101 Days

The last time I cared about 100 days, it was 100 days till commissioning.  Now I’m 101 days into this deployment and I’m ready to cut my ears off with a dull knife and claw myself out of my skin I’m so antsy to get out of here.  The more I stew about being here I just get more annoyed. I’m restless, bored, tired and hot 24-7… there’s no stopping it.  One of these days, the groundhog will crawl out of its hooch and not see its shadow and I’ll be able to go home. All of this is just a result of the proximity to being able to go home and sleep in my own bed.

Yesterday was particularly terrible for no particular reason other than I don’t want to be here anymore so I decided to finally take a logical approach to my “I want out of the Air Force” days.  I’m keeping a log. If I’m miserable in my career more days than I’m willing to be miserable over the next 6 months, then I’m pulling the plug.  I’ve not decided how many miserable days are acceptable so I’m taking suggestions from anybody – how many days are you miserable in your jobs during a given week?  Once I get a mean average of what a typical American is supposed to endure, then I’ll decide how many I’m willing to endure.  I will however probably forget to log in the log by tomorrow effectively making that idea moot.  I’m too lazy these days to follow through with any long term plans.

GQ did a fantastic article on the idea of throwing away your career for something you’ve always wanted to do… completely change gears.  Some guy left the keys in his Porsche in the middle of the street along with his lawyer/doctor/high-stakes-financier whatever he was job was to go hike the north pole.  Did I already blog about this?  GQ had quite a few vignettes about people taking a 180 to do what they really want to do.  When I was a kid I wanted to be a lawyer… sometimes that thought crosses my mind still – I’m methodical and am a libra (balance) so you’d think I’d be good at that. The idea popped into my head as a kid when we took a family vacation to Boston and saw Harvard…  I don’t have the dog-eat-dog mentality to do that though. I always wanted to be an architect too, drawing houses as a kid was my normal pastime. I didn’t go anywhere without my geek-o-briefcase filled with graph paper, colored pencils and rulers.  I just forgot to go to a college that offered Architecture.

Then there was all this business about being in the military… I got a scholarship, I joined… I’m still here. It was never a deliberate decision… it just happened.  I can’t say it was a bad decision.  People ask my why I joined. I don’t know, I just did it… kind of like when I bought that BMW that I only had for 4 months. I’ve had exceptional opportunities and experiences and met some wonderful people who will be life long friends. I wouldn’t have ever had all that without the military…  but it wasn’t a conscious decision – ever – do to this.  If I took my 180, I wonder what I’d do?  Probably nothing… as my eyes jump back to that line 2 grafs ago about being too lazy to follow through with any long term plans.

So has anybody seen the news about President Bush wanting to expose children in schools to “intelligent design?”  I’ve decided this is the new PC secular way to say “creationism.”  What the hell else out there besides God would there be that’s intelligent that could have created the universe if you don’t buy into the big bang theory, or does intelligent design also encompass little red men from mars too? Did somebody scratch out that sentence in the constitution – something about separation between a couple of things?  I’m not saying it’s a bad thing to expose kids to ideas, but why would we open the doors to let our government instead of those kids’ parents give that exposure?  Blatant disregard of our governments’ roles and responsibilities to go down that road if you ask me.

The second 3 dollar phrase I’ve seen in the news recently is the Bush administration’s deliberate decision to reshape the ‘global war on terrorism’ to one of a ‘struggle against violent extremism.’  Does this change in rhetoric mark the end of the war? Does this signify a forthcoming draw down? Why the change? As a professional spin doctor – cough cough, sorry ‘corporate communicator’ – you don’t make such a change without good reason.  Being on this side of the war and having to monitor it through open source media accounts, the new phraseology ticks me off… Didn’t anybody happen to notice what happened in London a few weeks ago?  Jack Straw, the UK Foreign Minister seems to think its inexplicably linked to the UK’s participation in Iraq and Afghanistan.  Do both phrases encapsulate what’s going on? Yeah – but a struggle makes me think of a quagmire where we can’t figure out how to put our pants on straight – a global war makes me think of bombs going off in double decker busses while 6 U.S. Marines die in a single day in Iraq.  If we as a society swallow this deliberately planned perception shift, we’ve totally lost the bubble on reality.

Off to fight a ‘struggle against violent extremism’

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