Dream of Waking

I’m on what is basically a two month vacation from work. I’m in classes. Classes that are required for promotion. A promotion I won’t be getting by my own choice. I don’t think the Army gets much better than this, honestly. My hours are steady again and my schedule doesn’t change every fucking day. I’m in this class with fifteen other people who do the same job I do and a couple of them are even worth talking to! I can bitch about stupid stuff that typically goes on at my normal job and these guys actually know what it’s like!

Non-shocking fact: most of these guys did other jobs before to get to the rank that I would be getting promoted to (which is hard to obtain in my job), before they reclassified to my job. This is why my points for E6 are so high. All the E6s are reclasses. And what do you know, I’m far more knowledgable than they are at this job! This is another way the Army is fucked on promotions that I didn’t even consider. It’s easier to jump the ranks in a different job and reclass to computers than to come up the ranks, gain the skills and knowledge, and then get promoted to E6 in a timely manner. I just took my first test and a lot of what this first week is covered in AIT, which even reclasses have to go through, and it’s almost surprising how many of them struggled with it. It may not be stuff we do every day but it is a perishable skill that needs periodic refreshment and these are the guys who’ve come out of training much later than I did.

I don’t want to bash these guys though, they’ve done their time in other jobs and fulfilled the requirements to be where they are today. The system that put them here is inherently flawed. Some of them toted a rifle for most of their Army career, and now they’re punching buttons. To put them in the same position of responsibility as someone like me, who’s done the job for four plus years, says to me that the job is interchangable and that all that matters is the rank you wear. That’s insane. If I were to be swapped with an infantryman at my rank I would absolutely lost, because I don’t have the experience of doing that job that the responsibilities I’d inherit requires.

This wasn’t supposed to turn into a rant, I swear.

Tonight I ate ramen for dinner and finished season 3 of Battlestar Galactica. I must be home alone!

Katie’s in Springfield for a month. Being home alone is pretty lame. There’s no one here to talk to except Chester and the cats. They’re not exactly talkative either.

I can’t listen to the Deftones’ cover of Duran Duran’s “The Chauffeur” just once. I have to put it on repeat for half of a day.

Work sucks. All the four day weekends are gone. We got rid of our satellite tv receiver last weekend so I’m almost at a loss for things to do after work. I’ll probably get a lot more gaming done, until the cables I ordered to hook a laptop up to the TV come in, then I suppose I’ll be crashed on the couch watching Hulu all night.

I recently read Joe Haldeman’s “The Forever War”. It’s basically a literary response to Heinlein’s “Starship Troopers” based on Haldeman’s experiences in the Vietnam war. It’s an amazing book. Coming home from two year long deployments was always something of a shock. So many things had changed that it’s like I was put in a box for a year and brought out into this bizarre new world and Haldeman illustrates that kind of culture shock when the main character returns to Earth decades after he left, though time dilation causes him only to age a year or two. Everything he remembered from before he left seemed to have gotten bleaker, less enjoyable, the same way coming back from Iraq to a Bush-ravaged economy was to me. It’s like in the span of a year, the whole world had hit a downward slope at a faster pace than I could’ve imagined.

It really made me want to read John Steakley’s “Armor” again so that’s what I’m doing now. Another amazing book.

Today I scheduled my first pre-seperation counseling. This will probably be the longest year of my life.

I’m in a gaming rut. There’s nothing in particular that I really want to play that I already own. This weekend I spent an unhealthy amount of time staring at my game collection, trying to work up the nerve to install and play one. I want to play Doom 3 but it doesn’t play well with 64bit Vista. I kind of want to play Deus Ex but then I remember that I hate Deus Ex. But hey, what’s like Deus Ex except fun? Deus Ex: Invisible War. And I just so happen to own it on Steam.

I install it. As it downloads I find that wizz-bang new High Definition textures pack. The game finishes downloading, I install the texture pack, and run the game. Crash to desktop. No error given. Okay, maybe the texture pack isn’t playing nice. Uninstall the texture pack. Run it. Crash to desktop. No error. Fuck. Maybe the texture pack didn’t uninstall cleanly. Delete the game, re-download the game, run it. Crash to desktop. No error. The support forums have mention of the same problem but the answers are never the same for each post. None of the solutions work. I’m just fucked.

Today I’m on 24 hour duty. I’m using my laptop, which runs Windows XP. Maybe I can play Deus Ex: Invisible War! Slowly download it. Run it. Holy shit, it’s working. Get in the game, start to enjoy myself for about 20 minutes, the power goes out. Turn it back on, it’s giving an overheat error. This is an old laptop. It’s never overheated before but this is not unheard of. I try a couple more times to make sure it wasn’t something else with the same results. When I go home for dinner, I made sure to get my small tools to bring back with me. I open up the laptop, dust out some old Iraqi crap, pull out two dust bunnies conveniently located around the fans, and put it back together. When I start it up, I can hear one fan going. The other isn’t. Okay, that’s an improvement. Run the game. Start to enjoy myself. Power cuts out. I’m fucked again.

I can sit here and watch Battlestar Galactica for three hours straight but I can’t play a game for longer than 20 minutes. I don’t even want to bother with playing a less graphically intensive game at this point. In conclusion, the laws of heat transfer can go to hell.

So we got a new stove about three weeks ago. Our old stove still works but it’s kind of crappy. Our new stove shows up, it works great, now we have a hunk of metal that’s just taking up space. It’s not garbage because it still works but there’s no way in hell it’s fitting in the back of my Corolla. Katie tried contacting someone on Craigslist who offered free appliance pickup and disposal and they totally flaked out. So today we gave it another shot, this time we’d list the stove and let people come to us.

I published the ad and in an hour I already had two offers. It’s only been up for six hours and I’ve gotten five offers. Provided the first one doesn’t flake out, by 9am tomorrow I’ll be free of one enormous paperweight. The power of the internet! Or the desire of people for something free.

Puma is making Mega Man shoes.

That’s pure balls. I just bought shoes. I need to save up for more awesome things, like this watch, and they drop this shoebomb on me. Life sucks.

I’m on day four of a four day weekend. For the last three days I’ve done absolutely nothing. Nothing. I’ve wasted all three days. I feel pretty miserable about it but I’m having a hard time coming up with ways I could’ve spent my time better.

I can’t say I did absolutely nothing. I played some Freelancer. I played some Starlancer on my dreamcast. I watched a half hour of Southland Tales before I had to turn it off. I kind of cleaned up my office in an attempt to find a phantom smell. I kind of organized my closet when I was looking for the video cable to my dreamcast. The sum of all this, though, is basically zero.

I’ve got two more four day weekends coming up. Hopefully they’ll be better spent. This one was basically a waste.

ABC News: Gates Announces End to Army Stop-Loss

This is easily the best news I’ve read since President Obama took office. Though the article says stop-loss will be phased out over the span of two years, this gives me a huge amount of hope that I won’t be stuck on the next bullet train to hell. Stop-loss is a despicable practice that turns volunteers into conscripts and I am undescribably happy to know it will finally end a nightmare that has affected countless lives.

The definition of clueless leadership.

The single notion that repeated, long deployments are not the source of the increased number of suicides is absolutely ridiculous. That “resiliency” that develops is apathy. It’s depression, and anger, and loss. It’s knowing that even though you’re putting in your time overseas, the Army needs one more body to fill up that plane going back to another meaningless fight so you can watch as the world you know disintegrates. It’s the hopelessness of knowing that the deployments will never end for you. “Resiliency” is what’s driving us to suicide.

A coworker and I went halfsies on a case of Drank. It arrived today so we each had an inaugaral can. It’s billed as a relaxing drink, a de-energizer if you will. The polar opposite of Red Bull. It’s alcohol free, which was my first concern, and not sold in this area, hence having to order a case and have it shipped here.

I can report that it tastes pretty good. It tastes like some kind of melon soda. As to it’s effectiveness, I can say with 100% certainty that my roll has been slowed. I opened the can at about 4:30 PM, it is now 6:45 PM and I am dead tired. I am falling asleep at my keyboard. I’ve been dranked.

So two weeks ago I spent a four day weekend in Washington. IVAW flew myself and several others up there for some training. It’s hard to describe what I went through there. Everytime I put fingers to keyboard I end up with a mess of boring details and no substance. I met some amazing people, learned a lot, and left with a changed perspective.

I spent the whole week afterward in a kind of funk.

I’m on 24-hour duty. You know what makes 24-hour duty tolerable? Wireless internet stolen from the barracks.

After two aborted efforts to recompile a new kernel for my Dell Mini 9, I finally get one compiled to completion. And the wireless stops working. So now I’m recompiling without any modifications made to the configuration in hopes that it’ll bring my wireless back from the grave. If not, at least I’ve only been getting readjusted to Ubuntu 8.10 for a week before having to reinstall. Maybe I’ll be more careful next time, eh? Probably not.

This is the reason why I like using linux on a computer that’s not essential to my day to day life. I can break the OS doing goofy stuff and it’s no big deal. It’s a learning experience even. If I have to reinstall the OS, who cares. All it costs is time.

I just cancelled my preorder for a Matte Black Nintendo DSi with one-day shipping. Katie complained instantly when she knew I pre-ordered it so I started to think about why I wanted one. I want one because it’s got bigger screens, better speakers, a downloadable game service, and my DS lite got pretty trashed on the last deployment. But I usually play with headphones on and the downloadable games are going to be lame like mahjong and puzzle games and I can live without bigger screens and the scratches. So I guess I have better things to spend the cash on.

I’m in Tacoma, WA. IVAW is having a shindig this weekend here and they paid for my plane ticket.

The first place we all get together is Coffee Strong, which is a veteran owned coffee shop. I felt I had walked into another dimension. This place looks just like The Asylum and someone I remember from The Asylum is there. What.

It turns out she’s working with a war resisters organization. She’s as shocked as I am to see someone else from Springfield here. We chit chat and then she leaves. Later in the evening there’s a show. It’s exactly the same kind of show The Asylum would’ve put on.

I thoroughly believe I’ve hit some time pocket and actually landed in Springfield eight years ago at my current age. More to follow.

Good riddance.

My 2008 resolution was to beat a Bioware RPG. I should’ve said a Bethesda RPG because I beat Fallout 3 and didn’t get to Mass Effect in time. I think this year I’m going resolution free.

Katie and I made our third trip to Nashville in a week to visit the newly opened Trader Joe’s. It was totally packed. Parking lot was packed, store was packed, people everywhere. Once we got inside we spent maybe fifteen minutes in there. There were just too many people around and both of us were kind of freaking out. We got some fabled peppermint Joe Joe’s, some cashew macadamia nut butter, I got a mint chocolate clif bar and mini orange chocolate bars, Katie got chocolate chilli spiced mango slices and some other stuff. As we were checking out the clerk told us that if we don’t like something we bought, we don’t need to bring back a receipt or package, just tell them what it was and they’ll credit it to our next purchase. Wow. That’s almost insane. If it weren’t for all the people, it probably would’ve been a pretty positive visit, even though we couldn’t find the meatfree jerky or tofu anywhere.

Yep. It’s that close. In less than 30 days I’ll be sitting at home playing video games with my awesome wife instead of sitting here playing video games while listening to my asshole roommate yell at his apparently not awesome wife. I’ve sent one box of stuff home, I’m packing the second, and the rest of it will be stuffed in duffle bags to be thrown in a shipping container. The strange part is that everything is still so vague that it feels like it’s farther away than it should be. It feels like it’s still three months away rather than one.

In other awesome news, both Ben Folds and Bayside released new albums this week and they’re both rather awesome and make up for past discretions. Life is looking pretty good for a change!

There’s an excellent article at The Huffington Post on why not electing Sarah Palin into office could be more important than not electing John McCain into office. It’s a scary and painfully realistic view into why Sarah Palin was chosen as McCain’s running mate and how a cabal of traitors would like to see their biggest wet dream come true. I could describe more but then you wouldn’t simply go read the fucking article already, would you?

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/naomi-wolf/the-battle-plan-ii-sarah_b_128393.html

Note: This entry is getting a lot of attention! I’ve disabled mandatory registration for a limited time to encourage discussion.

Ever since I enlisted, I’ve taken more notice to politics. It seems like my day to day life changes everytime the President farts. It gives me great interest in seeing the outcome of this election be in my favor. That said, I support Barack Obama as the next President of the United States.

It was basically a no-brainer. Obama has never supported this war in Iraq and he’s the one of the few politicians who seem at all concerned in ending it. I’m in a combat manuever brigade. My deployments will not end until the war in Iraq does. A Republican administration will do nothing to take us out of Iraq. McCain himself said he will keep us there for another hundred years. They say we won’t establish permanent bases in Iraq but when I go to the bigger bases that’s all I see. New construction. We’re digging in for the long haul. Under Republican rule, this country will become another hardship tour duty station such as Korea or Germany.

When I get home from this deployment, I will have roughly 18 months left in service. I’m only “guaranteed” (and that guarantee is only Army strong, which is to say it can change at any minute) 12 months stateside. 18 months is a long time to dodge another deployment to Iraq at this pace, no matter where I’m stationed. I’ve basically hinged my ability to avoid stop-loss on this election. If Obama is elected, I stand a good chance of getting out of the service on my scheduled exit date. If he’s not, I can guarantee I will be stop-lossed and involutarily extended for up to 18 months; 3 months prior to deployment, another 12 to rot here while the rest of the world turns without me, and 3 months after.

Katie and I have a lot riding on this election. If I’m stuck in Iraq for another tour, I can almost promise that once I am let free I will not endure another minute in a country under the rule of Republicans. God knows they’ve sent the country to hell in the last 8 years, no damage will be repaired if another warmonger is elected. By the time I get home the U.S. will be as much of a bombed out wasteland as Iraq is after we got done removing it’s tyrannical dictator, and ours will still be there to show for it. To hell with my plans for school, to hell with the pittance of benefits leftover for veterans after the nations budget has been gutted for more war spending, I’ll be packing up everything and moving elsewhere. I’m told Alberta is a nice place to live.