The completely unfiltered diary of a 23-year-old (week 55)
My Fiverr side hustle had a gig lined up, and I was expecting a notification any minute telling me that the new client had placed an order.
A notification came up on my phone.
I assumed it would be the client I had been talking to, but it wasn’t. It was another name I didn’t recognize. I’d received an order from a surrogacy agency from Ukraine.
No, I’m not selling my womb as a surrogate as a side hustle.
That was a joke of poor taste.
But yeah, I was pretty surprised. It was just so random.
And then I started thinking, shit, would it be immoral to accept this job? It was for proofreading some website copy. I did a quick google search and turns out surrogacy is legal in Ukraine. But it’s just not something I’m really familiar with. And the possibility of exploitation in that industry seems, well, definitely possible (based on what little I’ve read about it before).
It got me thinking, hell, prostitution is legal here. And in quite many other countries too. Would prostitution seem possibly immoral at first glance? Yeah, definitely. Just like many “taboo” subjects. Though, personally, I think in an ideal world, it’s the person’s own choice. And I do think it’s also a person’s choice whether they want to be a surrogate or not. And in an ideal world, the legality of that would make it safer to do so.
Of course, legality is not the same as morality. But let’s not delve into that for now. I can see how it would be nice to have morality spelled out in religion for you to fall back on. Though, maybe, that’s not really how religion works either.
I thought of that bakery that had refused service to a gay couple. They’d refused to bake the couple a wedding cake because of their own religious beliefs. (I might be remembering the incident wrong, but it was something like that.) Honestly, I think the bakery was entitled to their own views, and the right to refuse service, even though I disagree with their views. They should serve gay people. It shouldn’t matter. They should have the right to refuse service, but they really shouldn’t have and that was just unfortunate. They did come under a lot of fire.
Of course, in more serious circumstances like a doctor refusing to treat a patient because they’re gay — that would be ludicrous.
(Side note: I’d misspelled ludicrous as ludicrus on the first try and autocorrect wanted to change it to Ludacris. Well done, Luda.)
Back to moral debates. I thought about that bakery incident though — what if I was being like the bakers. I was thinking of possibly refusing service because I thought surrogacy was morally questionable. But maybe in Ukraine they see it differently.
Maybe you can already tell from the past tense how this is gonna end.
I think I’ll accept the gig.
It could be a terrible mistake. I might never know. I’ll sleep on it before deciding.
Also, on a disgustingly and insultingly unrelated and unimportant note, I went to the supermarket today. At the self-checkout, two receipts came out. The person before me hadn’t taken their receipt. When I got home, I took voyeuristic pleasure in reading that person’s receipt — I just wanted to see what they’d bought. Mushrooms and milk. I immediately felt guilty about my own purchase of a bag of chips and a pack of gummy sweets. Here I was, spending money on complete trashy foods, while other people were buying legitimate, healthy sustenance.
Then, I looked closer and realized it was CRM MUSHROOM and DAIRY MILK-HZL. Cream of mushroom soup, probably the canned stuff, and Cadbury milk chocolate with hazelnuts.
I felt a little better about myself.
And, I’ve eaten half that bag of chips while writing this. And gained just about zero satisfaction from it. Why did I do that.
—
I’d completely forgotten about that weird gig from the previous entry. Not a good sign — early onset dementia in youths is a thing.
That other (more normal) gig I had lined up finally went through. I also spent some time trying to revamp my Fiverr gig page. Trying some DIY marketing 101. It’s still a work in progress; I haven’t actually made the changes live yet.
In other news, I had a good catch up with Shelly and her family. I feel like she’s matured somewhat since college, and I really admire her for that. Her patience for her family is astounding. It’s also a little strange to hang out with someone’s family — usually us kids just hang out together — but it’s also really sweet and cozy in a way. Though I do get kind of awkward, but I appreciate them being so welcoming. Plus, I do like talking to people who are important to my friends, i.e. their family, other friends, partners, siblings, etc. Pets. Maybe not plants. There has to be a line drawn somewhere before it becomes just weird.
I’ve been putting in pretty legit days at work. I actually started around 9am this morning, and worked till 6pm. Though I did take a lot of breaks in between. It was a decently solid day of work. And after that, I was pretty tired. But after dinner and some slothing about, by maybe around 8pm, things were good again. And I spent a good few hours trying to revamp my side gig profile. Just goes to show how many hours there really are in a day, especially when you’re working from home and don’t lose time to commuting.
Shelly’s been working from home too, which is probably a welcome change after regular office days. She’s the one who made the comment about there being so many hours in the evening after work to do stuff. She’s absolutely right. It really is a blessing and privilege.
I hate to think of what would happen when it goes back to normal office working.
Oh yeah, back to side gig revamping. (My thoughts really do jump about a lot.) I was thinking of making a page that showed all the good reviews customers have left in the past, and as I was looking through them to select the good ones, I felt really warm. It was like a flood of positivity and validation. I must really be validation deprived if a bunch of old reviews actually make me happy.
It did make me happy though. Cheap thrills.
In other news, an old acquaintance I’d met on a dating app (our conversation died pretty fast there. 100% my fault.) messaged me out of the blue. He must be bored. Or, he might have met up with a mutual acquaintance and gotten ideas from them. Either way, we’ll see how this goes. He’s a pretty interesting guy.
At least I think he is — don’t really know much about him.
In other news, I brought Mom out for an afternoon. We had some good food for lunch, and then we went to a Japanese supermarket. She looked like she was really enjoying herself. I probably went overboard with bringing her to a second place (an art supply store) after that. But anyway, it was a good mother-daughter day.
I can’t believe it’s been less than a week since I made that regrettable decision to buy a pack of chips. Damn. Gotta be more mindful of time.
As if.
:)
xo,
Amber
