"She found comfort in the nuances between a goal finished, accomplished, and a goal adjusted."

"For so many years she has been doing everything within her power to finish but again and again she has pulled up short, and has been content for having tried. She found comfort in the nuances between success and failure, between a goal finished, accomplished, and a goal adjusted."

-Dave Eggers in the short story "Up the Mountain Coming Down Slowly" in "How We are Hungry"

I love it when you read something and it just totally clicks. That is something that I love about fiction, truly good fiction--it is able to connect in such ways; it is able to tell you something about the human condition in a way you maybe have not thought about it before, or helps you see things you haven't seen before.

I can identify with Rita, the protagonist of this story whom the passage is describing, in getting so far only to re-adjust an initial goal. In the story, she goes on a trip to climb Mt. Kilimanjaro and is bitter because she is alone and didn't want to go. Her sister bought the trip for the two of them and ended up pregnant. She gets so close to the summit, and nearly decides not to go the full trip to the top. The whole trip she has an inner battle going on between finishing or quitting. At the end, she summits.

I understand the goal adjustment...my academic track record can attest to that. I'm an A student who tends to get more Bs than As. I have a decent GPA and will probably graduate with some honors...but I know I don't work hard enough. Last year this has become really obvious...with more difficult classwork especially. Part of this is the fact that I'm a great procrastinater.

Slate.com recently put out a special issue on the topic of procrastination, which was pretty interesting.

I believe it's getting better though. Last semester my grades were much better than fall (we'll see for rhetoric though. I'm hoping that the rhet crit doesn't give me my first C in college, which it could...).

But anyways, I guess this is all to say that I want to make a goal for next year. I want to attain a GPA above 3.7 for the last two semesters of college. I don't want to re-adjust this goal--I want to do it because I'm very capable of it.

I'm putting it in type, so that makes it official. Maybe it will be even more official if I facebook this. Hm.

I will give more updates throughout the summer on the reading list. I'm almost finished with "How We Are Hungry." Woohoo!
-Jessica