Today is Aura Awareness Day.

I like to think that mine is teal.

the price of (more or less) success
I'm beginning to feel nostalgic for the days when I first threw prudence to the winds and decided to become a freelance copywriter. I had hardly any clients, and would therefore rarely leave the house for fear of being tempted to spend money I didn't have. Dean kept me housed, fed, and clothed, of course, but then--as now--any luxury expenses were pretty much my own lookout. So I stifled my never-ending desire for kikay products, and read every book in my library at least thrice out of desperation.

Then came the halcyon Hong Kong days, when Dean was making enough money for me to be a luxuriously kept woman, going shopping when I felt bored and buying a minimum of one new book a week. By then I had actually amassed a modest stable of copywriting clients, but since I was abroad, it wasn't too convenient for me to keep up with the corporate projects. But that was okay, because I was making pretty good money writing Internet porn instead. Yup, porn--a pretty penny just for writing twelve pages a month of "ooh ooh ahh ahh no please don't stop". Not exactly challenging, but lucrative enough and excellent fodder for amusing conversation!

Two years later, Sage came along, so we came back to Manila. (Well, it was a little more complicated that that, but I digress...) I practically had to start over with the copywriting again (because the porn company, alas, folded), dealing with such challenging clients as a well-known purveyor of pineapple juice whose name starts with 'D' and ends in 'E'. D----e insisted that they were not a fruit company, but rather, a technology company who happened to deal in produce. Whatever. It wasn't like I could pick and choose.

Nowadays, while I'm not exactly rolling in it, I pretty much can pick which projects to take and which to turn down. I rarely do, though, since (a) I try not to look a gift client in the mouth, and (b) as we have often established, my appetite for things like makeup and bath products is well-nigh insatiable. (And let's not forget luxe linens!) So it's come to a point where I rarely go more than two days of late without a new project cropping up. I kid you not. I've been back from the States for about a month now, and I still haven't finished the pile of books we brought back; and it's taking me forever to get through the PC game I bought weeks ago--Evil Genius; and the number of blogs I've been promising to vamp up for people is piling up scarily towards the two-digit mark.

The price of success, apparently, is success.