Here’s the time now – I’m actually on my way back from Istanbul – on the plane headed back to Heathrow airport and then onto my parents.
I met Joe something in Wow Airport who got the same procedure as I did with Longevita.
Those guys are crafty buggers – you can see from the head band I’m wearing that on the back of it it’s got their company name – so you end up advertising the company wherever you are.
It’s smart and I’m impressed.
Joe and I at the airport even had two ladies look at our bags (also Longevita) and ask if they could take pictures of it.
I’m sure there are others who saw the bags and made a mental note and/or wrote it down.
Once again, the pressure is on as I now have 14% battery remaining and want to make sure I get this blog written.
Making that bet with Chris that if I don’t write everyday I’ll have to pay him $50 has been highly effective.
It’s in the midst of becoming a mental habit to make sure that I write daily.
One of the things I actually said to Valentina my coach was that what I aim for is about a 50% retention rate, 6 months down the line.
What I mean is that in the bid to pick up multiple new habits I’ll take massive action and keeping 50% of them 6-months later is pretty much what I aim for.
Writing, I intend to be one of them.
I actually told Joe about my writing, and what I enjoy is the reality that at some point my memory will fail me, or the act of writing this piece will get stores so far back into the recesses of my mind – that I’ll forget I ever wrote it.
Yet here it will sit – serving as a historical record of what I was doing on Sun 15th November at 10.24 local time Turkey – when I was 30,000 feet in the air flying back to London.
This blog isn’t going to be about my hair transplant because I’m going to write a monster piece about that so instead, I’ll turn my eyes to something else that happened this weekend.
I got an email from Vice.
Yes, from Vice magazine – about our internship programme and about it being ‘low-paid’ and whether fundamentally I was exploiting people.
It was a scary but not totally unexpected email to receive – and I think within that are the makings of a longer blog within itself.
Fundamentally some (I expect) disgruntled starters (I say starters because some <5% of people apply, start and then quit a couple of days in), and some ‘applicants who didn’t make the grade’ I think were in touch with Vice about our internship programme.
Anyway they knew about our programme and so wanted us to comment upon unpaid work during Covid 19.
I shot an email response back pretty much immediately.
I’m on the plane right now else I’d jump into my email and share the screenshot with you.
But keeping my internet off so I can actually write is much more productive for me.
I’m finding the mere act of writing again to be pretty surreal.
This blog is totally unrelated to what I do for a living (run a marketing agency) and yet I take great joy in the creative act of writing.
It’s interesting to consider how at heart I’m a creative and yet I’m running a small, small business.
I mean I have around 30+ people within the Pearl Lemon Group in total and that keeps me busy as a business owner.
But, there’s something really enjoyable about the act of writing words that come from the void seemingly and get spilled out onto paper.
Stephen Pressfield talks about words, once written, no longer belong to you.
They were written by you, made by you – but they do not belong to you.
I suppose that’s what I mean when I mentioned to Joe that once I’ve written something – it feels like a document of historical record and whilst it refers to my life and my thoughts – it represents a couple of things.
History – written as it happened.
A stream of consciousness – i.e the ramblings of the wandering mind.
Something that has transmuted into a document.
This record does not belong to me, it does not belong to he/she who reads it, as one person’s insights and thoughts about it are different from someone else’s.
For the reader, what do I know about what your thoughts on this piece are any more than the person who read it before you and those that will read it after you.
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That’s the interesting thing about history isn’t it?
What’s ‘fact’ and what’s ‘fiction’, what makes one version any truer than the other?
Anyway, I’m on several sets of drugs at the moment.
I have painkillers (stopped taking those), anti-swelling tablets (apparently these suppress the immune system) and antibiotics (to help prevent infection) I guess since I had my head carved open.
Maybe it’s all of that that’s making me feel so reflective.
But 20 minutes have passed and already Microsoft word tells me I’ve written:
Not sure if you can see it but it’s 866 words.
My head throbs because of this damn headband that I’ve got to wear until at least tomorrow evening – but I think I’ll wear it till Tue morning for good measure.
Above it the fluid is trapped (I think it’s the saline they put into my skill to make the transplantation a little easier to manage) and slowly dripping down through the pressure the headband is giving.
But the headache that comes with it isn’t pleasant at all.
Anyway,
I’m not sure what else I wanted to share with you this morning.
I feel like my energy and my motivation to keep writing is spent – as tiredness returns to me.
I did spend the last hour or so trying to doze on and off with limited success.
I’ve actually got my jumper and rolled and wrapped it around my neck to prop me up a little bit.
I cannot lean to the side nor lean forward.
Mostly I need to keep my head upright or lean back at a 45 degree angle as I sleep.
It’ll mean the saline that’s been injected into my head will disperse more evenly I read.
Else if I slept on one side all evening, the saline might accumulate on one section of my head and cause me other cosmetic problems.
________________
Cosmetic problems…….
It is embarrassing, and does feel like something of a slight upon my masculinity. Going bald is a natural part of aging and simply because I don’t like the way it makes me look – I’ve gone and put myself into relatively intensive surgery.
The recovery period for it to be perfect is basically a year – which is a damn long time – with the first 30 days being critical to it’s care.
Depending upon when everything gets published you can read more about this in detail in my other blog/write up about my hair transplantation adventures.
Right now however, I’ve got a couple of movies lined up, plus I’m tired as it is so perhaps I’ll just try and doze off.
It’s so difficult to sleep well.
But yeh, I never slept that well anyway.
Until next time all ☺
Final time and battery life:
Final word count (and with this I bid you adieu and catch you on the next post: ☺ )
