Goals Down the Toilet and Other Depressing Complaints with No Relevance in the REAL World.

I had a plan. I really did. It was a good plan, solid, with a schedual and dates and times. Good plan.

It was my summer plan.

The first half was dominated by visiting a dear friend for her birthday and taking on a job as co-RA in charge of an army of teenage girls (talk about gathering dramatic material). This was in the plan. Check. Fin. Done deal.

The rest of the plan. . . Well, suffice to say, it did not work out. As planned. It was simple really. I would reach a certain writing goal, a certain art goal. I would read a certain number of books, clean the house, exercise, diet, train my little brother to be a half-way decent essay writer, plan out my future. . . You know, the usual. However, these plans came to a screeching hault after about a weeks time. I have read only a handful of books. The house is a disaster zone. I have been walking every day but my diet is somewhat lacking and has not resulted in anything significant. My brother has far more interest in video games. And my future. . . It's in the future.

So I had a new plan involving the last two weeks before dorm move-in. I was going to attempt twenty-thousand words. But, before this journey began, I was going to tack the tail end onto a few of my short stories.

The every evening that this was to begin my mother became very ill and had to be rushed to a doctor. Kidney stones. Again. This is still not resolved but the infection is being dealt with and she hasn't felt that sort of pain again. The next day nature decided to add to this by giving me a tooth infection. Thank you very much, Mr. Wisdom Tooth, for the ringing ears and locked jaw. Mr. Wisdom Tooth waves at the bright new world from a somewhat sideways position and should probably be extracted, but, alas, lack of money and insurance. A few antibiotics cleared up the infection, thankfully, and I can now open my mouth again and chew "big-people" food. And now, you ask? Now writers' block. Simple.

Fine, Nature, fine. But I will not give up my planning. So there!

Here goes the planning again. To hell with the 20,000. I'm going to finish those two pieces and clean my bedroom. I'm going to get through the three books I'm in the middle of. It's getting done. And my dorm things are getting repacked.

As soon as I finish procrastinating.