Day 26 - Goals

On the road of life everyone needs a trucker buddy. Additionally, everyone needs some sort of goal to work towards. What I like to do is set small moments of anticipation, but when I set goals they are usually long term, and rather intangible. Throughout the course of this I think I have already partially showed what many of my goals are as well, which means that I am probably just going to be recapping a few of my long term desires from here on out, so if you are a regular reader we can do some fact checking. There will be a test at the end, so it would behoove you to pay attention, and if you do not know what behoove means there is a 99.5% chance that you have already passed a point of no return.

The big goals in my life are all there, at some point in the future I would like to have a job that I love, preferably one that allows me to use my English language expertise in an industry that I have interest in, which means i need to start focusing on one type of media instead of continuing my quest to be a jack of all trades media conglomerate. Passion is fickle, but I have had success capturing passions, which mean it only needs to be refined. Like oil. There goes the magic, it all becomes real. The stars are nothing more than gas when we get up close, but we still continue to fly.

At some point I would like to have a family, my own house, all the manufactured ambitions that make me an American. Though above this I feel more compelled, while I still have the youth, though not always the means, to start traveling a bit more. The United States especially fascinates me. I don't consider myself incredibly patriotic, at least not blindly loyal, but I love the country and would like to see more of it, to learn about the different perspectives that exist. I think, occasionally, about the vast number of people in the world, how they are unaware of me, but perhaps somewhere else someone is thinking about the world as well, and in a way we are thinking about one another. Perhaps in different languages. I may never know, but I can at least see.

Though the goal that hovers above them all is arguably the most simple. I just want to learn. Knowledge is always acquired, but there is always more to accrue. More to experience. More to synthesize. Intangible? Perhaps. Unmeasurable? The subjectivity of knowledge says no. But I can strive. People just float, but I can drop my arms and try to drift in the intended direction.

Thanks for reading.

Tomorrow's Topic: Future

Rich

Day 24 - Something You Learned

This entry will be a bit too tough because I think that I have learned a lot, not a day goes by when I don't, in some capacity, learn something. I think that the best way to handle this is to simply limit myself to the most important thing that I learned during this exercise. At least so far, there is still plenty of reflection and learning left to accomplish in the final few days, as the candles extinguish, as it all unravels. Still, even if I limit it to that I think that I have a good deal of narrowing down that I need to do as I attempt to discover the most important.

Actually, maybe it won't be all that difficult.

I think, at least I hope, what I learned is that I need to work hard, perhaps the hardest I have ever worked, in order to be honest with myself. It is easier said than done, but that's because my conception of identity is at odds with the idea of acceptance. I am too aware, hyper aware. Honesty is said to be the best policy, and a sense of self is probably most important when speaking about honesty. I actually just read an article today about feminist criticism in Turn of the Screw where it had a section that spoke about how we look in mirrors, that they constantly distort what we see, but we also recognize this as 'us.' However, the distortion means that we can never see what we really look like, so in order to know us we have to accept that everything we have seen of us is not us. So maybe I will never know who I am, but in the mean time I learned that I need to be honest, and that starts now. The train, she rolls uphill.

Thanks for reading.

Tomorrow's Topic: Shuffle

Rich