Friday, August 31, 2012

Goals for September

Edit: Putting this one off for a month.  I'll most likely give it a try for October.

I decided to give myself five goals for the month of September--one easy one, two medium-difficulty ones, and two hard ones.  Here they are.

#1 (Easy): Download 100 new albums.  This should really be ridiculously easy.  I am hoping to start adding more jazz to my world.

#2 (Medium Difficulty): Read 4 books--Blink, by Malcolm Gladwell; The Tin Drum, by Gunter Grass; The Marriage Plot, by Jeffrey Eugenides; and Feast of Crows, by George R. R. Martin (Book 4 in the Game of Thrones series).  This should probably qualify as a hard challenge, since three of these books are quite long, with Feast of Crows leading the bunch at nearly 1,000 pages.

#3 (Medium): Walk for 20 hours.  I just got an ipod and filled it with 5,900 songs, so this one should be pretty fun.

#4 (Hard): Drink no more than 10 Cokes, 5 Starbucks coffees, and 48 beers.  Give or take a few, each month I average 30 Cokes, 20 Starbucks coffees, and about 100 beers.  More than halving each of these will be pretty tough.

#5 (Hard): Write fiction of any kind for 20 hours.  I have some story ideas rolling around in my brain, but I don't want to limit myself.  My only goal is to sit at my laptop and click away.  If I sit down hoping to write some realistic fiction or a short story about pixies or else a fantasy like Game of Thrones but instead pump out three chapters of a romantic novel set in a senior citizen's home, it still counts.

I have two goals with these challenges--to be healthier and to inspire myself creatively.  I am not sure whether I will achieve all five goals.  It would be nice, but even if I only go 3 for 5, that will probably qualify as a "successful failure."

But I don't want to think like that yet.  I think I have a decent shot at all five.  Slightly less than even money.  No, that's not true.  My best guess would be that I have a 37.67% chance of total unflinching success.  A wise man, in short, would probably bet against me.

I will update my progress on this blog a few times a week.

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