I work with my lover and we love our work using social media
Congratulations, Mrs. London. He’s a real estate agent,” he used to joke in a bittersweet way, that the nurses had told my dear late mother after giving birth to me. I was the oldest son in a thriving third-generation real estate business in the As it turned out, after trying for several years in my twenties, real estate wasn’t “my thing” and I later found out after doing big media marketing and public relations in New York City and Washington DC wasn’t “my thing.” It took a massive heart attack to find out, but as they say “it takes what it takes.” I was “put on the sidelines” and forced out of work, and into Social Security.
The year was 2001. I pinched my skin to discover that I was still alive and, having been the active person I perceived myself to be, I started to get busy. The first step was learning golf. That lasted about a month. One would think that, since I grew up close to Tiger Wood, perhaps by osmosis some of his genius for golf might have rubbed off. That was not the case. I spent more time in sand traps, pine-filled forests, and shallow lakes than on green grass. Mark Twain had been right. Playing golf was “a good ride gone wrong.”
Although I had worked almost two decades in “the real corporate office”, the more I did it, the more I realized that I was creating a kind of “imbalance” between who I really was and what I was really becoming. I didn’t like who or what I was becoming, i.e. someone willing to give up my real friends for the almighty dollar and basically “sell my soul” in the process. I got tired of even the best paying jobs pretty quickly; some of them others would have (wish I was kidding here) literally killed to get them.
I remember one day sitting down with a piece of paper and writing down what “an ideal life would be like” for me. I had read in a self-help book that the process of writing a dream or goal on paper was/is actually the first step of action; that is to bring it from the subconscious to the universe. It sounded “a little cheesy to me,” but I was willing to do anything to have a life that made sense to me with at least a semblance of happiness.
The change was not a “neon light experience-Eureka!”; in fact quite the opposite. In twelve years one thing led to another. Today I work at home, sometimes in my pajamas if I wish. I work next to who I love, my finances. Together we run an online company.
I founded what later became Google’s top-ranked wacky cartoon and has remained that way since 2005. I’ve created numerous e-shops filled with fun gifts and collectibles featuring my cartoon images, from t-shirts to mugs and more. I founded, designed and created the only famous shoes with love phrases in the world. I design licensed gifts for actress/author Mariel Hemingway.
Through Twitter, my fiancé and I have met many wonderful people. I was officially adopted by someone I’ve always looked up to a lot, Kathy Ireland as her brother, and it’s closer than any other real sibling I’ve ever had. She has another foster brother, Jon, and Jon and I are “the brothers Kathy never had and Kathy is surely the sister I never had and always wanted. We can and do talk about anything that’s on our minds.”
Most importantly, also on Twitter, I met the love of my life. I met her and she had waited 54 years to find me. I had several chances to get married, and both of them didn’t pan out, I’m sure now for “a reason”. If any of them had, I would never have met “Miss Right,” and nothing and no one in the world means more to me than her and my love affair with her. We work together. We love our work and we work hard at it. We wear many hats.