So, as you may remember from a few days ago, I am now officially-unofficially done with classes. This is obviously a relief. Yet it is also dizzyingly anticlimactic. For so long I was solely focused on getting done the schoolwork in front of me that I never once dared to imagine what the world would look like when I was done. Now I am, and the answer is, to summarize: more or less the same as it looked when I was still working.
There is now an interesting paradox with my schedule. The list of things that I have to do each day is now incredibly short, and comprises mostly on those items which are necessary to my day to day survival; I have to make sure I eat, and shower, and get to the doctors’ offices on time. Beyond that I have almost no commitments. I have no local friends with whom I might have plans, nor any career that requires certain hours of me, nor even any concrete future path for my further education (I was, and still am prevented from making such plans because my school still cannot provide an up to date and accurate transcript, which is a prerequisite to applying).
At the same time, now that I have some semblance of peace in my life, for the first time in memory, there are plenty of things which I could do. I could go for a pleasant walk in the park. I could take to the streets and protest something. I could fritter away countless hours on some video game, or some television series. I could write a blog post, or even several. My options are as boundless as my newfound time. Yet for as many things as I could do, there are few things that I need to do.
Moreover, almost all of here things that I could do require some degree of proactive effort on my part. In order to sink time into a video game, for example, I would first have to find and purchase a game that interests me, which would first require that I find a means to acquire, and run said game on my hardware (the bottleneck isn’t actually hardware on my end, but internet speed, which in my household is so criminally slow that it does not meet the bare minimum technical specifications for most online distribution platforms).
As problems go… this isn’t particularly problematic. On the contrary, I find it exhilarating, if also new and utterly terrifying, to think that I now command my own time; indeed, that I have time to command. In the past, the question of time management was decidedly hollow, given that I generally had none. My problem, as I insisted to an unsympathetic study skills teacher, was not that I categorically made poor use of time, but that I only possessed about three productive hours in a day in which to complete twelve hours of schoolwork. The only question involved was which schoolwork I focused on first, which was never truly solved, as each teacher would generally insist that their subject ought be my highest priority, and that all of their class work was absolutely essential and none could be pared down in accordance with my accommodations.
Nevertheless, while my new state of affairs isn’t necessarily problematic, it certainly has the potential to become so if I allow myself to become entranced in the siren song of complacency and cheap hedonism. I am aware that many people, especially people in my demographic, fall prey to various habits and abuses when lacking clear direction in life, therefore I have two primary aims in the time that it will take the school to produce the necessary paperwork for me to move on to higher education.
First, I need to keep busy, at least to an extent that will prevent me from wallowing; for wallowing is not only unproductive, but generally counterproductive, as it increases feelings of depression and helplessness, and is associated with all manner of negative medical outcomes.
Second, I need to keep moving forward. I am well aware that I often feel most hopeless when I cannot see any signs of progress, hence why much of the past five years has been so soul-crushing. In theory, it would be quite easy to occupy my time by playing video games and watching television; by building great structures of Lego and then deconstructing them; or even by writing long tracts, and then destroying them. But this would provide only a physical, and not a mental defense against wallowing. What I require is not merely for my time to be occupied, but an occupation in my time.
I am therefore setting for myself a number of goals. All of these goals are relatively small scale, as I have found that when setting my own goals as opposed to working under the direction of others, I tend to work better with small, tactically minded checklist-style agendas than vague, grand strategies. Most of these goals are relative mundanities, such as shifting around money among accounts, or installing proper antivirus software on a new laptop. All of these goals are intended to keep me busy and nominally productive. A few of them have to do with my writing here.
I generally detest people who post too much of their day to day personal affairs online, particularly those who publish meticulous details of their daily efforts to meet one target or another. However, having my goals publicly known has in past attempts seemed to be a decent motivator of sorts. It forces me to address them in one way or another down the line, even if all I do by addressing them is explain why they haven’t happened yet. If there is a reasonable explanation, I do not feel pressure; if there is not, I feel some compulsion to keep my word to myself and others. So, here are a few of my goals as they regard this blog:
1) I am looking at getting a gallery page set up which will allow me to display the photos that I have taken personally in one place, as well as showing off some of my sketches, which people say I ought to. Aside from being nice for people who like to look at pictures, having a gallery, or a portfolio if you will, has been a thing that I have wanted to have in my life since my first high school art class, as part of my quest to be a pretentious, beret-wearing, capital-a Artist, and people have been clamoring to see more of my pictures and sketches of late. My aim is to have this page in working order before thanksgiving.
2) I am also working on getting that fictional story I keep mentioning polished up for launch. The reason it hasn’t gone up yet is no longer that I haven’t written necessary materials, but that I am still working on getting the backend set up so that it displays nicely and consistently. I’m also still writing it, but I’m far enough along writing it that I can probably start posting as soon as I get the technical hijinks worked out.
This story was scheduled to start some time at the beginning of last month. However, a major glitch in the plugin I was aiming to use to assist its rollout caused a sitewide crash (you may remember that part), and subsequently I had to go back to the drawing board. Because I am, quite simply, not a computer coding person, the solution here is not going to be technically elegant. What’s probably going to happen is that the story is going to be posted under a sub-domain with a separate install of WordPress, in order to keep fiction and nonfiction posts from becoming mixed up. I’m working on trying to make navigating between the two as painless as possible. The timeline on this one should be before thanksgiving.
3) I aim to travel more. This isn’t as strictly blog related, but it is something I’m likely to post about. Specifically, I aim to find a method by which I can safely and comfortably travel, with some degree of independence, despite my disability. My goal is to undertake a proof of concept trip before May of next year.
4) I want to write and create more. No surprises there.
This is likely to be the last post of the daily post marathon. That is, unless something strikes my fancy between now and tomorrow. I reckon that this marathon has served its intended purpose of bringing me up to date on my writings quite nicely. I have actually enjoyed getting to write something every day, even if I know that writing, editing, and posting two thousand words a day is not sustainable for me, and I may yet decide to change up my posting routine some more in the future.
