30 minutes or 3 pages, whichever comes first

[starts timer]

Morning wakeup alarm goes off at 06:15, I was already mentally awake and thinking, “I wonder when my alarm will go off… I hope I haven’t awaken prematurely to the point of missing the opportunity for an entire additional sleep cycle.”

This pen looks terrible on this page, but so did the other one. Stabilo point 88 fine 0,4 it reads going up the shaft between my thumb and index finger. It’s a shade of brown. The other, on the page left of the binding, where I’m taking Anatomy of Pilates notes, is heavy black ink from an S•Gel pen with a delightful rose gold body that an event gig mate handed me during Grammy House. She was working Sharpie’s footprint, while I was working Vaseline.

Not having a *real* job while living in L.A. is made possible in part by all the major events that take place. In this photo, myself and fellow brand ambassadors act on behalf of Vaseline during Grammy House, a 4-day activation for music industry players, leading up to GRAMMYs Award Show day.

Ou, thank You, Lord, for that check; I recently received it. Four extremely long days at $30/hr. It’ll definitely be March rent. Goodness gracious, we’re at the end of February already. When was Grammy House, end of January? Honey child, listen. I’m grateful for the ability to pay bills, yeah.

Oh, it’s this paper that sucks. I’m writing in a composition notebook that probably cost a dollar when I got it. It came with me to L.A. from Louisiana; I may have had it since high school and just didn’t get around to using it until after graduation.

(I stay lying to myself; I’m knowing I bought this in college.. wasn’t sh-t extra in high school! My little stationery-obsessed self bought this as a fresh, new adult out on her own. Then again, it’s very possible that I kept an unused composition notebook from high school. There were giveaways from school supply drives and back-to-school church revivals, and I’ve always been one to take exceptional care of the smallest of belongings in hopes to hold onto them for as close to forever as possible, not knowing when the next will come).

The first entry, me taking notes about pronounciation of vowels and consonants in Spanish, is dated 9/21/2016. Today’s entry is dated mardi 24 fevrier 2026. Surely everyone keeps random notebooks intermittently in use for at least a decade.

I’m ready to get off the plantation, folks making money off my physical body being present and completely work at a given place while they sit home like big fat rats and eat cake.

My sound mind (…okay, somewhat sound), my able body, my well-groomed appearance, my welcoming disposition, all of these attributes that allow me to pick up the random gigs around L.A. and beyond that pay my rent, I’m thankful that they exist — the attributes and the gigs.

Originally purchased in November 2019 under the domain name aroundLAwithTK, to begin my blog, then mildly rebranded once in December 2025 to aroundwithTK, no longer hiding behind L.A., I’ve been investing in this little corner of the Internet for several years.

Yeah, I’m on the back side of this page now and I can’t see sh-t! The words from the front side of the page have bled through, causing me to be putting brown ink on brown ink and we all know that equals invisible. I’ll be more mindful next time; I’m going to use the rest of this space. Nothing goes to waste. Whew, this may make me feel like a childhood Ray Charles trying to read it back if I end up transferring it onto another page.. a digital one, that is, my online written blog! It’s scribble scratch, but and tf what?! Scribble scratch is better than absolutely nothing day after day on a site for which I pay! Girl, yes, pay! Ain’t sh-t free. Two hundred dollars or something, two-hundred-fifty, is about to be automatically debited from my account in a few days for what, the 5th time? 4th?

What was the inception of this personal website of mine hosted by Squarespace? What do I have to do for a free membership? Shoot. If I were earning money from my written blog, or any ongoing form of content creation, it’d be a different story. But noooooooo..

Little Miss T. Krystal Greaux, always on the go, never sticking around. Lord, am I my mama’s child?

[timer sounds]

As I transcribe these morning pages onto keys, I’m reminded of a few things that grind my gears enough to where I could write about ‘em at length:

working for brand ambassador staffing agencies is a ripoff to everyone involved: client (brand), consumer (marketing producer) and “contractor” (me); only person not getting played is the staffing person. solution: cut out middle man (staffing person)

Wait. I was on the phone with my best guy friend, Calvin, and I could’ve sworn there were a few items brought back to the forefront of my mind to possibly revisit. Hm.

That working as a brand ambassador one through a middle man ticks me off so badly that the others have fallen to the side. It’s modern-day servitude, loaning out your worker to the farmer down the road, collecting a heap of big shiny coins to sit your wide a** on while flicking him one red cent.

I gots ta get me free.

Oh, a pleasant realization came to me:

I’ve maintained owning an active domain for SIX YEARS!

Now, I knew in advance that that was a singular item, why did I bullet-point as if I were about to write a list? I wanted to make sure it stands out, and, it’s a bit of a list altogether, a list of points that came to my mind during scribbling words down in my one-dollar composition notebook after a morning jog.

Have I consistently been posting on my blog for six years? Not even close. However, has it gone unpaid? Nope! And that’s more than I can say for my previous webpage. I forgot about my previous personal websites to the point where when I went to log back in, no longer did it exist! So, it’s a step for me to have even kept this one in existence.

Shoot, I owned the domain name, aroundLAwithTK, for a good nine months before I built the website and/or added anything to it. I remember my first post being about shopping at farmers’ markets aroundLA, emphasizing why it was even more crucial during the most widespread occurences of COVID-19.

It took me having been furloughed from my full-time job in Beverly Hills luxury retail, spending a few months back home in Louisiana with family, then being back in L.A., bored and wanting for more.

That was May 2020, that first post. I’d bought the aroundLAwithTK domain in November 2019. If that doesn’t equal the amount of months in between that I said it did earlier, remember that I’m an ELA girl.

After that first post in May, I don’t think it was until August when I put up another, encouraging folks to shop at Black-owned, brick-and-mortar stores aroundLA while business owners struggled to stay afloat during all of the mandatory closures caused by COVID.

The gaps continued to grow. Lately, I’ve been closing ‘em.

Ou child, it’s after 13:30! I want to rest my eyes before I head over to Larchmont Village to meet with my LMFT. What I’m really brushing over and hiding from is how I don’t want to be my mum.

[inserts rabbit] That’s all, folks!

At the time of writing this entry, yesterday’s and maybe tomorrow’s, this website is serving as a personal exploration project through writing. Other writers have readers; here, we’re riders. Thank you for coming along and I hope you’ll stick AROUND.