Goooooooooooooals

I believe in setting hard goals and working towards them.

Stating this belief out loud is a new thing for me, but being as focused on a goal as I am right now is a new thing for me, too.

I set a goal to pay off medical/credit card debt by mid-April, and I also set a goal to paint 300 illustrations by mid-April. The two go hand in hand, as I'm hoping the latter will be the means to the former.

The numbers don't really work out as I have 280 illustrations to go and 66 days remaining. I'd have to do more than four paintings each and every day, and right now I do four on an average day, but there are days (like today) when going to town with The Hosts is a healthy thing to do, and I don't meet my quota.

Even so, even knowing that my goal is pie-in-the-sky unreachable, I cannot bring myself to officially compromise that 300 number. Perhaps the struggle to reach it will make me stronger and better than I would be if I lowered it and gave myself more days off. While 300 sounds more impressive, I also think that the rhythm of a story 300 tweets* in length will feel more rounded than one 200 or 250 in length... despite the fact that this project is very light on plot and character development.

*I gave myself a 140 character limit for the text that goes along with each illustration and made a special twitter account for those bits of text, which go up at the same time as an illustration.

Saying this may be redundant, but today I discovered why I am so motivated to pursue these goals. Back when Reagan and I racked up this debt, it was from emergency room visits back in August to take care of an infection on my leg. He was working, I was... drawing. I am motivated past the point of being pulled down by self-consciousness because I feel I've struck upon a way to use what I was doing then (art) to pull my own weight and take responsibility for the "problems" I caused.

I think Reagan would approve. And that motivates me, too. Before he left I didn't tell him about this, just asked some cryptic questions and alluded to a "secret". Some hints get dropped into letters, but for the most part I plan to shock and awe him with super artistic awesomeness when I see him in April. And impress him with how many push ups I can do, too.