THIRTY DAY MEME- DAY 29
Again, totally appropriate prompts for the end of the year.
Day 29 → Hopes, dreams and plans for the next 365 days
I think I pretty much summed it up when I said in WERP (and latter Twitter) "I REFUSE TO BE THE LOSER I WAS IN 2009." Because I was total fail this year. I may have mostly been able to put a lid on my more dangerous emotions and have bettered myself that way, besides finding employment, I didn't do as much to get closer to any of my goals.
My hopes and goals are pretty much the same I have every year, though, with a few additions and changes.
JobPoint wants to see me hold on to my job at CiCi's for a year. I am hoping I'll prove myself valuable enough that they won't eject me so easily when they need to cut down labour, and I need to really get them to teach me in other duties around the restaurant. That's pretty simple.
Art-wise, for the most part, since now I have enough of a paycheck to keep my one bill at bay and am now paying it off, I'm going to pretty much close all major commissions. I'll still be doing icons and such 'cause they're fun little things to do and I like the quick gratification of getting an icon done, but anything bigger than a cel shaded picture is going to be out of the question. This is mostly so I can finish all my standing commissions and other art I owe. I seriously have some older commissions that I really have no excuse for not finishing other than just my wanting to do anything else besides those pieces of art (and usually drawing robots instead.) I need to get those commissions done so I can do art for myself for a while, both for exploring my characters and the eternal quest to better myself as an artist.
There's so many things I didn't do art-wise this year like full colour paintings with backgrounds and such and most of my full body drawings haven't gone farther than sketches. Also, my "Legacy" characters have gone neglected, I just realized just how LITTLE I've drawn Dakota and Lillian. Much less Lindsay, Ron, Syd, Josh, Dr. Macaulky, Dr. Yin Long, and then there's all the characters who I haven't explored visually and have been trapped on the page for the most part, like Alicia, Richard, Dakota's parents...I can go on like this. I also know that I'm really close to hitting something with my human art and am actually beginning to like how I stylize my people for more cartoony art, and I know if I want to get this nailed enough that I feel I can do future commissions with people, I need to do a lot more drawing just for myself. I need to spend more time life drawing; I've already started trying to master the art of stealth-drawing but right now I'm just not as quick with a pencil as I should be, and again, the only way to fix this is practice. I also know there are figure drawing classes offered by Mizzou on Saturday mornings so when I am not working I should start going to those at least every couple weeks, as work allows. I going to do my best to tackle perspective as best I can without a teacher to guide me through, also.
I honestly do still want to do occasional fanart, of ex-military robots or otherwise, but I should try and not give in to my every "doodle"bunny I get.
I also do need to get back in the writer's chair. I'd really, really like to get the radically revised version of the old, old, old first "published" chapter of "Legacy," "Confessions at Sunset," whose name is probably going to change because of the new tact I'm going about revealing this plot point and the fact the name is stupid anyway. That is going to take a big enough chunk of my time. I'd also like to finish some of the fanfic I have hanging, even if one is going to take some major brain-teasing on my part to figure out how to handle fixing the Fridge Logic the canon presents. Besides the fanfiction I started I should really stop for a bit to get more "Legacy" work done, because that'll always be the most important stuff on my list.
I'd also like to have my third win in NaNoWriMo next year, and like 2008 I want to start early on that.
This is really going to be dependent on how I manage work and the rest of my life, and if I can afford to spare some time, but I'd like to start some community college classes. Heck, just online classes if need be. I'd just like to start. I wanted to do so this year, but then the whole job-finding thing dragged all the way into fall, the semester I was aiming to start, but I decided work was my first priority. I'm not going to be able to lean on my parents for money for college, and Voc Rehab will only pay for things like community college and not anything that will get my closer to my goals art-wise. I WILL be taking advantage of the Voc Rehab help for my community college classes when I start those just to dip my toes back into the school thing again, but I will be saving cash for art college and, adding to all my art goals up there, building a portfolio. I know a lot of what I want to do with life art and figure drawing classes will be good portfolio fodder, anyway, and despite the horrid art block last year, I feel more confident about my art than I did when I graduated high school (compare my art from 2006 to now, you can see why XD ) and feel that I may be closer to being able to snag myself an scholarship if I find the right channels to go through. While I need to keep my job at CiCi's, I need to start looking forward to my career. And while some of those community classes I'll be taking be for a graphic design degree...in the end, no matter what my parents will say, I will head out of this state in search of an animation degree.
It's all I ever wanted all my life. I can't stress it enough. If I didn't at least try and instead play it safe and just be a mediocre graphic designer, I would regret it for the rest of my life.
To also achieve this, I...really...need to...drive. I need to pass the damn written test, save up the money to pay for some lessons again, and get myself on the damn road. I can't put this off. It's limiting my life too much right now. I do not live in a place friendly to people who do not drive. That, and I have places to go, road trips to make. If there is a SC mini-con with the board members when the new movie comes out in Astoria, Oregon in 2011, I am determined to be there. (And I'm dragging you along too, pikachuashnat. It would not be complete without you.) But before I can truly plan anything like that, if the fandom ever does decide to do that, I need to drive.
(It's sad, the idea of going to Astoria to meet a bunch of Short Circuit geeks with Pan is a bigger motivator to get me driving than just getting around in normal life, sadly. Shows where my priorities. are. P: [They're with my FRIENDS!!! ...and fandom.] But if this happens it'll be 2011 so I'm going farther out than the meme is telling me to. ^_^ )
I also need to cling to and expand on the friendship that just started the past couple months or so in real life and just in general make friends in real life so I can go places with them and such. Y'know, so I can have a life and all.
I need to keep myself stable emotionally. I made major strives this year by...being boring. But this is good! I need to hold it together when my life DOES get exciting!
I also need to get closer to living on my own. I say "closer" because I already have a lot of goals that will cost me some big bucks, and I also need to SAVE big bucks for WHEN I move out. But in the meantime there's always skills to learn. (I'm really going to be wracking my brain for a recipe when I get back to that prompt, as one example! XD ) I fully admit I am still woefully inept in some areas.
On a similar thought I forgot when I start paying federal taxes, but I know it's soon, and I reaaaaallly really need to hound my parents on teaching me that stuff. I am really not looking forward to that, even though you'd think I'm used to paperwork by now. (Being on disability, in Voc Rehab, having to go to the doctors a lot, etc, etc, leads to a LOT of paperwork.)
I also hope that the new migraine med I start will continue to work as it has the past few weeks and be the solution I'm looking for. I go in for a CAT scan in January but they don't expect to find anything since I "just" have migraines, but they're doing it to be safe. But I'd really like to leave the nightmare that is my chronic migraines behind. As I've said a million times before, I can't live with having debilitating migraines at least three nights a week.
Well, yeah, we're getting in the smaller things now, but the Big Things are Big so I think that's perfectly okay. I can put a good portion of it REALLY short and just say "I hope to get on my feet and start living my own life" and it'll get the point across. I'm 22, and despite wanting to keep young at heart and mind, I still have a lot of growing up to do just so I can do what I want to do in life. Some of which will embrace my more "young" side. Life can be a hard balance like that.
But most importantly: Remember that life is NOT a malfunction and that it's something to hold on to. I wish that was something I didn't need constant reminding of, but it is. (Four day old sentient robots are smarter than me about this! Gah! What went wrong in my brain?)
Okay I'll stop this before it gets goofier.
Day 29 → Hopes, dreams and plans for the next 365 days
I think I pretty much summed it up when I said in WERP (and latter Twitter) "I REFUSE TO BE THE LOSER I WAS IN 2009." Because I was total fail this year. I may have mostly been able to put a lid on my more dangerous emotions and have bettered myself that way, besides finding employment, I didn't do as much to get closer to any of my goals.
My hopes and goals are pretty much the same I have every year, though, with a few additions and changes.
JobPoint wants to see me hold on to my job at CiCi's for a year. I am hoping I'll prove myself valuable enough that they won't eject me so easily when they need to cut down labour, and I need to really get them to teach me in other duties around the restaurant. That's pretty simple.
Art-wise, for the most part, since now I have enough of a paycheck to keep my one bill at bay and am now paying it off, I'm going to pretty much close all major commissions. I'll still be doing icons and such 'cause they're fun little things to do and I like the quick gratification of getting an icon done, but anything bigger than a cel shaded picture is going to be out of the question. This is mostly so I can finish all my standing commissions and other art I owe. I seriously have some older commissions that I really have no excuse for not finishing other than just my wanting to do anything else besides those pieces of art (and usually drawing robots instead.) I need to get those commissions done so I can do art for myself for a while, both for exploring my characters and the eternal quest to better myself as an artist.
There's so many things I didn't do art-wise this year like full colour paintings with backgrounds and such and most of my full body drawings haven't gone farther than sketches. Also, my "Legacy" characters have gone neglected, I just realized just how LITTLE I've drawn Dakota and Lillian. Much less Lindsay, Ron, Syd, Josh, Dr. Macaulky, Dr. Yin Long, and then there's all the characters who I haven't explored visually and have been trapped on the page for the most part, like Alicia, Richard, Dakota's parents...I can go on like this. I also know that I'm really close to hitting something with my human art and am actually beginning to like how I stylize my people for more cartoony art, and I know if I want to get this nailed enough that I feel I can do future commissions with people, I need to do a lot more drawing just for myself. I need to spend more time life drawing; I've already started trying to master the art of stealth-drawing but right now I'm just not as quick with a pencil as I should be, and again, the only way to fix this is practice. I also know there are figure drawing classes offered by Mizzou on Saturday mornings so when I am not working I should start going to those at least every couple weeks, as work allows. I going to do my best to tackle perspective as best I can without a teacher to guide me through, also.
I honestly do still want to do occasional fanart, of ex-military robots or otherwise, but I should try and not give in to my every "doodle"bunny I get.
I also do need to get back in the writer's chair. I'd really, really like to get the radically revised version of the old, old, old first "published" chapter of "Legacy," "Confessions at Sunset," whose name is probably going to change because of the new tact I'm going about revealing this plot point and the fact the name is stupid anyway. That is going to take a big enough chunk of my time. I'd also like to finish some of the fanfic I have hanging, even if one is going to take some major brain-teasing on my part to figure out how to handle fixing the Fridge Logic the canon presents. Besides the fanfiction I started I should really stop for a bit to get more "Legacy" work done, because that'll always be the most important stuff on my list.
I'd also like to have my third win in NaNoWriMo next year, and like 2008 I want to start early on that.
This is really going to be dependent on how I manage work and the rest of my life, and if I can afford to spare some time, but I'd like to start some community college classes. Heck, just online classes if need be. I'd just like to start. I wanted to do so this year, but then the whole job-finding thing dragged all the way into fall, the semester I was aiming to start, but I decided work was my first priority. I'm not going to be able to lean on my parents for money for college, and Voc Rehab will only pay for things like community college and not anything that will get my closer to my goals art-wise. I WILL be taking advantage of the Voc Rehab help for my community college classes when I start those just to dip my toes back into the school thing again, but I will be saving cash for art college and, adding to all my art goals up there, building a portfolio. I know a lot of what I want to do with life art and figure drawing classes will be good portfolio fodder, anyway, and despite the horrid art block last year, I feel more confident about my art than I did when I graduated high school (compare my art from 2006 to now, you can see why XD ) and feel that I may be closer to being able to snag myself an scholarship if I find the right channels to go through. While I need to keep my job at CiCi's, I need to start looking forward to my career. And while some of those community classes I'll be taking be for a graphic design degree...in the end, no matter what my parents will say, I will head out of this state in search of an animation degree.
It's all I ever wanted all my life. I can't stress it enough. If I didn't at least try and instead play it safe and just be a mediocre graphic designer, I would regret it for the rest of my life.
To also achieve this, I...really...need to...drive. I need to pass the damn written test, save up the money to pay for some lessons again, and get myself on the damn road. I can't put this off. It's limiting my life too much right now. I do not live in a place friendly to people who do not drive. That, and I have places to go, road trips to make. If there is a SC mini-con with the board members when the new movie comes out in Astoria, Oregon in 2011, I am determined to be there. (And I'm dragging you along too, pikachuashnat. It would not be complete without you.) But before I can truly plan anything like that, if the fandom ever does decide to do that, I need to drive.
(It's sad, the idea of going to Astoria to meet a bunch of Short Circuit geeks with Pan is a bigger motivator to get me driving than just getting around in normal life, sadly. Shows where my priorities. are. P: [They're with my FRIENDS!!! ...and fandom.] But if this happens it'll be 2011 so I'm going farther out than the meme is telling me to. ^_^ )
I also need to cling to and expand on the friendship that just started the past couple months or so in real life and just in general make friends in real life so I can go places with them and such. Y'know, so I can have a life and all.
I need to keep myself stable emotionally. I made major strives this year by...being boring. But this is good! I need to hold it together when my life DOES get exciting!
I also need to get closer to living on my own. I say "closer" because I already have a lot of goals that will cost me some big bucks, and I also need to SAVE big bucks for WHEN I move out. But in the meantime there's always skills to learn. (I'm really going to be wracking my brain for a recipe when I get back to that prompt, as one example! XD ) I fully admit I am still woefully inept in some areas.
On a similar thought I forgot when I start paying federal taxes, but I know it's soon, and I reaaaaallly really need to hound my parents on teaching me that stuff. I am really not looking forward to that, even though you'd think I'm used to paperwork by now. (Being on disability, in Voc Rehab, having to go to the doctors a lot, etc, etc, leads to a LOT of paperwork.)
I also hope that the new migraine med I start will continue to work as it has the past few weeks and be the solution I'm looking for. I go in for a CAT scan in January but they don't expect to find anything since I "just" have migraines, but they're doing it to be safe. But I'd really like to leave the nightmare that is my chronic migraines behind. As I've said a million times before, I can't live with having debilitating migraines at least three nights a week.
Well, yeah, we're getting in the smaller things now, but the Big Things are Big so I think that's perfectly okay. I can put a good portion of it REALLY short and just say "I hope to get on my feet and start living my own life" and it'll get the point across. I'm 22, and despite wanting to keep young at heart and mind, I still have a lot of growing up to do just so I can do what I want to do in life. Some of which will embrace my more "young" side. Life can be a hard balance like that.
But most importantly: Remember that life is NOT a malfunction and that it's something to hold on to. I wish that was something I didn't need constant reminding of, but it is. (Four day old sentient robots are smarter than me about this! Gah! What went wrong in my brain?)
Okay I'll stop this before it gets goofier.