Swimming pool
I spent the last three days at another base. This other base has a swimming pool and Pizza Hutt and a PX that isn't run by a guy in my unit and actually has stuff I need in it and a bus line. It was like a mini-vacation. I did make the fatal error of bringing only one book that was almost finished (A Game of Thrones) and spent entirely too much time playing WarioWare Touched because of that. My cheap earbud headphones for my microscopic MP3 player also died so I had to get a new pair and that cost me almost as much as my player is worth ($20) and they fit weird. They sound much better than my cheap ones though.
Now Reading will be updated as soon as I post this. I need to add my Faulkner books and mini-review A Game of Thrones.
I need some funny.
I don't read Achewood regularly but when someone posts a strip or a link to one it's always hilarious.
Aneurysm
Tuesday night I had that dumb class and it lasted to a quarter past midnight. About halfway through I thought my brain my going to burst out the back of my skull. All of a sudden I had like the worst headache ever. As soon as the class was over I got out of there, got out of my uniform, and went to sleep. My brain wasn't done when I woke up. I still had a dull pain in the same spot and every once in a while I had the thrill of a pulse of mindstabbing pain. It was fantastic. Today, the same thing. Dull pain and then bursting skull pain and then back to dull pain again. So I went to the medics. I was concerned I might be having a stroke or something. Nope, no such luck. I guess I pulled a neck muscle that runs up to the back of my head. No stroke, no aneurysm, no brain tumor. Just a pulled muscle.
Tomorrow I get to go to another base for an overnight stay. I'm not really looking forward to it but it doesn't matter. I'm counting days.
I’m all busted up
Broken bones and nasty cuts. Accidents will happen, but this time I can't get up. Green Day's "Pulling Teeth" is still great, 12 years later.
My sunburn has started to blister, officially making it a second-degree burn. I don't really feel it but it looks bad.
I have a class at 10pm for some dumb crap that has nothing to do with me but since it's connected to a computer I have to be there. It's a load of crap.
Is it possible to overdose on cherry now-and-laters?
Never Forget Marvin Heemeyer
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marvin_Heemeyer
A day late but still not forgotten. When your government won't fight for you, you have to fight your government.
Transmetropolitan
I just finished Transmetropolitan. Overall, it's a good series. It follows insane gonzo journalist Spider Jerusalem's return to The City for contractual obligations and ends up overthrowing the presidency. The series has its ups and downs though. I think the series really hit a low point at year three (of five) and I found myself having a hard time getting through issues. I mean some of them were really that boring. There's a couple too many issues dealing with how messed up the people in The City are. I get it, it's huge and humanity is lost in the shuffle. It really grabs you by the balls in the first year though and it picks back up in year four. Spider's a loveable terrible character who's violent tendencies and rampant drug use are just a means to an ends for him. It's all about the story and by god he'll do whatever it takes to get it. It's a good read that focuses on the power of the written word.
What if…
I really should be sleeping but I'm in a thought-provoking mood.
I get paranoid sometimes. Sometimes I'm just struck with the inability to tell lies from truth or truth from lies so I don't believe anything and I assume the worst in every case. I can't blame everything on her but when it comes to girls a lot of my paranoia stems from Jen. She was playing a game of hearts and I lost or maybe I won but I couldn't trust girls for anything for about a year. Even when I started dating Katie I tried to convince her that I'm not someone she wants to be with partially because I didn't want to end up breaking her heart but mostly because I didn't want to end up heartbroken myself. She stuck with me though and god knows she's seen her share of my paranoia but I digress.
This deployment has really screwed with me. At first I was convinced that it was an elaborate exercise and that I was going nowhere. It was just a test. Once I was on the airplane and in another country it became a question of where I was. I've never been to Kuwait. I've never been to Iraq. The government could've dropped me anywhere, called it Iraq, and I would've never questioned otherwise if it weren't for paranoid delusions of being dropped in some undisclosed location to fight a secret war for ulterior purposes. From there it gets to where I wonder how deep the rabbit hole goes. Does the government even employ me? Is the news I read real or created to put certain ideals into my mind? Is the United States really only as big as it is on the map? What defines reality anyway? How do we measure time? Does time even exist?
Reality and time are what really get me. What defines real and imaginary? What really makes something truth and another thing fiction?
I don't really know where any of this is going. Don't believe a single thing I say.
My goose is cooked.
I spent four hours on a roof doing some dumb crap involving radios and not computers and now I'm medium-well. Tired.
Half-Life 2 Episode 1 is outstanding.
I don’t proofread.
Ever. My wife is my editor. I should just get this thing setup so that when I write an entry, it emails her, she reads and corrects and approves. It'd save me time.
Not a bad day
Pretty descriptive, right?
Started out good. I read another hundred or so pages of A Game of Thrones, which is outstanding by the way, before I got to come off of retrans, which is always a big plus. Then I get to work and everyone and their mother wants me to do something for them. Of course for the two days I'm up on retrans my work just piles up without me unless the SIGO decides to take care of some of the minor or ultra important stuff. So I spend the afternoon running all over the place, in the sun.
Later I find out that due to crazy circumstances I won't be going up to retrans for a while, if at all. This is good news to me. I don't mind not getting two days off if it means I get to do it in the AC and with an internet connection. I'd rather be working. It passes the time faster. I'm not ecstatic about said crazy circumstances but I guess they're serving a purpose that works to my favor.
Work is over and I make note of the date. Today is June 1st. Half-Life 2: Episode 1 unlocks tonight. So I anxiously wait 10am PDT (9PM, in Iraq) and restart Steam appropriately. It's still unlocking and downloading right now, at 11PM. I gave up on playing it tonight an hour ago but I didn't want to do a lot of stuff on the internet so it could have all the bandwidth it'd need to download so I started kind of picking up. I'm packing a box to ship home and I decide, on a whim, to try putting my Battlestar Galactica Season 2 Disc 1 in my utterly unreliable TV/DVD combo player. To my utter horror, it plays without a single quibble. I am so thrilled. I can finally get on with my BSG watching. Now I have to find my remote and it takes me fifteen minutes and then I had to try to find batteries for my remote, which I spend ten minutes on before giving up on that and just starting the freaking show.
This TV/DVD thing has a bad habit of screwing up right at the climax of an episode, no matter what you're watching and it doesn't fail me this time. Right before the last five minutes it starts to choke. I cajole it into finishing the episode with a minimal amount of skipping and sound distortion and it was great. I once again have nineteen more episodes of BSG to entertain me. At one episode per night and figuring in some nights when I won't remember to watch it, that'll almost take me through June.
All in all, today had its ups and downs and I think I'm better off for them. Katie just reminded me that I just got a 5GB mp3 player off of Woot for $100 and that is freaking great even if I won't get to use it out here.