Current mood:	indescribable
Entry tags:	clean slate, good luck, self-improvement, starting over, tabula rasa

PROJECT: TABULA RASA
Tabula rasa : (Latin: blank slate) the theory that individuals are born without built-in mental content and that their knowledge comes from experience and perception.
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First off, let me say that my bronchitis is long gone. It took only 5 days of a single daily pill’s medicine to make my throat all better. Well, sort of better. After two weeks of persistent coughs, my throat has become prone to occasional breaks in my speech whenever I talk for a while. I’m hoping they’ll go away on their own, so I’ll keep an eye out on that. Now, onto more important matters…

During those two weeks I was sick, I did some thinking. As I have posted here many times before, I’ve been feeling dissatisfied with the way things have been going in my life. I’ve been feeling this way for almost two years now; ever since I graduated from UF. I naively thought a college art degree would solve all my problems. Well, it didn’t. Long story short, I realized that I needed to make more substantial efforts than just sitting back and waiting for something good to happen. Now, I know I’ve made statements like that before, but my parents have recently been getting close to the boiling point with me. They have graciously supported me for 24 years now, and I can see that they’re getting more tired and older with each passing year. My little sister will graduate from UF next year. It seems like my life has hit a snag, and everybody else’s life is leaving me in the dust! I need to dig myself out of this hole, but that’s easier said than done. My BFA degree hasn’t landed me any jobs, the security job I’m at now doesn’t pay me enough money to live off of, and every day is a constant battle of keeping misery away with varying success.

Well, no more.

I have decided that I refuse to live the rest of my life in my parents’ house, depending on their cars, food, utilities, and the cramped, bland bedroom I spend most of my days in. That’s the whole point of being independent, right? To be free of all these restrictions, to make vast improvements on my life, to stop with the destructive and negative influences that have plagued me for months now… that is what I want.

So for my first announcement: I’m going back to school.

Security guarding is really not my thing, despite having the world’s easiest guard post. I can do better than minimum wage at only 18 hours a week. And my Bachelor of Fine Arts degree, as I’ve said, has not landed me the high-paying jobs I have anticipated when I was a freshman… yet there’s tons of programming, web design, and IT jobs on virtually every job site I’ve seen! I’ve taken a couple of such classes at UF, but perhaps if I take more of these classes and maybe get an associates degree in IT training, maybe this will increase my chances of finding work in the future. To save money and time, I aim to take these classes at Santa Fe College, a community college that’s closer to my house and has less expensive classes than UF. The curriculum I’ve looked at will allow me to find internships, jobs, and just as importantly, new people to talk to, since my social life needs a severe jumpstart.

My second announcement: I am not leaving the furry fandom.

Earlier this month, I had briefly considered leaving the furry fandom. I felt like I wasn’t getting much out of it and wondered if it was really doing me any good. In the 4 years I’ve been in the fandom, I’ve traveled to several Florida furry conventions and meets (Megaplex, Furloween, Elliot’s Spring Gathering, et. al.) I admit they were fun times, but they were also expensive on my little-to-no budget, which always stressed me out. Plus, my parents haven’t been big fans of the fandom, and are often worried that I’ll become so consumed by the fandom that I’ll lose track of my goals and aspirations and fall in with “the wrong crowd”. That’s why I hesitate whenever I want to call the Funday Pawpet Show and ask to guest appear one day. That’s why I feel slightly sick to my stomach whenever I shell out $100 for my own hotel room because it feels wrong to room with a complete stranger or without paying. And I enjoy drawing furry art, but not furry porn, despite recent attempts to draw porn just to pander to certain audiences and my own desires when I wasn’t really comfortable revealing it to the public in the first place. So you can see how I have been wondering if the fandom has just been one big negative influence on my life.
But…
I have one local friend who is a furry, treats me with respect, and talks to me often. I have fun at furry conventions and enjoy meeting new people. I like drawing furry art… I just need to set more specific parameters to my art. And most of all, I want to be original. I don’t need to fit in with any one crowd or species or clique. I have my own set of rules regarding the fandom, and damn it I’m going to use them to my advantage. So it looks like the furries CAN be a positive influence on me! I just need to use common sense and a clear mind and everything will be okay.

Which brings me to my final announcement: PROJECT: TABULA RASA





The link above is an image of a flowchart. It’s a map of ideas and goals that I created on one of my patrols last week. As you can see, it has a bunch of information on it. I want at least 50% of these goals to be accomplished by January 1st, 2010. Why should I wait until New Years to suddenly change when I can lead up to it gradually instead? Goals include developing new art styles in new mediums, making a daily job search schedule, my long-term “new CCC” (new car, new computer, new condo) goals, and many more. My personal website will also be overhauled to look like a professional portfolio website, complete with Arial text and grey backgrounds.

In conclusion, I want to be a better Me next year, compared to years in the past. 2007 was a good year, but 2008 and 2009 SUCKED. This miserable feeling I have all the time has to stop. It’s like a sickness that’s driving me crazy. I even went to so far as to buy a planner. You know, one of those daily/weekly planners you use for school. It should help, because I’ll be using it for school and for projects and schedules in the immediate future. With this new path in my life suddenly open, I will be very busy for the next couple of months putting this plan into motion. Internet accounts I never use will be destroyed. Worthless information on my hard-drive and elsewhere will be removed. People I never talk to on my IM lists will be deleted. I’m doing this not because I no longer appreciate these people. I’m doing this because there’s only one person whom I have to improve and depend on before I can feel happier than how I feel right now:

Me.

Happy New Year. See you in 2010.