Anyhow, it is time to conclude the navel-gazing here at the Burro by posting my last two goals for the year.  As it happens, they are both goals pertaining to written language – clearly the deepest and most abiding of my passions.

The first goal is a reading goal, and of course it involves the infamous list.  The list turned 12 just before I turned 30, which also makes it one of the most constant elements in my life – it’s lasted longer than my parents’ marriage (and my own, so far), or my tenure at any school, or the time I’ve lived in any town… My reading on the list tallies more than the combined reading of all the classes I took to become a licensed teacher of English… and this is the year I finish it.

There are 18 books remaining on the list, so this is an entirely attainable goal – although I may at some point have to forego my habit of alternating books designated by the list with books selected purely for pleasure.

The other goal concerns writing.  I’ve always had ambitions to pursue writing in a serious way, and I’ve usually put it off for some unspecified time in the future when I would be “ready”, having learned enough, and lived enough, to be able to write worthy prose.  As a result, my career highlights, through age thirty, consist of this blog, a couple of semi-embarrassing adolescent manuscripts, and a few scraps of poetry that aren’t too displeasing.

Well, ready or not, the time has come to write, and in the spirit of National Novel Writing Month, I have decided to use a “forced writing” approach:  my goal is to write and post 12,000 words of fiction this year. It is a modest goal, but I find myself unwilling to abandon craft in favor of raw output  the way a project like the one-month novel requires.

An approach I find much more appealing is the way Brendan Adkins of Ommatidia combines forced writing with constrained writing (in his case, a 101-word limit).  This seems to combine the motivational factor I’m seeking with a requirement for discipline – often overlooked as a teacher, and still one of the best.

Since this is my established conduit to the interweb, a fiction page seems to be in the offing here at the Burro…

Okay, so first we have the inevitable weight loss goal.  While not terribly concerned with health or longevity or looks, for that matter – I do feel a certain stubborn defiance born from the fact that this is a problem I have tried and mostly failed to lick for the last two decades.  I’ve decided to lose about 10% of my current bodyweight, and keep it off.  While this will still leave me fatter than I’d prefer, it will require significant toil and commitment, and is about as much loss as I feel it reasonable to attempt this year.

The second goal is a roleplaying goal, and it is a somewhat ambitious one.  Y’see, in just about every incarnation of D&D, one of the central mechanics has been “leveling up”.  This is the idea that characters start out at fairly modest levels of power and ability, and through the successful completion of their various adventures, gradually accumulate enough experience to increase their personal puissance.  The idea is definitely culled from fantasy fiction – Tolkien’s hobbits return from their quest as great heroes who save the Shire without any mighty warriors or wizards backing them up (in the books, at least), Harry Potter and company essentially “level up” with each new year at Hogwarts, etc.

My goal is to run a game that starts off with lowly first-level characters, and continues until they have all reached twentieth-level: the height of legendary heroism.  It is kind of the iconic D&D experience, and it is one that various circumstances have kept me from reaching over the years.  The current plan is to organize a group to meet once a month and game all day, hopefully reaching twentieth-level in twelve sessions.  My chief obstacle in this regard is lack of players.  I have two lined up, which is enough to get on with, but I’d prefer to have a couple more.  I’m giving myself a week or two to find them, and then pressing on regardless.

First, Rebekah and I will finish moving into our house. It’s been six years now, and we still have a guest room full of boxes and bags that have never been unpacked.  My goal for the year is to finally clear out this room and make it into a craft room for Rebekah: a place where she can practice the many mysterious and beautiful arts at her command, a small shrine to the bright angel of our home.

And also a place where we can put all the yarn in the house to keep the thrice-accursed cats out of it!  I swear that attempting to salvage the myriad tangled skeins with which they bedeck the house after a yarn orgy is like treading the twisted pathways of a madman’s brain.

Also, I will build a sleek and powerful new computer with Ty.  My current computer was top-of-the-line when I bought it nine years ago, and it has served me faithfully for all of my twenties, traveling thousands of miles with me and operating with an astounding lack of those troubles apparently familiar to most PCs.  Finally, however, the peripherals are wearing out (the keyboard’s space bar functions erratically, and the monitor has begun to flicker at odd moments) and pricing new components led me to the realization that I’ve always wanted to build my very own dream computer.  I’ll need a little bit of help from my tech-savvy friend Ty, but I think that’s more of an opportunity than an obstacle.

First, it is time for me to learn how to drive a stick.  I have long felt this to be one of the more glaring omissions among my manly credentials, such as they are, and it would be dead useful in my job as a driver of various vehicles.  This is the year it happens.

Second – speaking of my job driving for the family auto brokerage, I want to transition out of it.  For a while now, my conscience, such as it is, has been smarting under the charge of receiving the position via nepotism.  It is currently the source of about 60% of my income, however, and Rebek and I can hardly afford to give up any revenue at the moment, so my specific goal is this: by my 31st birthday, I would like to cut my dependence upon the family business in half while maintaining the same overall level of income.  I have a couple of good ideas about how to proceed, and although starting businesses and hunting jobs is something I truly loathe, I am bound and determined to make the change.

The key component of my agenda this year is to be a set of ten goals, each representing a definite step toward the achievement of a long-held dream or ambition.  I’d like to set forth the first couple here, in hopes that I may be able to derive some support from the process – whether that takes the form of encouragement or counsel from my readership, or even just the increase in personal commitment I always feel after having written something down somewhere.

Goal #1

Learn some Latin.  The language of empires both spiritual and temporal, and one firmly entrenched in nearly every branch of scholarship thereby, Latin has always seemed to me to be covered with a patina of ancient and venerable associations far thicker and more distinguished than any other tongue.  I have long wanted to add such a relic to my collection, and this year I’ll actually do something about it.  While I recognize that learning a language is a big job, and have intentionally left this goal a bit vague, I am determined to acquire more than the handful of vestigial phrases known to so many – (e.g. - in medias res, non sequitur, deus ex machina, etc.)  – I won’t be satisfied until I have at least a small vocabulary and the grammatical knowledge to string it together extemporaneously.

Goal #2

Go at least one entire month without saying a single unkind word. If you haven’t spent much time around me, you may not realize how incredibly difficult I am likely to find this goal.  No toxic tirades directed at drivers who inspire my road rage.  No muttered imprecations aimed at our worthless and vexatious kittens.  No snarky critiques or comments.  Not even a little innocuous self-deprecation.  I consider this to be my own idiosyncratic approach to cultivating the divine state of Metta, or loving kindness toward other beings.  I may not have much natural generosity of spirit, so I must attempt to train my spirit by first training my words.

I’m planning on making my first attempt in February, both because it is the shortest month and because it will afford me plenty of subsequent chances should my first attempt fail…

Like most people, I found more significance in this particular birthday than in the typical annual tally.  In truth, it seems like the kind of thing that would ordinarily depress me – I’d go down the whole “passage of youth/encroaching mortality” route, and be sulky and maudlin for days.

But I think I’d like to try something different this time.

I suppose that, up to this point, some part of me has always considered itself under construction.  As long as I perceived myself to be young, I allowed myself to stay in a fairly passive state, soaking up knowledge and experience without concern about how or when or if I’d ever apply the lessons.

Well, I’ve decided to look at thirty not merely as the end of my youth, but as the jumping-off point for the realization of the modest dreams and ambitions I do possess.  One might consider it a preemptive strike against regret.

Accordingly, and in keeping with my character, I made a list -  a list of things whose place on the docket just got moved up from “someday” to “right fucking now”.  After considering entries like “escape from a maximum security prison” and “choke out a velociraptor”, I decided that perhaps I was being a little too ambitious.  There followed a second list, composed of such picayune aspirations as “always remember to wear pants when going to the mailbox” and “don’t be the one to teach Ezekiel and Ryan’s baby its first ethnic slur”.  Finally, with my third draft, I believe that I have found a pretty good balance between ambition and attainability.  I’ll be back tomorrow to talk about the first couple of items I have to check off this year.

So it was with an enthusiasm undimmed by years of waiting that I reached the spot on my book list (many months ago now) occupied by Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451.  Set in a future where books are burned by squads of government “firemen”, it certainly falls into the dystopian category.  I found its premise that an increasingly hedonistic society had willingly submitted to censorship in order to save themselves the hassles attendant on critical thought chilling and plausible – and an intriguing step away from the clear-cut oppression of Huxley and Orwell’s novels.

Upon reading, I found that the book also contained characters who display genuine humanity and boasted some thrilling moments of action to counterbalance the cerebral horror that comes with watching western civilization dead-end.  A good read, and highly recommended for fellow fans of the genre.  The 2002 film Equilibrium makes an excellent film counterpart – or substitute, if all copies of Fahrenheit in your area have been rounded up and immolated already.

As for the book itself, it was slow going.  Descartes, a formidable intellect, was also meticulous to an extent that would probably be medicated in our current age.  The concepts he was exploring and the lines of reasoning he pursues are fairly abstract, and there aren’t many good car chases to liven things up, either.

On a more serious note – I think that Descartes’ ideas relating to the proof of existence (you know, the cogito: “I think, therefore I am”) are very sound, but I was much less convinced at his attempt to extend these lines of reasoning to prove the existence of God.  I’m not saying the Big Guy doesn’t exist, mind you, just that Descartes, for all his method, doesn’t prove it – which I suppose is an argument for agnosticism.

Anyhow, I followed the Meditations up with a ton of other good books – and I’m giving myself the project of writing about one of them here each day this week.

I finally straighten out the most dysfunctional of my family relationships – by ending it.

My professional DMing business doubles in size, and though it is still just a lucrative sideline instead of a career, it makes it a lot easier to get by.

My wife, the incomparable Ducky-Lou, makes the absolute most of her return to college, logging a 4.0 GPA and taking home the “Outstanding New Student of the Year” award – I’m  not even kidding, that’s a real award they give out – yeah, well, just ’cause you never won one…

In the inevitable wash of hubris accompanying her scholastic honors, Rebekah brings home a pair of kittens, hands them to me to raise, and promptly disappears on a two-week house sitting gig, trusting that all will turn out well.  For a week the disarming aura of cuteness radiating from the kittens pacifies Clem and me, while Gypsy, less easily swayed, nonetheless confines himself to issuing portentous growls from his series of kitten-proof hideouts.

Around day eight or so, the aura of cuteness wears off at about three o’clock in the morning when the kittens, who have attained full vertical leaping capabilities improbably early, knock every goddamned thing off of every countertop in every house on the block, clawing their way through countless screen doors ($30 each) to do so and causing the residents to spend the next day searching for lost prescription bottles or car keys, scrubbing at brand new soda stains in their carpet, and picking up the shards of family heirlooms.  Full-fledged, unanimous hatred of the diminutive devils sets in among the remaining members of the household.

Clementine carries off the role of cancer survivor with impressive nonchalance, chewing a tumor most of the way out of her leg to bring the problem to our attention, and then sailing through the operation and recovery period as the vets finish the job and remove another mass (also malignant) from her ear.  She seems to actually enjoy the vet visits and assures me that chicks will dig her new scar, a zipper-like affair on the back of her leg.

Whew! I can feel some of the rust flaking off, but it may take a few more of these things before we are again operating at full capacity.