Goals for Coming School Year

I begin my fourth year of classes in a little over two weeks. Ker-BLAM, summer’s gone! I’ve decided to share a few of my goals for this coming semester, not only because I needed a bloppick, but also because I’m really good at thinking about goals and then never writing them out. Stuff gets serious when you write out your goals. So, here are some things that came to mind, in no particular order.

I would really like to get myself back into a workout routine. Used to have one, and I also used to have abs. Maybe like, a four-pack even. Now, I see all my guy friends at school going to the rec. center all the time, getting beefed and buffed, and I feel like a shrimpy wimp. Or maybe a wimpy shrimp. Either way, my job at school requires heavy lifting and I could use a little more meat on my bones.

I have this awful habit of starting some hugely ambitious drawing with all kinds of symbolism and meaning, then not finishing it. I either need to draw simpler things, or get cracking completing the art I’ve come up with in the past three-plus years that have been tucked away in folders unfinished. Hey, some artists get recognized for unfinished work, right? I mean…after they die…I have a piece which is a modernized “Annunciation of Mary” scene I’ve been meaning to get started for the longest time, and I’m long overdue for a drawing of the Israelite Judge, Ehud.

Along the same lines, I’d like to squeeze a few more commissions into my artwork schedule this semester, though I’m not the one picking my customers.

I have to get out of my apartment and visit more people. Most of last year, I was either hiding away in my room, the art building, or a computer lab, or people were coming to my apartment to hang out with my roommates. I personally didn’t get out to see people much, and being a hermit (the words ‘hermit’ and ‘art student’ are interchangeable) won’t draw my friends to me a whole lot.

I need to cut WAY back on my caffeine and soda pop drinking. Somewhere, midsummer, I began drinking at least two cans of pop a day, which isn’t bad until you add in my already-pathetic immune system. That, and I’d really like to keep all my teeth.

I gotta finish a book. Yes Mom; homework, schoolwork, food service, that all comes first, but when I don’t write, I’M WRONG. (See what I did there?) I’ve gotten the hang of writing out a story as sort of a skeleton-draft, if you will, then adding the muscle and detail later, and it’s become a very thorough method of writing for me. Now I just have to finish something.

I also want to read a lot more this year. I’ll have plenty of freetime to write and read, and my “to read” list could last an eternity as this point anyway. Some books I plan to read this year, or soon: Illusion, by Frank Peretti. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick (I plan to read all of his works eventually, but this one’s first). Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter, by Seth Grahame-Smith (everybody tells me I should read this, so I guess I’ll get around to it). Darkly Dreaming Dexter, by Jeff Lindsay (and all which follow in the Dexter series, if I like them enough. I love the show). Adam, by Ted Dekker (one of the few I still haven’t read). Demon, a Memoir, by Tosca Lee. The 13th Tribe, by Robert Liparulo. The Silence of the Lambs, by Thomas Harris (tackled Red Dragon already. Creepy, crazy goodness). And finally, any number of works by H.P. Lovecraft, because he’s the one horror author I still haven’t explored a lot yet whom everyone has suggested I should read.

That’s all I can think of right now, so I hope this inspires those who read it to make up their own list of goals and feel all productive about life and stuff! Thanks for reading, cheers, Happy Thursday, God bless!

In Christ,

Luther D. Powell