Bad Opening Lines

Back in November during the one weekend I had off for at least six weeks on either side of it, I got on a plane and flew 600 miles south of us. My brother kept telling me that my 95 year-old grandfather was fading fast and that if I wanted to see him, I should do it. I kept getting this message from various members of my family until finally Z and I decided to go. So down we went. Since we were already heading south, we decided we should visit my maternal grandmother who also lives nearbye-ish. It'd been awhile since I'd seen her, and she was always saying that we never visited. So we went. And we stayed for one night. We jumped up and did the dishes on queue. We cleaned up the $50 of steak her dog threw up. We stripped the sheets from our bed and started the wash machine before we left. We did or duty, and because we both had to work on Monday, we couldn't stay long. But we did it.

32 Days In

 There are only 52 weeks in a year and so for some reason saying I only have 40-some weeks left is terrifying. Yet if I tell myself I am only 32 days in, it feels like there is more time to catch up. 

A few giant work things are now over, and life has calmed down enough to still be a frustrating schedule but manageable. I'm sleeping more. Actually I'm rearranging habits so that sleep is a priority. I still eat like a crazy person but the sleeping is making waking up and exercising a reality in a way that it just wasn't before. 

I like it. 

Goals:

356 Days Left

First off, I love the internet. I could could type, "How many days left until Feb 19, 2014," and I got an answer in a website. http://daycalc.appspot.com/02/19/2014

Bookmarked!

This is why it's good for me to visit this list each and every week. It's easy to get sucked up into life and forget the goals. I'm doing some fun stuff this week that wasn't on the list like finishing my sister's baby invites. I'm adding an "other" section at the bottom to keep track of creative pursuits that aren't part of the goals. 

Goals last week and goals this week:

Thirteen for Thirty-Two

This coming year, it's a numbers game.  Many of the goals will be quantity not quality. The truth is, quantity leads to quality especially when one is trying to learn a subject or a discipline.

Some have specific numbers attached to them:

1. Photoshop
Watch a Lynda.com class on Photoshop.

2. Illustrator
Watch a Lynda.com class on Illustrator.

3. After Effects
Watch a Lynda.com class on After Effects. 

4. PaintingPaint 365 portraits (at most basic sense). I want to be good at painting faces. I don't even know what that means yet but what I do know is that I need to put in a lot of time with drawing and painting. This feels like the loftiest of the goals.

Turning Over the 31st Page

I started this blog when I turned 28. It perhaps was a bit before but the birthday as a marker isn't a bad marker.

Today I turn 32. Thirty-two is a nice round number a lot like 28. It's arbitrary, but I feel better about 32 than say 31. Thirty-two has purpose where 31 is just a number waiting to change.

I was feeling bad about life a few days ago and I stopped to try and clear my head. "Think about something positive, God damn it," I said out loud to no one but myself.

During year 31 I did a few things well:

Conversations No One Had

I got an angry(lite) emal from one of the artists we're working with on creating a DVD saying that she was sorry nothing had come of her DVD, that it had been almost a year since filming, and I guess she would have her lawyer contact us about who owns the rights to the footage.

Yes we told her it would take four months, and it's taken almost a year. Yes we've done a bad job communicating this with her. Yes the DVD is almost finished being edited, and we don't have a good communication structure set up for this. (All of those thing btw Z and I have been trying to fix for years and every time we were close we were totally fucked by my parents. End side note.)

There's this really interesting thing in human behavior...and I see it more so in female human behavior... is the strategy to say nothing until the negative emotions build into a super offensive explosion. And it often is the direct result of time dredged down by purely defensive behavior.

It's hard to say what we need. It's hard because first we have to understand ourselves well enough to know what we need. Then we have to look out into the world and define how the current situation isn't giving us what we need. Then we have to do the very hard task of figuring out if we can change it for the better and how to go about taking those steps.  

August 2012 Goals

I love arbitrary dates, and this means that each and every month on the first, I feel like life is opening up to me as much as it does on a January 1st.  So here we go. I'm allowing myself 10, which statistically is 9 too many to really stick with something, but alas. Goals.