Goals, Goals, Goals
The great balancing act that is my summer has finally found a north star in the fleecy sky of a tepid attention span.
As I write this, I am flanked with textbooks. Arabic. Persian. Russian. Icelandic. Spanish. French. Portuguese. Introductory Computer Science. Cognitive Science. A GRE workbook. I have math textbooks (I am going over fractions), French verb drills, and texts that promise to unlock the Pandoran secrets of grant writing. My notebooks sit waiting for me to return to my two novellas from the collection Sister Pleiades. I have flashcards of Japanese hiragana and katakana awaiting my focus with only the slow tap of the toes. Application materials for graduate schools bubble up in my cloud drive folder. Academic essays are in their fetal form, demanding some quality time with the amassed journal articles. At some point, I have to review Langacker’s Cognitive Grammar. My Goodreads goal is floundering.
In all of this studying and all of this preparing for some thunderclap future, one where the lightning will strike hot and energetic to cleave my sorrows into like a desiccated trunk, I have been working sluggishly toward my novel, Canis Major. I tend to spend more time on my first drafts than the revisions (which is probably backwards from what I ought to be doing) because getting the mind to stand up when it is dizzy, getting it to connect to my patient left hand, is a gargantuan task. But I am finally, finally closing in on a complete draft of this book that has guzzled so many stories and kept me in dreams throughout so many nights.
I return to Johns Hopkins for my final two semesters on August 29th. Thus the goal is to have this draft of Canis Major brought to a gentle close on August 28th. I do think I can do it this time, though I suspect that the revisions will be a shaving process, picking at words like bugs on a plant’s stem — it is rather protracted.
I do like setting goals for myself. I am a compulsive list maker, from books to read to meals to plan. Lists give me a well-worn sense of a river stone in my pocket, something to ground me in the twisted tidepools and vagaries of life. I have a list of chapters that populate Canis Major; I am slowly but steadily checking the bullet points of that list.
August 28th. This is the goal, finish the novel, celebrate with some inevitable tears and maybe some green chile.
I think the budding catastrophe that stalks me in this moment is that I do not know how to do all that I want to do. Why can’t I study Persian and work out the wanderings of Lysander Ruiz as he bounces from one crisis to another over twenty-eight chapters? Why can’t I do well on the GRE (though I realized my hubris on this front yesterday when I saw the verbal section is going to be more daunting than I had anticipated)? Why can’t I read and do it all?
What this is getting at is the question of who I want to be, an eternal question that I am learning persists well into adulthood; it didn’t end with my twentieth or so birthday. Overwhelming, I do hope that sense of goal setting, of list making, never seeps through my porous skein of self-worth.
So for now, it is time to write, and tomorrow I will write, and the day after that I will do some battle with my cats for control over my keyboard, and I will keep thrusting this boulder uphill until it is done and I can see the vista of my efforts. I may even sprinkle this with the word destiny.
