A Full Day

The run kicked my ass today, so prose is out the window. How about a glimpse in my typical day? Sure, why not?

0445: Wake-up. Brush my teeth and shave.
0510: Go to formation.
0530: Morning accountability formation
0540: PT! WEEEE!
0630: Personal hygiene.
0730: Breakfast! Yum!
0800: Work call. For me, that’s seeing sick call.
0810: Intensely hate all those that are injured and sick.
0811: Treat them anyways.
0812: Remind myself why I love my job.
1000: Sick call is finished or winding down. YouTube time!
1030: “Is sick call still open?”
1050: More YouTube.
1130: Lunch! Well… it’s food… I guess?
1200: Lunch nap. The best kind of nap.
1300: Work call! Sometimes I have patients, sometimes I don’t. The afternoons are usually filled with correspondence courses, catching up on notes, and other equally fun activities. Sometimes meetings.
1500: Clean! Sweep, mop, trash, dust… I feel like Cinderella!
1600: Out the door. Admin time, i.e.: my work-out time.
1610: “Hey baby, I’m working out. Can I call you back? No? Ok.”
1640: “Hey, babe, I’ve really got to work out… no? Ok.”
1715: Off the phone, workout.
1800: Dinner! Can this torture please end?
2000: Watch Top-Gear
2130: Sleep. Dream about formations. Wonder exactly what life choices led you half-way around the world. Dream of wife. Dream of wife and… ok, just wife. She reads this thing too, you know.

So that’s a fairly typical day. There are always formations, drug tests, meetings, ranges, dispatching vehicles, classes, missions… you know name it. Stay flexible my little chickadees.

I hope your day is filled with as much merriment as mine is.

I’m Going For It

I have a PT test coming up.

I’ve always dreaded it.  From the moment I joined and did my first work-out and realized what a chain-smoking, whiskey drinking, no exercising 24 year old man can do.  It was painful and unpleasant.

And it’s never gotten easier.

I’m a lazy sort of fellow.  I like to conserve my energy.  To what purpose I conserve it for is a mystery.  I used to do cross-country and track.  I used to run six minute miles and then later I would join show choir (yes, the glee type stuff) and dance and sing and chase girls.  That was in high school.  Before I was allowed into bars.

Apathy is like a drug.  You use it more and more everyday and you become addicted to it, dependent on it.  It becomes your whole life.  I had to join the Army to go cold turkey from it.  But every once in a while it creeps up on me.

It also doesn’t help that I’ve come up injured when I really step up my physical game.  I’ll go the gym everyday, run more often and twist an ankle, or get a stress fracture, or pass-out from medication I was taking.

There is no excuse out here.  I’m doing Insanity everyday, keeping up with the schedule.  I’m taking the right supplements  eating right (for the most part) and I don’t smoke or drink.  I have 15 days until my PT test which involved 2 minutes of push-ups, sit-ups and a two mile run.  It’s scored based on how many you do or how fast your run, and on your age group and gender.  

It still scares the crap out of me.

I’ve failed it before.  Intellectually I know I can pass but it’s always been by the skin of my teeth.  This time, I am holding nothing back because there is no reason to.  If it kills me, so be it.  I’m tired of living a life of conservation.  There has to be a point to all that energy I’ve built up.

So I’m going for it.  

So Good It Hurts

 

It’s pretty amazing that a 90 pound Chinese woman can consistently kick my ass.

 

I’m a big fan of massages and somewhat of a expert.  I actually took a few massage therapy classes and was thinking about making it my career until I realized that I could make a lot more money doing actual medical work.  That’s not a slight against massage therapists (they don’t like the terms masseuse and masseur anymore), it’s just the truth.  You do something vaguely medical that has benefits of its own. 

 

That doesn’t mean that I don’t love getting a rub.

 

I’ve had good ones and bad ones.  I’ve only stopped maybe two people in the middle, and that was when I was at the height of my gambling problem days and got massages at the tables.  Most of them have been at least decent, as one would imagine with the several months of training.  I’ve had them in decadent spas and weird little bodega like shops. 

 

And no, I’ve never had a happy ending. 

 

There have been hints, but I’ve always felt myself as the subject matter expert in such activity.  Why waste twenty bucks on something I can do myself?

 

It is always a little odd for me to hear people afraid to skin down for a massage.  Your gluteus muscles get tight too.  Your upper thighs get tight.  Why would you not want to have them massaged?  Are you that afraid of your own body?  Do you really thing she hasn’t seen that all before, and that just the sight of your naked body, she’ll pass out from the glory of it all?  Shut up, strip down, and lie there and take the punishment.

 

Bruises mean she did it right.

 

(And yes, I realize that males can do the job.  Most of the time, I prefer males.  They are stronger.  If you are really that ridiculous that you are afraid of another man touching you, you have more issues than I can deal with.  I use the feminine pronoun because it was a 90 pound Chinese lady that always kicks my ass.)

 

It’s All Going to be OK

I’m reminded sometimes of why I do this.

I won’t win any awards for being on-call everyday, all day.  I won’t win an award for the time I helped a buddy who was hung-over get well.  I won’t get an award when I tended to the random triple amputee in the parking lot after he got cold-clocked.  No one is going to give me promotion points because I just helped two soldiers feel better about their health in five minutes on the weekend, when I want to sleep.

That’s just fine by me.

We are the ones that often go overlooked.  Some of us are lucky to be called Doc.  I maybe known as the grumpy one, the one that’s going to give you shit but each and every one of my guys (and I do call them my guys.  It’s a case of older brother mentality; I can fuck with them, not you) can come to me and I’ll set aside the sarcasm and help them.

They want to know everything is going to be OK.  They want me to tell them that, tell them how it’s going to be fixed.  

I know lots of dirtbag medics.  The medics that say Fuck it, it’s the weekend.  I may get frustrated, or burned out, but my job doesn’t stop at the aid-station doors.  That’s why I got into this gig.  With my ASVAB score, I could’ve done anything.  I was begged to do certain jobs.  

I wanted to help people.

So yes, my little chickadees.  I’m going to fix your boo-boos.  I’m going to harass you mercilessly about your crutches and your medication and holy shit, why are you playing more basketball?

But trust me, it’s all going to be OK.

Old School Still Here

I saw that they still sell plain, Jansport backpacks.  

This restored a little bit of faith in humanity.  

I’ve already talked about how soul crushing it is to have something like this happen.  We expect certain things to have continuity.  Does that mean I hate when variations come out, giving a brand a sense of rebirth?  Of course not.  

I just hate when they stray away from what drew me to the brand in the first place.

Backpacks have become a fashion statement for school age kids now.  Well, maybe more for their fashion conscious parents.  They come in a variety of shapes and sizes and colors and styles.  The thing about these backpacks was that they could last you forever.

I still have a Jansport at home that I’ve had since I was in elementary school and besides being a bit dusty, it has lost zero functionality.  

Just seeing that a brand that I’ve used for schlepping my books and papers and laptops and who knows what else around for well over two decades is still keeping it classic warms me up in the nostalgia bone.  I hope they keep it up.

Yeah, I’m looking at you Oreo…

The Basement

This post is fantastic. We forget that most things are based on very old technologies in very odd places.

cabel.com

Somewhere in Portland, there’s a very old building, and that very old building has a very, very old basement. An incredible basement, a video-game-level basement, a set-decorator’s dream basement.

And when you walk past the janitors office, with the wonderfully decked halls…

And tromp down a sunken hallway…

You find a old room. Mostly empty, dusty, and dead quiet.

And then you start to look closer at the walls.

And you start to see things.

(You see that Brown didn’t often pay his dime for coffee.)

(You see that a lot of calculation was done right on the wall.)

(You see that World War I was front and center on everyone’s mind.)

(You wonder what was being tallied, and if it was better to win or lose.)

(And you learn the tongue-in-check “rules” of the room.)

And eventually, you crawl behind a corner, and discover a bundle of conduit.

Conduit for…

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Oh Good, Another Camo Bag

There is a whole industry designed to painlessly separate us from our meager paycheck.

You live in a culture long enough and despite protestations of innocence, you buy into it.  I want to buy an assault rifle because I’ve come to love shooting.  I want to go hiking and camping because going to the field can be like a vacation if done correctly.  

Oh look, there is a “tactical” shop right on base.

You can get tactical boots, pants, shirts, writing tools, pouches, bags, backpacks, hats… the list is endless.  All my issued military gear is ACU patterned and yet there I am, buying stuff that I need in the same pattern.  

It’s just so damn useful.  

These companies aren’t stupid.  They know what we need.  They know the sizes and what works and what doesn’t and what we’ll shell out money for.  I have my eye and quite a few things when we get back, little rewards for a deployment well spent.  I already have the car (one of the number one things people plunk down a boatload of cash on).  All I want are the little things that make my life a little more…

military.

Ah shit.

I’ve had too much of the kool-aid now.

It’s My Web, and I Want It NOW!

We are moving closer and closer to a unifying landscape of technology.

I think homogenizing our technological experience is a good thing.  There is plenty of room for competition and growth behind the portal the user interacts with.  It’s frustrating to me, an average consumer, to have to go searching for content that may lie across several different websites.  I want to log into one website and have all my choices plainly displayed.

Netflix is the perfect example of this.  Would I be willing to pay more for better content choice?  You bet.  If I could get all the shows that I get elsewhere, all the movies I have to torrent because they simply aren’t available online, I would pay a premium.  We’ve been doing this with cable and satellite television for years.  I’d say take my money if they could lump all the things I love together in one website that was half-way decent at housing and displaying content.

Smartphones too.  I use a phone for texting and calling, due to my situation (read: deployment).  I was an avid smartphone user before and will be again.  I want the apps I want, I want them to work, and I want to be able to access them everywhere.  I’m not sure what the hold-up (money) is about building a true high speed wireless network, but they better fix it.  Other countries have better connectivity than us.

And we say we are the best.

The Web isn’t going away.  More and more, things are moving here to stay.  We haven’t upgraded our infrastructure in a while and it’s time to invest in this like we invested in roads in the 50’s.  

Do we really want to be a third-world web country?

Ch-ch-ch-changes!

I’m moving this blog.

You won’t notice a thing.  You’ll still be able to come here and laugh and cry and play piano.  Assuming you did all those things before. 

I’ve had quite the response in the short time I’ve been actively engaged in writing this silly online thing.  So, in the spirit of crass commercialism, I’m putting my chips on the line in hopes of making a bit of cash off my brilliance.  I’m moving from WordPress.com to WordPress.Org.  As you have already noticed, I have the domain name and hosting all set up.

Then I ran into another language.

I wish I had time to sit here and try to decipher the instructions on how to change over from one site to the other.  I wish I could read this language easily and manipulate my own destiny.  I also wish for a pony and a winning lottery ticket. 

So much for that.

Instead, I paid the good people at WordPress to do it for me.  I think of it as investment.  Even if this thing tanks and I don’t get a single reader ever again, at least I’ll know that I put it out there.  I took a risk and failed.  I could’ve sat here and written my little blog for no money and no fame and no prestige, made some people all little more entertained. 

Where’s the fun in that?

So I’ll be signing off for the next day or so.  The Facebook page will still be active and I’ll be posting to that.  I actually have a weekend this week so I’ll be spending it sleeping, eating, working-out and maybe even a little beach time.  I love you all my little chickadees. 

I’ll catch you on the flip-side.

PS:  That’s a picture of my dog, Lucky.  She pretty much runs our lives, as you can plainly see.  What a princess.

Truly an Honor

Today was a special day that I’ll look back on fondly.

There will be no sarcasm in this post, no funny quips.  

I met a Medal of Honor winner today.  SSG Jenkins, Don J was a PFC in Vietnam and was caught in an ambush.  He repeatedly returned fire and went out from cover to retrieve fallen comrades.  He disregarded his own wounds and sallied forth to a position where one man had already lost his life and several others were wounded to retrieve more wounded soldiers.  He did this not once but three times.  He destroyed bunkers with whatever weapons he could find after he ran out of ammunition in his machine gun.  

The man I met today was humble, stern, funny and filled with class.  He lectured the higher leaders to remember who supported them and would (or would not) come get them.  It wouldn’t be their fellow senior leaders, it would be us; the Joes.  

My favorite story from him was and old one, but still great:

A Sergeant Major, a Captain and a Colonel were captured and sentenced to death.  They were asked what their final wish would be.

The Colonel said he wanted to speak before he died.

The Captain said I want a steak dinner.

The Sergeant Major said:

Just shoot me before the Colonel speaks, thank you.

I have his autograph on his picture and what he did to earn that medal.  I think I’ll keep that to myself (it’ll go in my Guambat scrapbook).  

You can read about this great man here.