holding steady.™

this past week or so has been a small nightmare. this is the second day that i’ve been home, after a tour in gainesville-tampa-west palm beach for a couple of john mayer concerts and a whole lot of tiredness. then, after a single day back at home, i had to head out to key largo for a retreat for my new job, a position with the public allies americorp program, working with an organization called the human services coalition.

what was surprising to me most about the past couple of days, as i sit back and reflect on the retreat, is how much i enjoyed it. yeah, i liked the people i was with, including the director and manager of the program. but i was surprised to find that the substance of the retreat helped me more than i could have possibly expected.

one of the best exercises came yesterday morning, when we discussed vision and mission statements, and how to take the personal goals that we envisioned for ourselves and turn them into personal declarations of purpose. the following are my responses to being asked to establish a vision of my utopia, my goals which can help me achieve that utopia, my understanding of the world as it is now and my personal mission statement which will help me to attain that vision. hokey though it may sound, i am still riding the high.

-VISION: i envision a perfect world in which people actually do celebrate their differences and diversity of experience in a way that fosters a true love for individuality and a tolerance for distinction.

-goals: to continue studying the things that separate and divide people - if one focuses on these differences, you can see that our humanity underscores us all and we can develop a collective appreciation for the identities of others and find more worth in ourselves without belittling these other experiences

-the world as it is now seems to be constantly in a state of flux. each big change resonates with a sort of tidal wave of cultural identity. people dislike the idea of their reality changing, and therefore hate the differences they see in others. hatred and fear are the manifestations of our theories about “other people.”

-MISSION: to further the learning process and construct a constant attitude of respect for diverse experiences and celebration of differences to eliminate the perceived threat to collective identities

a member of my family recently gave me “the lecture.” most African-Americans of my generation and middle-class background have heard it.

“make sure you put money away…save, so you never have to be worried about things the way I was…”

i received a bad-ass graduation gift or two…but i have the worst money habits on the planet. i’ve decided to substitute guilt and self-loathing with a renewed commitment to my savings. to that end, i’ve decided to minimize my goings-out over the next year or so, and commit at least 40% of my earnings directly to savings.

i’m actually currently looking around my room to see what i can sell to make a little more money. being broke puts you in the position to really recommit to having money.

i’m noting that i can’t sell anything. but i will say this..i could live in my bedroom forever.

i hate money. i can’t wait to get a damn job.

As it turn out, I’m about to have a certain amount of time on my hands. I’m nervous about it, but I’m also really looking forward to getting to the place in my life (i believe some call it adulthood) where I set and meet goals.

I’m probably embarking upon a tremendous journey of sorts. It’s going to require some planning, some scheduling, and more active usage of my whiteboard calendar. I have been putting some thought into it, and I like that I am giving myself some tasks. Hopefully it will all come together as articulately as I would hope.

First off, I’m a chronic book buyer. I used to also be a chronic book reader, but college has done a number on my bibliomania (as well as a variety of other things). So, I have some books that I have bought in the past six months or so, and it’s about damn time they were read. These include, but are in no way limited to (since there’s a pretty high probability that I am going to buy more books): A History of American Law (Lawrence M. Friedman), War and Peace, Demons (Fyodor Dostoevsky), The Michael Eric Dyson Reader, The Cornel West Reader, The Divine Comedy (it’s really time to finish that), A History of Western Thought (Betrand Russell), Les Misérables, The Two Americas (Stanley B. Greenberg), The Fountainhead, Elizabeth I (Anne Somerset), Empires of the Word (Nicholas Oster), Language & Politics (Noam Chomsky), and À la recherche du temps perdu (Marcel Proust). That last one is gonna be a doozy.

I really want to get to the point where I read the 225-plus RSS feeds that come in through my NNW every day. Or maybe I could just trim them down. I also feel like I should be able to keep up with football a little better. It’s going to be a banner year for the Colts, I can feel it.

A huge project, but I feel worthy: I really want to finish my website. I’d like to get it done before September or October, so that I can use it when I’m applying to grad school as an expression of my love for politics. This is going to require some better understanding of HTML/CSS, which is fine. I am also thinking about doing some sort of mapped representation of the US, in terms of congressional races, and also maybe a tracker for the state count for the presidential race this November. For that I may need to go to an AJAX or Javascript alternative. I just got a whole mess of web programming guides to help this project along. I seek full proficiency in Photoshop, Dreamweaver, Fireworks, Lightroom, Illustrator and Flash. Also, I have recently acquired CSSEdit and Coda, but don’t use them because I barely know what I’m doing. This is the web paragraph in case it wasn’t painfully obvious.

I’d like to see myself getting more into crosswords. I have pretty much got sudoku down, it’s time to get serious about my intellectual stimulation. I want to have listened to all sixteen thousand-plus songs in my iTunes library, and by that, I really just want to have logged it all on last.fm via iScrobbler. I also want to fully plan out the King Report, which I think I will start on my birthday.

The rest is of a more significant nature. I want to spank my GRE in August. I mean, kill the damn thing.
I also want to be on a gym schedule of what will eventually even out to about four times a week. But bigger than that, I want to be at about 150 lbs. That’s a feasible weight for something like a bicycle century, which is something else I want to do.

This seems even more intense than I originally interpreted.I may need to compile some sort of schedule in order to get it all done.

starting in april, i think i’m going to start keeping a running tally of how often certain things happen to me.

i’ll have to make the list first, but i want to engage in some type of infographic recording system of what goes on in my life.

some ideas:

miles traveled via bus, bike, and skateboard

purchases made via amazon.com

times checked balance on bankofamerica.com

phone conversations lasting longer than 15 minutes

(percentage of those with the girlfriend)

showers taken per week (ave)

twitter updates

texts sent per day (ave)

t-shirts purchased

times i personally did the laundry

times the laundry got done

pages written (for school)

emails sent

times quit biting fingernails

pounds gained/lost

alcohol consumed

pictures taken

travels taken

whew…i’m gonna need to organize this crap. probably gonna do that next week sometime. in between doing all the other shit i have to do.

according to this, the world’s most influential languages are english, french, spanish, russian, arabic, chinese, german, japanese, portuguese, and hindi. maybe in that year that i’m taking off, i will learn a bit more of the first three and possible pick up another one of the bunch.