Idle Time

At church yesterday the sermon was about self improvement. Kind of a Christian New Year's Resolution theme. At one point the pastor said something that struck me, because it was something I'd been thinking about. She said that in order to make a positive change you have to figure out what's in the way of that change and why you've been holding on to it. That is a pretty extreme paraphrase on my part, and the sentence is a grammatical abomination, but it helped me get some perspective on something that has been bothering me. 

In the past two years I have become an expert at wasting time. It might be the only thing I am still good at.J and I are addicted to the internet and TV shows. It never used to be like this, but now they seem to steal our time until we don't have time to do the things we once enjoyed. When I think about the root of the problem the answer is so obvious.

Our reality was unbearable. The problem of feeling immoral for his/ our involvement in the military in and of itself may not have been unbearable but feeling that way in a town that was so loyal to the military was awful. (I have heard that few military bases are surrounded by town with such blind support for the military which made our situation that much more frustrating.) It was pretty hard to hide that we weren't from the area and as soon as people pinned you for not being local they assumed the military had something to do with it. What was worse was that almost everyone had some kind of military passed that they were obnoxiously proud of and assumed we were too. The thing that we lost sleep over hating was rubbed in our faces everyday.

At that point in our lives I don't blame us for becoming addicted to something, anything that would keep our minds occupied. The problem is I believe I have forgotten how to live in the present. I have a much better reality now but I am still wasting all my time keeping my thoughts at arms length. One of the over riding theme for my life right now is to learn how to exist with my thoughts again and how to break my idle time habit.

January 2, 2008 Pantoum

The pantoum is an incredible form of poetry that I find very well suited to issues that I have not fully dealt with yet. I find them even more therapetic than artistic but I like them for both reasons. I found a this link to help me explain what a pantoum is if anyone would like to know, and to prove I am not making this up. 

January 2, 2008

If things had happened like we thought,

we would have packed and ran.

Fueled with idealism and naivety;

living  only for love and justice.

We would have packed and run.

We had nothing figured out .

Living only for love and justice;

it seemed so simple in our heads

We had nothing figured out.

Fantasying about a mundane life.

It seemed so simple in our heads.

Living by conviction is never simple or mundane.

Fantasying about a mundane life,

we made bold and rash decisions.

Living by conviction is never simple or mundane,

still I like sleeping with a clear conscience

We made bold and rash decisions.

Nothing turned out as we hoped,

still I like sleeping with a clear conscience.

Never could have known how right we were.

Nothing turned out as we hoped,

but it turned out as it should.

Never would’ve known how right we were,

if things had happened as we planned.

Oklahoma

This is not a poem about how I feel about Oklahoma, it's a poem about how I felt about a very specific place at a very specific time. It is another one I wrote out of a writing prompt. I wanted to write about something else but this was therapeutic.

Oklahoma 2009

I have no roots here.

I know if the right wind blows

(and it threatens to every day,)

I will simply blow away.

The winds are relentless;

the clay is indifferent.

The insects have taken over.

Survival is based on luck;

this place is not designed for life.

The sky is too close, threatening to fall.

We have no Mount Olympus and the

invaders mock the gods.

The sun is too hot;

the rain is too scarce.

No one treats this land as holy.

The colors are matte

And what else would they be?

If everything is threatened here

what will protect me?

I took these pictures in 2009 in Oklahoma.

Thoughts, 21 days

Ugh, I'm sleepy, but now that I've started this habit it's impossible to sleep without it. (Which is both good and bad.)I'm going to try to get this out quick and I'll deal with punctuation later.

First of all I love that I am getting over the misplacement of my anger issues with the army. I still have a long way to go and will still avoid the shortest line in Wal-Mart if it means I would have to stand next to someone in uniform, but it's not affecting how I get to know people. Essentially it is still affecting my view of passing strangers, but not affecting my ability to get to know somebody. I have met a few people recently who I genuinely like to have military careers that leave them fulfilled and I am able to see them as decent human begins even good, albeit flawed, people. (But who among us is not flawed?) I have found more peace than I have ever expected to gain and I am so grateful for that lifted burden.

Secondly I have been making peace with a lot of past frustration. This peace stems from an incident, but it's not important to name that incident. Basically I have been realizing that I expect everyone to approach problems with a similiar mind set and skill set as my own. Obviously that's not going to happen. What's more is I've been engaging in the useless practice of giving people advice that I had to learn the hard way. It is the most pointless venture I can imagine. It's like giving a 13 year old a high school diploma and expecting to be able to survive in college. The paper is meaningless without the work it took to earn it.

I'm not saying that people never listen, but a lot of the time I feel like I am giving them extremely valuable information, that they are not mentally ready to use yet because they haven't had the experience to prepare themselves mentally. I am so totally rambling.

Lastly, I'm over my self righteousness about what I did for myself and what I went without. I have realized that everyone is a victim of their circumstance and I shouldn't judge people based on theirs anymore than I would want to be judged based on mine. Actually the one thing I am going to mis about the culture out here is the socioeconomic culture. I feel much more at comfortable and middle class than I ever did or probably will at home. My mind is still going 90 miles an hour but I'm done typing now. Goodnight.

23 More Days

I've spent most the day with my head in the clouds because I had a Dr appointment this afternoon. Anyone who knows me knows that this means I spent the day niiiiice and drugged to ease the anxiety of doctors appointments. I cleaned out the office a bit, to get prepared for the movers. I really really hate the idea of strangers moving our stuff. Especially ones that are contracted out by the army. The whole thing makes me feel spied on.

For what it's worth I am aware that that is a ridiculous way to feel, but it's still how I feel. I have been attempting to clean a lot and hide anything incriminating in cardboard boxes and stack them in a closet to make it look like that's just how we store stuff. (Which is partially true.)I'm pretty grumpy at the moment because I had the inkling of a poem in my head earlier today but the phone rang and ruined it. Fortunately I had the for thought to write down the name of the song that gave me the thought, so maybe I'll be able to retrieve it later.

Well Couscous Shebang!!! is ready so I have to go.

Count Down to Move--- 24 days

I hate transitions. What I hate more is the time between when you know one is happening and when it happens. I always feel awkward and unsettled until it's over. Like with this move, I feel detached from everything here but not yet attached to anything at home. I am floating in between. I tear up when I'm with Z all the time knowing that soon I am leaving. He has grown up so much since I started watching him.

Ever since J started got out of the army things have been worse. Suddenly he has a job he likes and it feel like we have a family, a really close family. Now that we are finally feeling settled here it's time to go home. I'm ready, I just acknowledge the emotions, I don't try to fight them. I cannot change them. They are healthy things for me to feel right now. When Z talks about it I try to tell him that too. When he says he is said I tell him it's ok to be said because I'm said too, but that's normal, and in life sometime people have to move but you will always be close.

Thankfully the replacement sitter seems to be working out well. That takes a lot of my burden away from me. Only 24 more days. I hope to post every night between now and them.

Pre Wedding Myspace

OK. I promised myself I wouldn't do this again, but lately it has just been making me feel so much better about my "issues" that I can't seem to stop for the life of me. I am very overwhelmed about what I am in for in the next 14 months. My fault I know, and I am looking forward to most of this but I am also…. Well overwhelmed is the only way to phrase it.

First of all I have this semester to tackle (a breeze compared to the bear of a semester I had this fall!) And I am finishing up wedding plans (and realizing how short a five month engagement truly is. I only have 101 days left as a single woman.) After my last final I will have five days before my wedding so I will be working and finalizing wedding stuff, having the rehearsal dinner ( bachelorette party? Hint hint) and making cupcakes in a variety of flavors. After that comes a great week in Italy which I am so stoked about. I don't think I will see even close to everything that I want to see.



I will come home from the honeymoon and have about a week until J leaves. I've decided to drive out with him so I'll be gone for like 3 or 4 day just driving to Washington state and taking a plane back just to steal to few more days with my then hubby. (That will take getting used to.) After that I will have a weekend which invariably means I will be working the kind of overnight shifts that prompt these rants.

Then I will hopefully be teaching summer school. This will be a full time job which I will have to pay UNH for in order to receive credit, but it will also be awesome. (I hope.) I will of course be working weekends trying to earn my keep but work will be basically impossible. That ends about the same day James comes home. Then I would really like to take a vacation but I want to see James too so that will really depend on when school starts and other variables. I hope for at least a few days camping in Acadia again because it is beautiful up their.

Then my last semester. I originally had hoped that I would be able to take three classes and get a full time job doing something in a school but that is looking less and less likely at the moment. Oh well. Then J leaves again in October so I guess I will just go to school, work, and visit people when I can because my apartment will be so empty. (HA! My apartment is tiny it will still be quite full with me and Shuppi!) Of course everything I just listed is what I do anyway, but usually I have J to commiserate to every night and I will have to learn how to deal that that. Anyways I will graduate in December and then J will be home shortly after that.

After Christmas I will chilling in Oklahoma for a little (4 months to be exact) where I will at least get a mild second fall of the winter. It does get cold there but nothing like this winter we are experiencing. It stays above freezing. This mild winter will be very important to me since after that I will be moving to ALASKA! Thankfully I will be moving in April when the weather is decent, but no worries the snow starts flying in September and today in Fairbanks (where I will be) it is a pleasant -21 before the wind chill. I will be the most pleasant New Englander ever when I return. (Actually after Alaska we will be spending time in Arizona so maybe not.)

What overwhelms me is that this is all happening in about 14 months. It sounds like enough stuff to be a couple of years worth of changes but no it is all happening quickly. It looks so much more manageable written down than in my head.

Dear United States Military

Oh my god do I ever hate you. Do you know that? It's like the most severe hate ever, and you guys know a thing or two about hate. I mean, you just cannot manage to function can you? I swear, the simplest, most mindless task and you treat it like you are building the pyramids. Your logic, or lack there of is mind numbingly ridiculous, seriously, my mind is actually numb from being confused by you for so long. I swear you’d look at the math problem 2+2 and your answer would be rhinoceros with a fever. If you are reading this right now you don’t even know why I’d be confused by that answer. The confusion portion of my brain is exhausted from trying to deal with you. I would have been better off beating my head with a bowling ball while doing opiates before I even try to understand anything you are doing. Maybe by that point I would have dumbed myself down enough to understand. Have you ever seen a three year old with their favorite toy? They just hit the same button over and over until it no longer makes cool noises, only unintelligible gibberish. Well you are the three year old and the confusion mechanism in my brain is that favorite button. Seriously, I hear that sound in my head sometimes. I was sane eight months ago, but no more. I can’t even make this rant coherent because my brain is certain that there is something wrong with me. It thinks I must be delusional because the facts I’m asking it to process couldn’t possible be correct, but alas they are, and my brain has abandoned me for no reason. Even my seven year old brother hates it and is always blocking your chair HAHA. See you’ve completely killed my last brain cell. That is all.

.. ..

.. ..

C ---The one you don’t acknowledge is married to J

More Myspace

So without going into any detail J has been making decisions lately that he knew would get mixed reactions. Many people including some close family are not happy with the decisions he is making. The other night in order to comfort him I reminded him that X number of immediate family members support him, including myself in that number.

Later I started thinking about how cool that really was. There is obviously a lot that goes into marriage but one really neat part is how you get to take the person who thinks the most like you and understands you better than anyone and make that person your immediate, in fact your most immediate of family. It like making an ally for family feuds that you know will be there and back you up (even if they disagree with you, when around other people who disagree with you they’ll have your back.) I’ve had a few close friendships that played this role for me, but now were really able to interact with my family, where the real battles go down.


Now I by no means expect J and I to be bitching at each others families when something goes wrong, but knowing that I have one family member who will always take my side is just cool to me. I wouldn’t call it the best thing about marriage and this all sounded better in my head but oh well. I thought it was pretty damn cool that my best friend is now officially family and I guess it just hit me for real when I said that.

The Whole Story

And finally I can tell my whole story, or more of it anyway. It’s been a long frustrating battle but it’s over now and I am soooooo happy .
So my hubby joined the Army Reserves when he was 18. He concurrently was in ROTC at college and planned to be a career military officer. After 2 years in ROTC he decided he would do his 4 years and get out. At the time we were friends, nothing more but I already could feel the tension growing. He got more and more frustrated as the years went on, but he was still convinced that his cause was a normal one. We got married right after he graduated from college, and I was trying to graduate early.

That’s when it all went to shit. A few weeks after graduating he got “volunteered” to run ROTC’s version of Basic Training. There he found that it was a regular occurrence for officers who had screwed up to blame someone of a lower rank. That he could have dealt with, but eventually he was being COMMANDED to lie to corroborate their stories. He got some cadets in serious trouble doing this, for things they didn’t even do. He was sick about it and hated himself.
After 6 months of soul searching he decided to write a letter of resignation and see what happened. What happened is they said “no” to his resignation. So he decided getting out was the only option he could live with and that he would do it by any means necessary, and most importantly he would not participate in anything he felt was illegal or immoral along the way. Doing it this was took just under two years.

That time was stressful and heart wrenching. We went through the whole thing 2000 miles away from family, the whole time never knowing when we’d make it back. We lived a lie to pretty much everyone we met, we couldn’t just share this story in a military town. But it’s over now, he’s out, and he never has to go back. This is the short version

Relieved

After much waiting J finally has his discharge papers, the ones we've been waiting a year and a half for. I am so relieved it's completely unreal. I feel like J and I are finally living, not simply existing. I am already planning our next move and it feels so wonderful to actual be able to plan without all the uncertainty. We have a date for moving, August. It's not "if your out by August" it's actually, really August. It has been almost 2 years since I've had that much certainty in my life. The last time I was this sure of a date was my wedding.

J has given me full control over when we move and to where. I am so appreciative of this because it tells me that he really appreciates everything I've put up with for so long. It's also good because I've come to the realization recently that I've never really made my own decisions. I have always simply reacted to the situation that was put in front of me. My therapist said that I would have trouble making my own decisions, and maybe that's what motivated me to be so good at this one. I was extremely nervous about making such a big decision, so I decided to go with my gut and never look back. Thus I decided Boston in August.

I never would have been able to make such a big decision a year ago. I would have over thought it to death until finally the decision was made for me by some outside force. In many ways I have the awful situation of the past year to thank for this. For one thing being a nanny has seriously taught me to trust my gut instinct. When I first started working with this family their son would ask me lots of questions and I'd say "let me think about it." (One he used to ask about a lot was wanting cold medicine when his brother had some even if he wasn't sick.) I have found that I never ask for time to "think about it" anymore. I know the answers instinctively. This makes me so happy because it is something that I identified two years ago as a weakness that I do not feel is a weakness for me anymore.

I also have this situation to thank because without it, I never would have realized my tendency to let other people or factors make my decisions for me. I realize I probably would have noticed it eventually, but it would have taken a lot longer. Being married to someone in the military would have meant having almost all my decisions made for me. Living where I live now I see people everyday who are newly out of the military and have trouble making any decisions beyond the most basic ones for themselves. It's not their fault, they just never really learned how to make certain kinds of decisions on their own because they were always made for them.

This bizarre extended state of flux has left me with a lot of time to think, which is all I've been wanting since I was 15. Time for me to be quite and learn who I am and what is important to me. True to my form I had to learn under fire, but at least I learned. And what I learned most 1) how much I really don't know about myself and 2) how to learn and grow as an adult.

I am feeling extremely confident as I head into this new chapter of my life. It's a weird kind of confidence that I never even knew I didn't have. (And yes, I know that makes no sense.) For the first time I feel relaxed. The future is full of uncertainty but I can handle it. I feel a peace that I have never before known in my life. Everything is telling me that this is the right move to make and I making it without any reservations.

Just Babbling

I've been feeling our of sorts this week. Found out some really frustrating information that hasn't helped much. Apparently in his report the psychologist that evaluated hubby actually said that he has paranoid and depressed, like I knew, but that he didn't require help. I don't know what psychologist would say he was paranoid and depressed and still totally fine to be in the army, things like this just make it abundantly clear how the Fort Hood shooting happened. That man is the reason for my disillusionment with, well actually pretty much with people. I really thought people were harder to buy and sell out, but I am learning from this experience that people will be bought and sold for unbelievable low prices.

I was over it, I really was. I was over the fact that the man who claimed his job was to help people actually made his job just keeping people in the army. Well not over it, every time I heard about a soldier committing suicide I knew this was part of the problem, my heart raced and my blood boiled. If they would only actually commit themselves to mental health, but retention is their only goal. Ironically I think their numbers would improve if they actually cared about the mental health of the service members and their family. But I had accepted it anyways, I had accepted that people loyalty, their soul, their life can be bought for a few pieces of silver. But reading the report made me crazy.

Why would he lie to our faces then write something entirely different on the report. Or better yet write that a paranoid individual is completely suited for his/ her job as a military officer. That's ludicrous and it shows me that he clearly didn't believe he's responsible to anyone, and really he's not. The army is attacking the people who actually tried to get Major Husan out of the army more than they are attacking the people who did nothing. It's so frustrating to know this, know how few people would believe me and beyond that, how many more people would excuse the behavior because they don't know what else to do. The knowledge of how corrupt the army is (I don't know about the other branches because I am in no way involved with them) is terrifying to me. It's the reason I'm on antidepressants and take multiple pills a day for anxiety. I can't stop whats coming and obsessing over it just makes me seem like I have a god complex.

It scares me and frustrates me. I feel so sad for J. His dream was to be in the army and it's shattered because he cannot be apart of what they are becoming. All over everyday we are surrounded by questions we can't answer. The answers are either incriminating, insulting to the asker, or at the very least controversial.

I'm isolated. I'm in a tiny, tiny bubble with few people who know what's going one, fewer people who understand and few we support. Only maybe one person outside of me and J does all three. I sometimes wonder about the days when my life won't be a huge secret anymore, will I be able to transition back from this guarded state?

This has actually been unbelievable therapeutic.

Starting to Write Again

Friday January 15, 2010
In an attempt to start writing every day I am going to start with a dream dictionary, at least for today because last night’s dream was haunting to me. Meme and Grampa had a friend over who was some life time army guy. He was a super nice guy, but when he started discussing the army with me I couldn’t hold back how I felt and it made me so angry that a nice person could have such opposite views from me about the whole thing. Eventually my inability to deal with the frustration of the encounter lead to me punching a wall and taking a lot of Clonapin to try to basically put me out of my mind. So yeah, there is some obvious reasons for why I had this dream. On a more positive note I have found that taking Clonapin to help me sleep (by avoiding my nightly anxiety attack) doesn’t have the “never-wake-up” affect on me that it used to have, and that my sex life is coming back despite being on Celexa. I guess that means that deep depression was the cause for those things which is good to learn. Plus J coming out of his own depression is endlessly helpful for our marriage. What a crazy first 18 months we’ve had and it looks like it will be another 6 before we are out of the dark. If we can survive our first two years of marriage we can survive anything.