what to do with a year off
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.
