Three goals...

Tony, here.

I have to say right off the bat that this is my maiden voyage into the BlogSpot world. Sure, I've thrown down a few words here and there on Myspace.com (before BYU decided that logging into Myspace is directly correlated with a spiritual downgrade of sorts, and thus has restricted access to the website, along with a host of others...that really is another subject), but I really haven't put forth the effort to flesh out anything decent in a while. Not that I wouldn't like to--after all, I'm supposedly a fledgling writer of sorts--I might direct you to my inexhaustible list of published works...hold on...I just can't seem to remember where I placed the list...;)

Perhaps the proper time for goal-setting is New Year's when resolutions and fresh starts are on every one's mind. However, I am more disposed to self-evaluations during the long summer months, when school is scanty, work is arduous, and the only glimmer of intellectual progress that can be made is through sheer dedication to autonomous study. The resolutions made at the culmination of holiday mirth often tend toward shedding the unwanted pounds from the traditional killing (and consequential consumption) of the proverbial fatted calf--in essence, it is a striving back to a previous state--but my summer aims are more often seeking new heights in various aspects of my life. I want to achieve what I have heretofore been unable to (or never attempted to) achieve. As such, three of my goals from this summer are:

1. Do "well" on the Graduate Record Examination (GRE). Now I realize that "well" is about as relative a term as you can get, and that goals are merely yearnings when not accompanied by specific, quantifiable results, so I will qualify my goal slightly: I want to score at least a 700 on the verbal section of the GRE, at least a 600 on the quantitative section, and get a 5.5 or higher on the essay portion. (The highest possible scores are, respectively, 800, 800, and 6.0) In order to do this, I've taken to some serious summer studying, adding roughly 800 words to my vocabulary in about a month's time (with another 100 or so more vocab words to go), and learning all of the tricks of the test-taking trade through a book that Hollie so sagely recommended to me. I would like to take the test in December after finals.

2. Dunk a basketball on a ten-foot goal. Now this is a silly goal, intermingled amidst academic aims of much higher importance! But look at it from my perspective: Ever since I was probably ten years old I've dreamed of dunking a basketball. The prospect seemed imminent when I was 14 and 5'7" and could already touch the rim. Then, at about age 16 and 5'9", my biological clock determined that it was time to quit growing (at least vertically). Now, I've done the math: at 5'9", and a reach of about 7'4", I would have to have about a 40" vertical leap in order to smoothly dunk a basketball on a ten-foot goal. Right now I'm hovering around a 37" leap, so it's not altogether an outrageous proposition. So my reasoning behind placing this goal on an-ever-so-short list of more-worthy aspirations is two-fold: First, accomplishing it would utterly convince me that I am capable of whatever I set my mind to; second, in the world of fitness, the vertical leap is one of the finest measuring tools of overall physical fitness--the litmus test, if you will, of athleticism. Anyone who is of my whiteness and not a collegiate athlete, possessing a 40-inch vert, is a pretty studly individual. I give myself one year for this, although the faster the better, because my aforementioned biological clock will once again begin working against me if I let this lifelong goal stretch out too long.

3. Write a novel by the end of next year. Aspiring to Michael Jordan-esque hang-time might be more feasible than this goal, but notice I did not say publish a novel by next year. I've actually already begun the book. I'm currently working on chapter three, and I expect that when all is said and done, I'll end up with something around 70,000 words in length (we writers tend to deal in word-lengths rather than page numbers, because that's a much better indicator of actual length; pages may range from 200 words to 600 words, depending on how the publisher likes to present the information). Although it is difficult at this point to give a summary of the book's plot, I will say that it is extremely religiously-charged (although not with a particularly LDS flavor, or even a Christian one, at that, but rather with an overall sense of man's relationship with Something Greater Than Himself, if you will). At the same time, I expect it will leave the ultimate decision of God's existence up to the reader. I'm trying to make it an entertaining read, though, and I think, if categorized, the writing style would fall somewhere between a James Joyce and an Arundhati Roy, with a lot of stream-of-consciousness and free indirect discourse, though not to such a degree that it becomes the focus of the work.

So that's it. Maybe I'll write again.