m ignoring the problem. Just like I do with my own feelings, my own health, etc. etc. etc. I’m ignorning the problems of my Suburban!

Well it’s not like I can do much. I could pay to get it fixed only if I were to open another credit card. That is literally the only way I could pay for repairs or maintenance right now. Which brings me back to my plan of do nothing until it catastrophically fails, at which point I’ll sell it and buy a Smart Car or Tesla Model 3.

Can I even get a loan for either? I probably can. My credit score is still pretty good. That reminds me, I think I have a CC payment due today. Hold on a sec.

Why are bank websites so absolutely atrocious? Zero image optimization, horrible long load times, poorly written HTML/CSS, overlapping elements, jarring font replacement after a delayed load, jarring element rendering after a delayed load, non-matching visual styles across the site, UI and button placement that doesn’t make sense, random errors, inconsistent REST URLs, the list goes on…

Payment made! And my next payment due dates are in my calendar. I wonder how my Stock portfolio is doing on Robinhood. I haven’t checked that in awhile.

Very nice. It keeps going up! I reconciled that in YNAB and now look at my net worth.

Makin’ a comeback, baby!

Today while I was walking I was thinking that eBay is really a lot like stock trading. Instead of a token which signifies a share of a company, eBay deals with assets. Those assets can depreciate or appreciate based on age, condition, etc. My point is it’s up to me to make good decisions on what is valuable in markets other than the one I buy the item from.

Now if only I could be more brave and dumpster dive at Barns & Noble like Cincinnati Picker, I could get a bunch of free items which are worth a lot more than $0!

Maybe I could try going around Sunday evening after Barnes & Noble has closed. I think I would be more comfortable doing that, as opposed to dumpster diving when they are open. The issue is that they have a gate on their dumpster, so I’m not sure if it will be locked or unlocked. I assume it’s in their processes to lock it up at night, but then again, people are human, get lazy and don’t do the process correctly 100% of the time.

I could get lucky, or I could strike out. I want to at least give it a shot!

A few weeks back when I drove behind Barns and Noble on a Sunday afternoon, the gate was unlocked, but I was too anxious that a staff member would be running a bag of trash out to the dumpster while I was digging through it. I didn’t want to have that experience so I just kept rolling.

I need a grabber arm anyway. I’m not brave enough to actually want to climb up and into the dumpster, so I think a grabber arm is a necessity.

I’m thinking of making a listing on eBay for a penpal service. I wonder if anyone else is doing that on eBay? $5 is what I was thinking. That is enough for a basic envelope, a couple pages, and postage. Plus my time, of course.

I search for Penpal on eBay and all I see are books with that title.

I’m having second thoughts now. What if the person I send a letter to is a dick? What if I don’t like them and I don’t want to write to them?

I just have to consider it a paid job, I think. I’m getting paid to write someone al letter and send some stickers. That’s a pretty easy job.

I kinda want to try it, but I also think nobody will buy it. Why get a letter from a stranger when you could mail a letter to someone you actually know and care about?

I literally cannot find a penpal service on eBay. There is no category for such a thing. eBay is usually for physical goods, not services. I don’t think it’s an idea that would get any traction.

Maybe I should try this on a smaller marketplace? Something like Etsy or OpenBazaar perhaps. I’ll ponder this idea little more.

I’m hungy! I want to make some bread today. Maybe I’ll to that after I finish writing. I’m almost out of potatos. I think I should probably go to a community pantry and get free food for awhile. I don’t really have the income or the net worth to buy groceries… I gotta eat though!

I made $1200 in the past 30 days selling junk on eBay. I’m tempted to be loose with my money, but I have to keep in mind that most of the money I make has to go back into making eBay acquisitions, or this isn’t going to work out. I’m really on a shoestring budget for now, and I have to live as such.

Community pantry! I don’t think I can do it. I can’t even call and make a dentist appointment, so how am I to call and set up an appointment to collect free food?

BECAUSE I’M WORTH IT. BECAUSE I CARE AND I MATTER AND I DESERVE LOVE AND KINDESS AND BELONGING AND A FULL STOMACH!

That yelling is the compassionate part of me. I’m typing now as the logical part of me. Group therapy says it’s best to act as the wise part, which is a healthy combination of logical mind and emotional mind.

That sounds pretty good. Sure, why not. Mhm, whatever you say, dear.

I’m going to go prepare food.

I’m grateful for WiFi. Especially free FAST wifi that I get from my brother’s house or the library.

I’m grateful for Teamspeak, even though Discord is way better now that I got over the shitty parts of it.

Teamspeak is better at free speech, though. Everyone on Discord servers is so afraid of breaking laws and copyright and shit. But that’s more of a systemic problem brought on my social media platforms in cahoots with law enforcement and government censorship and all that bologna which makes statism the new, leading religion.

That was a tangent.

I’m grateful for fountain pens. I love my LAMY Al-Star very very very much!