So, there are less about 3 weeks until my birthday, which means that I have 3 weeks to close out any goals that are going to be met for this year.
The older I get, the more I think that I need to revisit my goal structure, but I don’t think this next year is going to be the year, as 3 weeks isn’t a lot of time to come up with a brand new structure.
But that’s not what I sat down to write about. I sat down to talk about my poster, aka the completion of Goal 15.
I got started on this goal a while ago, and then ran into some technical difficulty. Then I didn’t think about it at all for a while. I like to play around with Photoshop Elements, and had been making some things here and there, when I decided that Goal 15 was, indeed, in reach. Enter LBJ poster.
I remain somewhat obsessed with Lyndon Johnson. I’m not the only one, Robert Caro has spent decades studying and writing about him. There’s something captivating there. There are a lot of things captivating there. But, one of the things that interests me about the presidents are the things that make them human. LBJ has many of those things, things that you read about and think, “are you serious?” These things just make me love him more.
One of these things is his well-known habit of conducting business from the bathroom. So, my plan was to make an LBJ poster that I would hang in my bathroom. The stuff I have in my bathroom is orange and shades of blue and green. So, in order to make LBJ at home, I knew that the poster would have a lot of orange in it.
When I listened to The Presidents’ Club, one of the things that played in my head over and over was a quote of something that LBJ said to President Eisenhower once Johnson became president. He told Eisenhower, “I have needed you for a long time, but I need you more now than ever.” This speaks to Johnson’s ability to work people, to massage out what he needed at any given moment. Apparently that “I need you” thing was something that a great many experienced.
Marry the orange, and the quote, and all I needed was an image of President Johnson. I have to say it. I knew from the beginning that if I was going to have an image of LBJ hanging in my home that he was going wear a hat in it.
Thanks to a tip from a friend, I found a place to print my poster affordably. The frame that I had was an odd size, so I wound up trimming my poster a bit. Once I saw it in its full glory, I knew that it wasn’t going to hang in the bathroom, but in the living area. I get to see Lyndon every time I leave home. And this tickles me. I’m smiling right now just thinking about it.