Obama Party Crashers

Coming from a family of people associated with the Secret Service, I find this funny.

For those of you who don't know, there are two types of Secret Service personnel: the uniformed type and special agent type. The men that I know who are associated are not the uniformed police type, which remind me of glorified rent-a-cop. The fact that these jokers made it past them, yeah, I get it. They didn't look dangerous, they looked like they belonged, they didn't set off any alarms, literally. So, they got in.

I was just wondering where they actually sat once in the party.

Irrational Fears

Does anybody stop and think about their fears? Why are people more afraid to fly on an airplane than to ride in a car? You never hear about people too afraid to drive their own car so they have to ride some form of mass transit, save maybe people with some sort of mental illness, maybe extreme anxiety that are too afraid to leave their house. The fear of riding in a car is Amathophobia, but these phobias as mental, not necessarily rational fears. When people are afraid of things that have no statistical backing, I start to wonder.

I had an acquaintance email me because of a rather cheeky comment I made to his wife, who was a sorority sister of mine in college. She had gotten swine flu, and I learned later was wrestling with her pregnancy issues. I don't know if she was actually pregnant, or was trying to get pregnant, but she was sick with swine flu wondering if she should take Tamiflu or one of the other anti-virals. At the time of my comment, I didn't know if she was really having complications. My comment was something along the lines of "I'll take swine flu, you take Afghanistan." I made this comment mainly because of the many somewhat medieval diseases that are present here: polio, TB and malaria, to name a few. Ones like TB that don't go away and are highly communicable are the most scary to me. Once you get TB, you've got it for good, pretty much. You can die a miserable, long death similarly to Doc Holliday with your final words being "well I'll be damned. This is funny." Of course in the more civilized world which we like to think we live in, we are shielded from most of these illnesses. Malaria, which kills millions of people a year has practically been eradicated from the United States. And then swine flu comes along and everybody is freaking out back home.

From my point of view, it is very irrational. My acquaintance's argument was that I was saying nobody was allowed, in my book, to be worried about anything, which clearly, I wasn't saying. But with the threats facing my health in this country, I'm seriously not worried about swine flu. From what I've read since, 4,000 die of normal flu every year in the US, but nobody has been worrying about that little statistic. A lot of people won't get flu shots or other vaccinations because of the 1 in a million chance that somebody might have a reaction. There is a reason why the diseases were eradicated in the US: vaccinations. School age children were required to get vaccinations to go to kindergarden. Sure, I understand that it would suck if my son or daughter had a reaction to a vaccine (a one in a million chance) and if that happened I might say to myself, "I should have been playing the lottery because my odds would have been good." I know. But what if my son or daughter got polio? One of my Dad's friend's had polio and you can clearly see that one of his legs is almost half as thick as the other. Needless suffering and pain and debilitation. Sure, when my Dad's friend was a kid in the 1940's they didn't have the vaccines. But now they do. I'm sure he wished he had it. What I don't understand is why people get so upset about people regulating their child's health, but not about how their taxes support clearly failing businesses with stimulus money, but that's for another rant.

Another anecdote on a similar subject happened while I was in Paris with the Baylor in Paris program. There was another student that worried constantly about toilet seats. She even carried around toilet seat covers to use around Paris when she needed to pee or whatever. Funny enough, her fear was of STDs. Sexually Transmitted Diseases. When she told me of her fears, I didn't say what was on my mind, but it was something along the lines of "Sexually Transmitted" is in the acronym for a reason: because you have to have sex to get them. The chances of getting anything from a toilet seat, anything at all, are extremely remote. I looked up this on google and found the following: "none are spread on toilet seats... bugs don't tend to live on cool hard surfaces" and "syphilis and herpes... can be spread by direct non-sexual contact with infectious lesions, so make sure there is not an infected person already on the toilet when you sit down." Well said. More unfounded fears, and seriously, if you're that worried, hover. Oh, and don't touch the light switch or door knob, those do carry diseases.

I read an article about helicopter parents on Time.com. It describes a situation like the one I discussed above but dealing with parents and children. It's a scary situation that kids can't be kids and are ending up being less worldly than even us, who are only about 15 years their seniors. I guess people my age are already having children; I'm 27 after all. And maybe my childhood friends have become the hovering parent without even realizing it. I really just want to get a plot of land and release my kids into the wild of a boundary of a couple of acres where they can ride bikes around and go to the local corner store, and go to the beach with some SPF 30 and not many other worries. I'm sure it's possible that I will become a hovering parent... If I see my children's success as a definition of my worth. It could happen I suppose.

They mentioned the word "gifted" and I wanted to share some memories of gifted classes when I was in 5th grade. I think it was called GT, for gifted and talented. In the school I attended in forth grade it was called "TAG," for talented and gifted. I remember wondering why I didn't get to go to these classes and why these students were somehow more "talented and gifted" than I was. Looking back on this point in my life, I guess I really didn't care about school. School was very boring and I could always get past with minimal effort. When allowed to get by with minimal effort in many things, I do. It happened with athletics and with school. But since then, I have learned that I do in fact enjoy working hard, when there is something to be accomplished that is within sight, a clear-cut goal. But when I monkey can do the job, I usually amuse myself with other things and read a lot. So, I never did well in school really. I think my high school GPA was around 3.4 because I rarely did homework and was generally bored. College was the same, I got a 3.0, minimum "acceptable" grades for college. You get automatic acceptance to many graduate programs as long as you have a 3.0 or over. I took some of the advanced classes in high school and so on. But as with the classes when I was pre-middle school, the classes didn't matter much. I remember GT classes allowed kids to look through owl pellets. That's right, owl hair balls. The bones and left overs of what an owl can't digest, similar to hair balls which cats can't digest. Lasting memories. I'm sure they did advanced math and reading and so on, but all I remember is owl hair balls.

Down the road, none of these kids have done any better than I have in college or life in general, which begs the question why waste time on these "gifted" classes. Because these kids were bored with "normal" classes? So was I. My 5th grade teacher told me I'd never amount to anything.

I guess I just want to always keep it in perspective, and I want others to do the same. If I'm not keeping it in perspective, I hope people will call me out on it too.

Stuff

I feel a lot better about myself lately. I don't know why. Am I happy without having reason? Not really. I'm annoyed at my friend Benny for whooping the LSATs ass. I'm really just jealous. He said all he did was take an LSAT course through Princeton Review.... unfortunately, they don't have those in Afghanistan! I am going through a online one, but that's slow.

Need help...

Realization of Past Mistakes that you didn't even know happened

Can you really ever escape your past? That baggage you carry around with you. But then you realize what you thought about a relationship in your past and realize somebody was trying to tell you that they loved you more than anything... and just had no idea how to make you understand that. I feel terrible after learning something about a past relationship. Apart from my own shortcomings during a relationship with an ex, I learned that they felt a lot more strongly than I ever knew.

Maybe it was the result of the beginning of the relationship, a weakened foundation. Maybe it was my defenses coming up, the tall, tall wall that I constructed around my heart while he tore his defenses down. I suppose that fact is the initial unresolved issues were our doom in the end, other than my pride and stubbornness over an unfortunate event that happened that I hardly admitted happened, even to myself. I have a mess on my hands, a mess of my own emotions.

Understanding better what happened, all those events that were left out or misunderstood, I feel so lost. I had ended a relationship (or thought I ended it, because apparently a huge fight and a "I dread every time you call" then a "we're done" isn't ending a relationship) that I didn't even understand. I certainly didn't understand the depth of love for which he felt for me.

Even if I wanted to fix things between us, let the past be past because I know there are a lot of great things about us, I realize that the negative ideas that everybody else has about us wouldn't likely let us move forward. Even though the end of our relationship wasn't completely black and white and it may seem... I guess it never is, though is it? But I hurt a bit today... I guess sometimes I miss him. I doubt after what he thought I did he misses me much.

One thing I cannot stand is this:

After a meeting this morning, one of the senior officers stood up and complained about someone in the meeting cussing at something. He didn't mention the offender by name, or hint to who he was referring to, just seemed to get angry at somebody's comment during the meeting calling it unprofessional among other things.

I left the meeting wondering, was it me who was cussing? Couldn't think of what I might have said that pissed somebody off, then when I was standing over a computer in the TOC, working on a computer, I hear the senior NCO of the Battalion and the officer talking about it. Wasn't me. Usually I don't cuss much anyway, only if I get particularly upset. But what's the deal? Where did your pair go over the course of a year or so? Since when can you not approach someone and tell then, "hey, I think your behavior or language is inappropriate." Directly, to that person, not to the group leaving everybody wondering, "who was he talking about?" And the senior NCO needs to get his head out of his ass. Every other moment all I hear from him is "I'm the blank blank blank (important person around here), I deserve respect." But they don't even give the time of day to somebody they want to correct. That's disrespectful. I'm a firm believer in the saying "give respect to get respect." The senior NCO should be respecting all the officers, not acting the way he always does "I'm the most important person around here." God, how many times I've heard him say that. GET YOUR HEAD OUT OF YOUR ASS. You own nothing, you're in charge of nothing, nobody works for you; you're simply an advisor. If you have nothing worth saying shut yer mouth.

What is so difficult about directly talking to people? You don't have to call them out in the middle of the meeting, but seriously, grow a set and talk to people. Tell them what you want. Tell them what offends you. If you don't nobody is going to have respect for you.

Gays in the Military

Recently, there are even more issues with the gays in the military thing. Seriously? Who cares. There are no other jobs that I can think of that would fire somebody just because of their sexual orientation. In fact, most jobs look at diversity as something they desire in an employee body. Customers are as diverse as the employees that work for companies and often can come up with different ideas because they have different views of the world at large. There are even openly gay House Representatives and Senators: these individuals are not ruining our society because of their preference of a partner.

I’ve heard arguments, mostly against, made by those already in the Army, but I wonder why that the gays that everybody knows are in our unit haven’t made the unit completely fall apart or as some retired officers "We believe that imposing this burden on our men and women in uniform would undermine recruiting and retention, impact leadership at all levels, have adverse effects on the willingness of parents who lend their sons and daughters to military service, and eventually break the all-volunteer force," the letter said (from http://www.cnn.com/2009/POLITICS/07/08/murphy.gay.military/index.html written by Emily Sherman) What? Do parents not allow kids to go to college where there are openly gay men and women there in full force? And NOTHING says that these individuals have to hide their status, in fact, I would think that many people “come out of the closet” during college because they’re in a more accepting environment than even at home. This argument doesn’t make any sense to me. Break the all-volunteer force? You can’t break what’s already broken. The wars that we have been in since 9/11 in Iraq and Afghanistan have been a much more detrimental influence on the all-volunteer force. But you don’t hear the hawks mentioning that fact. But low and behold, the economy tanks and with it job security and then the military, even with its long deployments to places where people often at least initially hate us, starts to look a lot better. A pay check is a pay check even if it comes with a slew of plane tickets across the world to the most terrible places.

I understand that the Army is generally filled with people who are a lot less accepting of people of different faiths, such as Muslims, or different walks of life, either very rich or very poor, and those who choose to love those of the same sex. But is this a correct way of thinking? Should we condone this sort of behavior and allow people to think like this? Saying: it’s ok that you’re hateful and un-accepting of others. Shouldn’t the military be a representation of the society at large? What exists in society should be in the Army. I think the Army should be a direct reflection of our society. Granted yes, we don’t allow the sick or disabled normally, but in some cases we do: I know there is a one-legged paratrooper, out of all things, you’d think you’d need two legs to jump out of an airplane!

One issue that comes to mind is the military family. If we allow them in, then we would have to recognize their marriages that are legal in some states in the union. Thinking of, heaven forbid, a gay FRG (Family Readiness Group) leader running the wives gossip club. Men, husbands that is, already seem to feel out of place in these organizations, even if they’re what I like to refer to as “house husbands.” But a gay man or woman? It would be an interesting situation. But shouldn’t these parents teach their children to be accepting of others? Just 50 years ago we were arguing about the rights of blacks and “colored people.” I have mentioned before that I didn’t even know what black people were until I moved to the South. My young mind did not comprehend that there was anything different from them except that they had dark skin and I had lighter skin. I had blonde hair and some girls have brown or black or red hair. But did it make them any less human? Hell no. They had blue or brown or hazel eyes and I have green eyes. I don’t see that being any different than any other trait. Yes, there are different cultures, but are any really better than any others? My best friend from childhood was Thai, and I always thought that meant really good food when I was a kid. I thought different was better. Why would everybody want to be the same? Difference is the richness of life.

Still, Genevieve Chase, a straight veteran of Operation Enduring Freedom and the founder of American Women's Veterans, said she believes that not much would change in the military if "don't ask, don't tell" were repealed. Chase appeared with Murphy at the event Wednesday in Washington.

Calling them service members of a "new era," Chase said, "Gays have been and are already serving openly. ... Allowing discrimination and bigotry to continue is what disrupts cohesion."

(Also from the article mentioned previously)

That’s right. Not much would change. What disrupts unit cohesion, which is a popular scape-goat of those in favor of expelling any person who is openly gay, is hate and discrimination in all forms, no matter who it’s committed by, against anybody, black, white, Hispanic, Asian, man, woman or homosexual. Discrimination in any form is not ok. These are the Armed Forces of the United States of America, and no American should face discrimination in our free, all volunteer force.