Poor Me

Most of last weekend was taken up by a paper and this weekend it is not only raining, but I seem to have come down with either a stomach bug or food poisoning. I'm averaging one unpleasant run to the toilet every 35 minutes. This sucks.

Yesterday was nice. I hung out with Petey, my friend's son, whom I haven't seen since he was four months old (he's four years old, now!). It was great fun. We went exploring, drew maps, climbed mountains, sailed the ocean twice, fought our way through jungles and Target (yes, as in the store. We went there earlier in the day, but I still found it funny that he even drew the logo on the map), read a book about pirates and read a book based on the movie Ice Age 2.

Petey, iffin' he can't make it to Neverland to meet his namesake and Captain Hook (who he claims is "really nice once you get to know him," despite his ill reputation when dealing with little boys named Pete), wants to be an explorer when he grows up. Evidently, explorers wear big boots (even with shorts), a pack with a rolled up map tucked into the side and stomp when they walk (except when they're sneaking. Then they stomp in slow motion).

OK, had to run to the bathroom again. Did I mention that my toilet is broken and that I have to fill up the tank using buckets of shower water to get it to flush? Again, this sucks.

Word of the Day

Clinkery. Definition: unknown. It has something to do with lava. In an effort to self-medicate my attention span so that I wouldn't fall asleep trying to study geology, I have over-caffeinated and now can barely finish reading a sentence before I've skipped to the end of the next page. Words here and there keep jumping out at me without any of it really sinking in. But clinkery is sure a funny word. Clinkery.

Well!

Mood swings aren't always bad. Sometimes there's a swing that goes up up up! Today was one of those times. I finished my paper on a rite of passage (becoming a combat vet via Afghanistan), went for a bike ride around Forest Park, walked halfway back to my car because my legs were so tired, and am now sipping wine and eating yummy food. It was beautiful all weekend and even the wedding wasn't all that bad. It was nice to see family and everyone seemed to be enjoying themselves.

Unfortunately, when I opened the bottle of wine I shoved the cork down inside, so now I guess I have to finish off the bottle! Off to do my duty...

Tag?

Bah. Only because Diane S tagged me. :-)

Four jobs I've had:

1. Scrollmonkey (too long an explanation for here)


2. Oppressor of Indigenous Populations, Afghanistan


3. Middle Manager, Division of Gofers


4. Bum, Undergrad

Four movies I can watch over and over

1. Mars Attacks!


2. SLC Punk


3. Office Space


4. Any Indiana Jones movie. Except maybe Temple of Doom. Come to think of it, I don't own any of them!

Four pieces of music I love (this might be easier if it were four *hundred* pieces of music)

1. Beethoven's Piano Sonata #8, Pathetique


2. "Rudy Can't Fail" - The Clash


3. "Thousands are Sailing" - The Pogues


4. "The Man Who Sold the World" - the Nirvana version

Four books I could have read over and over

1. Ishmael - Daniel Quinn


2. Starship Troopers - Robert Heinlein


3. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance - Robert M Pirsig


4. The Hobbit - J.R.R. Tolkien

Four sites I visit every day:

1. Highland Dreams


2. A Stone, a Leaf, an Unfound Door


3. Steve Gilliard's Newsblog


4. The Company Bitch

Four places I have lived:

1. Philomath, OR


2. Gettysburg, PA


3. Anjungni, Korea


4. Watertown, NY

Four TV shows I love

1. The Daily Show


2. MXC




4. Hmm, love is a pretty strong word for a TV show...

Four places I've vacationed:

1. Hawaii


2. Glacier National Park, Montana


3. Bitteroot National Forest, Idaho/Montana


4. London

Four of my favorite dishes:

1. cheesy scrambled eggs. w/ hash browns, bacon, toast, coffee, (black), tea (tons of milk & sugar), AND cranberry juice!


2. giant black bean burrito w/ tons of guacamole


3. HOT (lots of kgo-chu-jong) bulgogi and rice. w/ Korean ginseng tea and lots of water


4. cheap, greasy fishnchips, soaked in vinegar, coated in salt. w/ beer and rain
   
   Four places I would rather be right now:
   
   
5. in the mountains, near a river to fish, with marshmallows to roast


6. at a Flogging Molly show


7. The UK (this time with money to spend)


8. in my car, no destination but far

Four things I would like to change about the world:

1. more books, less cars (I'd like to build a library on top of every NASCAR track. that'll learn 'em!)


2. more penguins, less assholes (Slow/stop/reverse the humanmade destruction of the environment and the earth)


3. more trees, less bush! (The year 2000's presidential election)


4. gravity. but only temporarily.

"Canadians or something equally awful"

I love Molly Ivins. Her column on Alternet provides a good example of why: "The political fight over global warming is over, except for the Bush administration, which has some weird problem with science in general. I'm still not sure what's behind that: I recall Rush Limbaugh and the radio right taking great glee in pooh-poohing the Kyoto treaty and the whole idea of global warming. Maybe they associated global warming with Canadians or something equally awful."

Spent the weekend down in the land where even the internet packets are sent by horse and buggy: Philomath, OR. It was impossibly dark, even in the middle of the day, and it poured nearly nonstop. I had just enough time for a dog walk and a half hour bike ride before it started raining again. No wonder I was depressed as a teenager. On the bright side, there were tons of good food, my wonderful dog Harper, and plenty of beer and wine. Watching The 40-Year-Old Virgin with the parents was a bit uncomfortable, but the movie was hysterical enough that it made up for it.

Morons, Morons Abound

Last term I had to sign up for an environmental issues newsletter called Tidepool and never cancelled the subscription. It's a very informative daily wrap-up of the latest environmental happenings, particularly concerned the NW. It is also rather depressing and I therefore rarely actually read it. Let's take a look some of today's newstories:

First off, we have the Idiot of Idaho, the president of the Idaho Anti-Wolf Coalition, whose
"voter initiative calls for removal of all wolves from Idaho." He makes various lame excuses as to why he wants the wolves removed, and despite his evidence being weak (he claims the wolves are killing too many elk, yet the elk harvest was a record high this year) he says, "We're not anarchists and we're not Aryan Nation wolf-killers, but if something isn't done about these wolves, mark my word, there will be civil disobedience." Ugh, rednecks.

Second, and most depressing, Canada's newly elected conservatives wreak havoc by cutting - by 80% - national programs dedicated to fighting global warming. The best part is that they only elminated the programs, not the people who work there, so essentially they are still paying a staff who have no work and no budget. Brilliant.

There was other great news, but luckily for you my internet connection is having fits and I don't have the patience to copy, paste and click anymore with it.

*rubs eyes*

This term is much more like the college experience I was expecting when I first started school: lots and lots of reading, many tests and quite a few papers. It's only the second week and I seem to be spending all of my time reading, studying and reading some more. On top of that, I'm trying to get things sorted out for the school I'm attending in Ireland this summer. It turns out that it's kind of difficult to pay for things in other countries when you're not there. What did people do before ATM/credit cards? I actually had to use a fax machine today. I imagine my fax is now sitting in some abandoned paper warehouse, full of dust-covered file cabinets that haven't been opened in a decade. Afterall, who uses fax machines anymore? There's also a rather long reading list for this course and I'm trying to get some of it done before I show up. This involves reading books written in the 1970s about the prehistory of Britain and various excavations in the region, and after about three sentences my eyes feel like they're going to shrivel up into my head. There are pictures, but they are even more dense and dull than the words. Lame!

Outside of school, my cousin is getting married in less than two weeks. Ordinarily, I'd find some convenient excuse to be as uninvolved as possible, but the wedding is five minutes from my apartment, so that severely limits my escape options. Sister 1 has already invited herself to my place for the weekend and Mom has mentioned that she may just drop by for a night or two as well. Dad, I expect, will flee at the earliest convenience.

This wedding may involve two terrible things: I will have to wear a dress (and therefore shop for and buy one) and there will be no alcohol. This last part is a presumption, but I'm already preparing. This girl does not spend the entire day in a dress, sober. Period.

*yawn* It's only Tuesday, I still have another class this evening, and I'm already exhausted. Off to fix myself a packable dinner so I don't starve to death during intro to linguistics.

To Read List

See, I really do pay attention in class! Everytime a professor mentions a book related to just about anything he or she is saying, I write it down in the margins. This is a compilation of my margin scribblings from the first term and two weeks of the second. This is already more reading than I think I may do in this lifetime, but oh well. This is also mostly for personal reference and I don't really want it front-paged, so I changed the date. The actual date here is Apr 14th. I'll leave comments open, in case you have anything fantastic to suggest or add.


Need to buy, borrow or steal:

Johanna Nichols - Linguistic Diversity in Space and Time
Stephen Pinker -The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language
Jared Diamond - Guns, Germs and Steel
Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed
The Third Chimpanzee : The Evolution and Future of the Human Animal
William Durham - Coevolution: Genes, Culture, and Human Diversity
Clive Gamble - Timewalkers : The Prehistory of Global Colonization
Steven Mithen - The Prehistory of the Mind: The Cognitive Origins of Art, Religion and Science
Merlin Donald - Origins of the Modern Mind
Richard Dawkins - The Selfish Gene
Shelley Wachsmann - Seagoing Ships & Seamanship in the Bronze Age Levant Eric Wolf - Europe and the People Without History
Michael T. Klare - Resource Wars: The New Landscape of Global Conflict
Richard Alley - Two-Mile Time Machine
Stuart Brand - The Clock of the Long Now: Time and Responsibility: The Ideas Behind the World's Slowest Computer
Jim Lichatowich - Salmon without Rivers



Sitting next to the shelf in the unread pile:

Susan Blackmore - The Meme Machine
James W. Loewen - Lies My Teacher Told Me : Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong
Ray Raphael - A People's History of the American Revolution
J.F.Cooper - The Last of the Mohicans
Stephen Ambrose - Undaunted Courage: Meriwether Lewis Thomas Jefferson and the Opening of the American West
Andrew Garcia - Tough Trip Through Paradise
Barbara W. Tuchman - The Guns of August
David Fromkin - A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East
Azar Nafisi - Reading Lolita in Tehran
McKay Jenkins - The Last Ridge
Sean Naylor - Not a Good Day to Die : The Untold Story of Operation Anaconda
Michael Herr - Dispatches
Homer - The Iliad
Homer - The Odyssey
Plato - The Republic
Thomas Paine - Rights of Man
Kurt Vonnegut Jr - Cat's Cradle
Kurt Vonnegut Jr - Bluebeard
Robert Louis Stevenson - Treasure Island
Edward Rutherfurd - The Princes of Ireland
James Joyce - Dubliners
James Joyce - A Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man
Samuel Beckett - Waiting for Godot
D.H. Lawrence - Women in Love
Ernest Hemingway - The Old Man and the Sea
Stephen King - The Dark Tower V: Wolves of the Calla
Pearl S. Buck - The Good Earth

Time to kill

I have three hours of time to waste and while that's a poor excuse to post a blog, I feel that I should mention a few things. 1) Tony and I broke up. Stupid army. 2) I cut my hair off. and by "I", I mean "someone else and then I when I got home and saw how awful it looked, I cut it some more."

These things should be ample reason to go to the nerdly archaeology lecture this afternoon, as there is a high chance of Hot Guy being present, but I'm afraid that there will be a total of seven people there, thus forcing me to interact with one, some or all of them. I'm not quite comfortable enough in my new look to do that. Lame, I know, but then so what. It's my life and I'm going to be happy, dammit, and being stared at/having to make small talk with strangers is not going to make me happy today.

But I'll tell you about something that did make me happy today: human suffering. This following paragraph was inspired by my old friend Perry, who rejoiced in the suffering of others. He came outright and said it one of those long, pointless days at work where we were forced to sit in our office and stare at the floor, as reading evil, thought-inspiring books was off-limits for some reason. The conversation turned towards TV and the greatest show in the world, MXC. If you've never seen MXC, it's an actual Japanese game show which is then dubbed over in Mystery Science Theater 3000 style. The contestants are put through the most outrageous stunts, many of which result in a violent ending. For example, one of the events involves running through a field of mud and approaching a wall with three doors in it and running full speed through of of them. Two of the doors are made of paper; one is made of wood. If one is correct one goes flying through the paper, lands in a mud puddle and sprints to the next wall; if not correct, the contestant bounces off the door, eyes roll up into the head and a dazed expression is produced. There are other events involving getting smashed with rolling logs, falling long distances on top of hard objects, falling face first onto rocks... you get the idea. It's the best show in the world. Perry announced that because work was so depressing (see, I wasn't the only disgruntled one!), that the only pleasure he got out of life was seeing other people suffer.

Today I was feeling awkward and self-conscious, due to the new haircut. While at the mall with the skating rink in it, a kid came skating near the wall where I was and fell, pulling his friend down and splattering himself onto the ice. I laughed out loud. I got some lunch and sat down to eat it at a spot with a view of a particularly treacherous corner where one kid after another biffed it with new and creative falling techniques. My favorite part was the looks on their faces. It would go from sheer ecstacy to terror. If they had a thought bubble it would say, "laaalala - EEEEE!!!"

Is falling on the ice really that scary? No, but someone important (who I can't remember) once said that the things humans are most afraid of is embarassment. Very true. I've never been ice-skating, but I've been pathetically bad at a number of activities, some of which involved crashing, falling or drowning, so I know the feeling. Everytime those kids fall, they learn something, whether it be eye-foot coordination or how to deal with being horribly embarassed in front of a huge crowd of lunchtime shoppers. So before you think me a bad person, when a kid falls, I'm not just laughing at at his or her misfortune, I'm chuckling and admiring the forces that govern growing up. Really. I promise.

The adults on MXC, however, get no mercy from me. I laugh hysterically at every brutal fall, face-smashing and humiliation. In fact, if the show were on more, I wouldn't have to snicker at the poor kids at the mall, I could just turn on the TV!

Sail Away!

Last night I had a minor heart attack when I came across this post on Steve Gilliard's News Blog which he got from Daily Kos. I'll just copy and paste the actualy Army News Service story which was quietly put up on AKO. I'd link AKO, but if you don't know what it is, you don't have a login or password.

Army to transform IRR
April 4, 2006


WASHINGTON (Army News Service, April 4, 2006) – Individual Warriors will be the new label for Soldiers serving in the Individual Ready Reserve.

Simultaneously, the new name will lead to a cultural shift away from the unstructured group of inactive individuals into a cohesive group of Soldiers who are trained, aware and ready to augment Army missions when called upon.

Secretary of the Army Francis J. Harvey endorsed the move to reset and reinvigorate the IRR through several programmed initiatives to transform the Army’s leading prior-service talent bank.

“Senior Army leadership is committed to providing the necessary funding required to shape the IW initiative,” Harvey said. He added that Soldiers in the IRR will be a “viable pool” of individual warriors “trained and employable to meet the needs of the Army.”

Presently there are more than 100,000 Soldiers (enlisted and officer) in the IRR that represent more than 200 Military Occupational Skills ranging from combat arms and support to combat-service support specialties, but that could potentially be reduced to 60,000 ready and available Soldiers.

“While the mission of the IRR is to provide a pool of previously trained Soldiers who are ‘individually ready’ for call-up, our culture and past management of the IRR has made it difficult for many to accept that call-ups will become common practice,” said Maj. Nadine Kokolis, a mobilization officer in the Army’s G-1.

“In order to establish realistic readiness reporting, the Army is conducting a systematic screening of the IRR database to reconcile existing records and identify non-mobilization assets, and separate those Soldiers who no longer have further potential for useful military service,” added Kokolis.

The Army will institute an annual screening and training program for all assigned IWs who align with the Army Force Generation model – Reset/Train; Ready; Available. This program will be developed and carried out in order to maintain positive contact, administer refresher training as individual skills degrade and ensure the deployable readiness.

“Annual readiness screening is the heart of this initiative to ensure IRR members are deployable,” said Kokolis. “The Army will execute a pilot screening for approximately 5,000 Soldiers in fiscal year 2007; the goal is to institutionalize the entire screening and training program by fiscal year 2013.”

Recruiters and career counselors will brief all Soldiers entering the service and transitioning between components so they understand service obligations and training requirements in the Army Reserve.




Sara here again. Warriors??? Come on, that was the mascot for my HIGH SCHOOL. They started this Warrior propaghanda a few years ago, adding this Warrior Ethos thing. "Never leave a fallen comrade" and blah blah blah. Read Orwell's Homage to Catalonia to understand what a joke war is, even when you're really there. Hell, read the chapter in Colby Buzzell's book about 'Movement to Contact' and understand how pathetic our "Warrior" tactics really are.

I really hate these people. Especially now that they're threatening to drag me back into it. My reaction was a bit more colorful last night, but I've calmed down a bit (thanks, Jesse) and remembered how slowwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwly things move in army land.

The Bread Line

There's nothing quite so dignified as waiting in line to beg the government to give you money. I'd consider going in again next week to try and get backpay for the $1500 or so that I was gipped out of last term, but I think I'd have a better chance of getting the earth to quicken its orbit. At least the people who work in the office are friendly.

Arrr, it be a new term! New classes! New people to not talk to me! Perhaps a new crush? Who knows. I'm taking more credits this time and have been invited to a few nerdly activities involving archaeology/anthropology as well as some veterans stuff, so maybe I'll manage to keep busy this term.

Oh wherrrrrrrrrrre am I going? Don't know wherrrrrrrrrre I'm going... hey!

Lemme tell ya: if you've never been mud-skiing down a huge hill of a treeless suburban hell development, flipped over a ten foot wall and landed in more mud, at three in the morning, after seven beers, you haven't lived.

Using the string method (hooray for the army teaching me something useful... like how to use a string) I figured out that I walked 6 miles last night. Did I mention it was raining? Yep, it was pouring, drizzling, raining and then repeating. Did I mention that it was three in the morning and I was terribly lost? Or that I was staggeringly drunk? The only reason that I wasn't at home taking a nice, long, hot shower was that I had to get off the train a few stops early because I thought I was going to be sick. Jeezus, one beer too many and look what happens. One more beer and I'd have probably ended up in Astoria or something. Oh, and did I mention that I was wearing an old, beat up pair of Chucks? Those poor shoes. Five years, six countries, countless punk rock shows...I even smuggled them to Afghanistan just so they'd have a little Afghani dirt on them. I only wore them once there and that was in the middle of the night to use the porta potty 50 feet away from the tent. But they've tread on Afghan ground and that's all that matters.

Ya know what's strange though? Even with all that walking, and I drove to the coast and walked on the beach earlier in the day, I'm not sore at all. My head hurts, as does my jaw (from clenching it while shivering), but I really don't feel like I've walked at all. That's a good sign, I guess. Maybe I'll be able to do the Oregon Coast Trail someday in the near future? Surely, not even *I* could get lost at the beach...

Three Hours to get Home

Holy hell.... I left Kell's nearly three hours ago and I just got home. Don't know if the highlight was sliding down the mud hill and then flipping over the ten-foot concrete wall or peeing in the industrial park, but it was a long, wet and lonely walk home. I was horribly confused, as usual and I got off the MAX because I thought I was going to be sick. I'm pretty sure that I walked at least three miles extra this evening, aided only by sheer luck and the recognition of a Chevron that I've been to before.

Off to wash the mud off....