Listening to the press conference

Wow–what a difference it is, listening to the press conference between President Bush and Prime Minister Maliki, here in my office in the Baghdad Embassy. Everyone in here is silent, because what is said here has a direct impact on our job in the next few weeks. We listen carefully to hear if certain important points are going to be made—points that I probably wouldn’t have noticed or paid attention to in my other life, outside of here.

I used to think that these things were such a waste of time—an elaborate minuet of the hostile press asking the same three questions, endlessly rephrased, while the politicians dodged and weaved. Now I see that there are subtler nuances involved, things which will elude the average person watching, because the very way that you phrase a sentence may completely revise your foreign policy. Witness the recent fuss over using the words “civil war”.

One thing that has struck me is the towering self-involvement of the American media. They speculated that PM Maliki skipped an event with President Bush and King Abdullah because he was miffed with our president over the recent leak, apparently, of a memo from the White House that was critical of the Iraqi PM. (This comes solely from my watching the news this morning.) Anyway, it’s such a predictable—and utterly silly—explanation! Have we not been paying attention to what’s actually happening in Iraq? Oh well. I guess we wouldn’t be good Americans if we weren’t self-absorbed.

Good work: a double-edged sword

I’ve gotten busier at work recently—my training period (I almost started to write “grace period”) must have ended, and now I’m being tasked to do a lot more reports and such. I’ve got to say, I started out with an erroneous impression of what this job was going to be like—I thought it would be a lot of repetitious data-mining through various different databases, as we got our monthly updates.

Oh, I’ll be doing that—but I’ll also working on short-deadline things that come to us as questions posed by leadership. Usually the questions are raised by one of our generals in a meeting with other leadership, and then come down to my level as a request for information within a day or two about (*name that topic*). Most of these questions have been interesting ones, even fun to research, because it’s not too difficult, once I got used to the databases we work with, to find information that supports an answer. (Often the answer isn’t really what the general wanted to hear, but that’s a different story entirely!) My enthusiasm to work on these, perhaps, added to the fact that I have done a pretty good, quick job on these types of questions, has led to my being assigned more questions.

However, the new assignments aren’t nearly so clean-cut. One of them is the paper that I’m writing—I mentioned it yesterday. I like writing papers, so this isn’t too difficult, but the problem is that we want it to be up to date with all the relevant current events and developments that are happening in real time. It’s a hefty research requirement, and I don’t feel comfortable writing off the top of my head in this instance. So I try to do the necessary research—but new assignments keep coming in to interrupt my concentration! Grin.

Another type of assignment that came up a few days ago involved me contacting lots of different people and trying to drum up data on stuff that no one has been tracking and no one that I’ve contacted wants to spend enough time on to help me get the information I need. So I had to invent some roundabout methods of “counting” specific types of events. I compiled enough of an answer to send back up to the top (it wasn’t perfect, but it was close), but they were so interested in the answer that they sent it back down to me again, asking for more detail . . . Of all the questions I’ve worked with, this is the last one that I wanted to get into again–it was like pulling teeth to find out what I did, and I don’t anticipate the process of obtaining more detailed information will be any more comfortable! Oh well, I guess that’s what junior officers are here for. (Yeah, out here at the Embassy, the captains are definitely the junior officers–it’s about like the Pentagon in that respect. I’ve seen about four lieutenants in my time here, and I believe all of them are types who work outside the fence, and were just in here to report to headquarters.)

I’m trying to think of an analogous situation from my prior experience. I guess I feel a little bit like I used to in the last few weeks of a quarter, where all my professors would have standing assignments for the end of the term that we knew about, but then they’d also get “bright ideas” and decide to give us short-term homework assignments because it would help us learn so much more. Which, if you had just the one class, would be fine—but when you have 4 or 5 of them, it’s a different matter entirely. I have the same half-awake, half-caffeine-jittery feeling that you get when you’re fueling your research with coffee. Several of my coworkers who have been here longer have noticed a degradation in their work outputs because they’re increasingly sleep deprived . . . and I can see how that could happen! So I guess I’m in month two of a six-month long end-of-term crunch. (I’m just glad it’s not a year!)

What’s funny—and what I was referring to about “a double-edged sword”—is that if I’d shown that I wasn’t able to do a good job with the stuff that has come my way to date, I would probably keep doing the same things that I started out doing, with fewer of these ambiguous assignments that cause me so much more trouble. I sometimes wish that I could find a happy medium, somewhere between being bored out of my mind with tedious repetitive stuff and overwhelmed by an increasing inflow of difficult, convoluted, nuanced questions that take so much more time and effort.

Nah, now that I think of it, actually I’m happier trying to do too much. I might get overwhelmed at some point and have to cut back for a while, but I like being in the thick of things like this!

Monday morning coffee

I’m trying to concentrate on the paper that I’m writing–two pages on unity and democracy in Iraq–and I’m having a difficult time. More coffee!!! I keep finding my eyelids drooping and my eyes crossing as I stare at the computer screen. Not that this isn’t usual for a Monday morning . . .

Interesting, isn’t it, that you can still have Monday morning be the bleak vista that it is, even when you’ve already worked all weekend? I find it somewhat amusing. I think perhaps it’s just programmed into us after decades of school and work on a Monday to Friday schedule.

But, speaking of coffee, since I was earlier (and besides, I’ve been looking for a suitable coffee picture to put with this entry), we have really good coffee around here. None of this “regular” or “decaf” business–we have “Strong Coffee” or “Light Coffee” available. The fainthearted (or weak of stomach) have available packets of instant decaf that you can mix with the hot water also available. But you can see all the non-Americans in the vicinity smirking if your hand even comes near those packets . . . for the most part, those who are not able to take the plunge into full-fledged caffeine addiction here dabble in cocoa and mochas from our local coffeeshop.

As for me, however, traveling to Europe in college got me hooked on coffee, and working in Seattle sealed the deal later on. When you survive on the caffeine boost because your days are uniformly dark and grey for nine months of the year, it probably creates some intrinsic brain-chemistry changes. Oh, don’t get me wrong–one of those years I gave up caffeine, in all forms, for Lent. I had a horrible two weeks of it with headaches that made it impossible to think and that wouldn’t go away even when I took aspirin, acetaminophen, or ibuprofen. I knowingly and happily got myself re-addicted as soon as Easter came along. There are a lot of good things that caffeine does for a person, and no one can prove the bad stuff that (as Americans who distrust anything we enjoy) is alleged against it.

Well, here at the coffee dispenser, it’s all about the “strong coffee” for me! I get approving nods from the local nationals who run that particular beverage station, though I can tell they don’t think I can really handle true coffee. (Well then, they might be right–I do end up dumping a lot of milk into it, but never any sugar!) It will be difficult to come back to the South again–their ideas of how to brew coffee leave a lot to be desired. At least we have several Starbuck’s in Montgomery to combat that particular problem, but I can safely say that one thing I’ll miss from Baghdad is the coffee. And yes, it’s important to me!

Well, all my research and talk about coffee has enlivened me. Besides which, it’s time to get my first refill of the day…

News brief o’ the day

This news alert speaks for itself.

Four Iraq insurgents killed, one cross-dresser captured

BAGHDAD, Nov 26, 2006 (AFP) – US forces killed four insurgents and detained 11, including one disguised as a woman nursing a baby, in a raid early Sunday north of Baghdad, said the military.
    The four insurgents were killed immediately in a gunbattle that erupted when US forces arrived at the house near the restive city of Baquba, a common site for sectarian violence and killings.
    US forces rounded up 11 other men in the house and confiscated a number of weapons, including a mortar, machine guns, rocket-propelled grenades and assault rifles.
    “One of the terrorists was hiding in a house dressed as a woman, pretending to nurse a baby,” said the statement.
    Baquba, and the surrounding province of Diyala, has been the scene of some of the worst fighting and bloodiest killings in Iraq, thanks to a Sunni insurgency with links to Al-Qaeda bent on expelling the Shiite population from this mixed province.
    On Saturday, up to 30 insurgents were killed in clashes with US and Iraqi forces, while 21 Shiite farmers were shot dead execution style the night before.

Over the weekend . . .

Well, without the post-holiday shopping spree (not that I usually participate, anyway–crowds overwhelm me), it was easy to forget that we’d just had Thanksgiving. They’re in the midst of cleaning up all the Thanksgiving decorations from the dining hall and the Embassy. Let me just point out that it’s really strange seeing big pilgrim and Indian (Native American?) cutouts decorating the mosaic walls of a Middle-Eastern palace, along with orange and yellow paper garlands.

I spent some time with some of my friends that evening, which was a really great change from only work or sleep as my alternatives. Not that there’s a whole lot to do with other people, but it’s nice to be able to talk outside of a work environment. After a few hours, you even start to talk about other things than work, amazingly enough!

BTW, one of my friends got this article of hers on the front page of the Manchester Union Leader! It’s another look into the world of the IZ and the lives we lead . . .

Work has gotten a little crazy. Al l the recent changes on the U.S. side have meant that now, more than ever, we’re looking at a time of transition. And in my office, Assessments, where we’re supposed to be gauging how different plans and policies are affecting the Iraqis, this means we’re very, very busy. It’s interesting stuff, and except for not feeling like I’m getting enough sleep at times, I’m loving being in the midst of it. However, since all of the things that I evaluate are supposed to come along with my recommendations for future action, I’ve been a little daunted. You see, once I make these recommendations, people all the way up the chain (of command) will give it a “yea” or a “nay”, and if it gets passed through, something I suggest could actually influence foreign policy–US or Iraqi.

It’s kind of scary, because if you make a bad recommendation that no one else knows to deny, then you could be setting up people to be hurt or killed. I had a whole moral crisis about it earlier in the week, but now I think I understand. What I have to do is enough background work to know to a certain degree of certainty that I’m making a reasonable and not harmful suggestion. And the background work is painful, because in matters like these you have to read so much and have your feelers out in so many directions that it gets exhausting. On many levels, I’m going to need recuperation when I get back to the States.

However, as my father pointed out, by doing this I am actually making a difference (funny how you get so caught up in the angst of it all to forget that), and I’m “running toward the flames” doing what I’m doing.

That last is a reference to my observations about the difference between the WTC and the Pentagon on 9/11–as people in New York described it, they almost to a person said, “I heard a huge boom and I ran away as fast as I could,” whereas every military person that they interviewed said something along the lines of “I heard a huge boom and I ran for it . . .” That was what impressed me enough to know I wanted to be a part of the military. I wanted to be one of those people who hear the boom and go running to it, to change things and help the people and damage-control wherever they can. (Granted, the situations in New York and DC were very different, but still, that impression sticks in my mind.)

I like it. I like being this busy, I like feeling like my words and work matter, and I like putting this much of myself on the line. I don’t think I could probably keep it up forever; it’s probably good that I’m only here for six months. And with as much transition as is likely to be occurring, I bet I’ll be kept busy for the rest of the time I’m here.

Baghdad Thanksgiving

Ahhhh, tryptophan. Though, sadly, as I did some research on this beloved drug of the holidays, it seems that tryptophan may not have quite the staggering impact that pop cultural references would have led us to believe. But it’s so fun to describe my tryptophanic coma that I belive I will continue to, regardless. BTW, check out that phrase, “tryptophanic coma“ on Google–it’s a popular blogging term right around Thanksgiving . . . I wonder why???

I always have trouble in the afternoon after lunch, anyway, so the fact that the office got together and gorged on the Thanksgiving feast that they provided us in the DFAC won’t help me any. And I’m trying to work three different projects, all of which are due before the end of the weekend, and my brain will not wrestle itself into order right now. Sigh. So of course I’m blogging, so as better to confuse anyone who tries to read this.

There are activities galore for those of us not tied to a computer for the day. Actually, I already checked out the “holiday bazaar” that they had in our communal area here in the Embassy. People were selling various unit coins, some rugs and shawls, DVDs, and the things that you find in the “haji shops” when you travel around the Embassy vicinity in the Green Zone. I was interested, but I went in right when it opened and there were too many people there, so I left pretty quickly. Besides, a bunch of people are trying to get ahold of me to give me numbers that I asked for yesterday, trying to track down one of my projects, so I really was tethered to my desk.

Later on, we’re going to have the big show–my roommate’s choir is going to sing, and she’s doing a solo. She told me that CBS and NBC (or was it ABC?) are supposed to be there. I do, rather, wish that they would have given us a schedule of when and where things were going to happen, but I guess I’ll survive! We’ve got pictures of our big Thanksgiving dinner with the office–I’ll post a few of them online once I get them.

I’ve been trying to think when was the last time that I was home with my family for Thanksgiving. For the last two years, I stayed in Ohio where I had Thanksgiving with two of my friends (one of whom became a boyfriend by the second year and has since become–well, not a friend any longer. Grin). The year before that, 2003, was the year that I went down to Florida and visited my brother who was in Pensacola. My mom was there, too, that year. It was almost a family Thanksgiving, except that my dad was hosting the rest of the extended family back in Arizona. Actually, right around that time–just after I left–was when my brother started dating the girl who is now my sister-in-law.

In 2002, new to the AF and new to dating someone, I didn’t want to leave him–I think that was the time that I visited him in Las Vegas and we drove down to Tucson to visit my parents. If it wasn’t Thanksgiving, it was close. That was my first trip in my red Eclipse (that will probably be supplanted by a new blue or grey MINI Cooper when I go back to the States after this deployment).

In 2001, I’m sure I had Thanksgiving with the family out in Washington State, because I was living in Tacoma back then. Ditto for 2000 and 1999, though for at least one of those years I went down to Arizona and had a small Thanksgiving with my parents and my brother. In 1998, we were newly moved to Arizona around Thanksgiving-time. In 1997, I drove from Miami to St. Louis to have Thanksgiving holidays with my former college roommate and her family, with whom I’d spent the Thanksgiving before, in 1996, while we were both seniors in college.

Hmmm. I can see a bit of a pattern here–somehow, the sacrosanct family-only nature of Thanksgiving completely missed me. I think that the only time I heard about it was that first year when I went out to St. Louis instead of home over the holidays. I’ve never counted Thanksgiving as much of a holiday, all things considered–as a kid, it didn’t count because, really, they weren’t giving you gifts. With my birthday about 2 weeks before it and Christmas about 4 weeks after it, Thanksgiving got completely overshadowed in the mind of proto-Kj. Not that I was a mercenary child, or anything! But, come on, can food and family and stupid football games (sorry, but that’s how I thought of them) really compete with presents? Not quite!!!

Anyway, I do miss cooking a turkey, because I got to do that for the past two years–and it turned out delightful, both times, though I had too many leftovers and vaguely remember throwing away old plastic tubs of turkey in January . . . gross . . . However, this is my first set of holidays out of the country. I’ve traveled before but only in the January-June timeframe. I think that, all things considered, Christmas is going to be a harder pill to swallow. I really like my time off around the holidays, and I’m sure that coming in to work on December 25th is going to make me feel VERY sorry for myself even if it means I’m doing important things!

But–thank you to all of you who are out there supporting us troops who are over here! Thank you for the letters of encouragement and support that we’re getting over here (and the girl scout cookies) . . . it means a lot to all of us!

Dayton’s Revenge

“You have a Midland accent” is just another way of saying “you don’t have an accent.” You probably are from the Midland (Pennsylvania, southern Ohio, southern Indiana, southern Illinois, and Missouri) but then for all we know you could be from Florida or Charleston or one of those big southern cities like Atlanta or Dallas. You have a good voice for TV and radio.

What American accent do you have?
Take More Quizzes
 

Actually, this is probably more a product of moving as often as I did throughout my formative years (and, I guess, ever since!) I think, though, that someone should do a serious linguistic study of the American military because I’m convinced we’ve got a different accent than the rest of the country. (h/t Amy)

(I’ve edited this a half-dozen times but it seems that Explorer doesn’t want to cooperate. I’m going to try it on my laptop with Firefox and see if I can get the code to work, but if not, I’ll stick with this simplified version.)

Consumerism and food

I’ve been thinking about food lately. We have this great dining hall, where we have restaurant-quality food served to us three times a day (though I don’t go for breakfast), and we have all these different choices available to us for each meal. Sunday nights are where they bring out all the stops, with lobster tails, chicken cordon bleu, and prime rib available at the carving station. For my first week or two here, I was blown away by it all.

And then the inevitable happened–it started to get old. Even with good quality food, the options are limited, and the menu doesn’t change that much from week to week. I feel like a terrible person, complaining about what is truly exceptional, and I try not to do it. Yes, I do complain that the smell of the DFAC gets into my clothes–I hate that stale food smell when it hovers around you. When I worked fast food for a short time in my early years, that was the worst part of it all! But after I bought a set of body sprays to combat the “dining hall smell,” that particular problem has been resolved to my satisfaction.

Anyway, between my various mood swings and the drama of the past few days, I’ve lost my appetite, at least partially. I like my coffee in the morning but everything else just doesn’t “sound good,” and I eat more out of a sense of duty than because I feel like it. Now, of course, I’m not exactly upset about this–I was a little concerned when I first got here that I’d be packing on the pounds because the food was so good, as many people do.

Have you ever been on a vacation or a road trip where you start out eating out for every meal, and for the first day or two it’s a great thing, and then it just gets . . . old? Well, I think it must be the equivalent of that which has happened to me. Now that I have good food available to me regularly, I find myself thinking about fast food, particularly french fries, which I happen to love, and we just don’ t have in their full glory here. Sigh.

Anyway, it occurred to me that perhaps the “epidemic of obesity” in America these days is actually an outgrowth of consumerism. And here’s my reasoning. Back a hundred or more years ago, your “common man” was probably stuck with a pretty limited diet. OK, I’m mostly pulling from my reading of the Laura Ingalls Wilder series, but I think it’s not too much of a stretch to say that most of our American forefathers were used to a pretty standard diet of whatever meat they’d hunted in the area, some salt pork, eggs and such if they were available, whatever vegetables were in season and what they’d been able to preserve, and so on. Refined sugar and flour were pricey commodities, treats that you didn’t always get to indulge yourself on.

All this being said, it probably contributed to a fairly monotonous diet. You knew what you were going to eat, and though it was often good, hearty food, it wasn’t tremendously exciting or new, and except for on special occasions, you probably weren’t tempted to overindulge.

However, with our economy of choice and options in food as in everything else, we have the ability now to eat something that “sounds good” to us with every meal, should we so desire. And because of this, the temptation to overindulge is not something limited to holidays and other special occasions, but a pervasive ever-present phenomenon. We don’t have to be bored by our diets anymore because we have so very much available to us.

A large part of what makes restrictive diets work, or so I’ve heard (and experienced personally), is that after a while, the range of options available to you start to bore you. After a week of bingeing on bacon-wrapped steaks cooked in butter, the Atkins diet quickly reduces you to the most convenient high-protein options that won’t leave you hungry again in the next 2 hours (which happens if you just eat the salad that is all you really want to eat). When you’re doing low-fat . . . . well, actually, I don’t do low-fat diets, so I don’t know. Again, for me, it turns into what lasts longest so that I don’t have to get a headache from low blood sugar OR from trying to figure out what I’m going to eat for the next meal.

So maybe diets are about getting us back down to a restricted menu, rather than really about making us healthier based on specific food choices. If you’re slightly bored with your options, you’re less likely to indulge. If you’re VERY bored with your options, you almost dread the times that meals come up because you really don’t want to eat anything that is available to you, but you know that you must or you will feel very bad from not eating.

Well, that’s how it works for me, anyhow. I do know that eating is linked to a host of different emotional responses, and some people have very different approaches to what motivates them to eat or not to eat. For me, eating is almost always linked to boredom in some manner. I snack when I lounge in front of the TV, eating primarily salty fried foods, though ridiculously sugary things now and then appeal as well. If I’m busy and involved in something, I would be happy not to eat, because it’s an annoying interruption from what I really want to be doing. Then again, I think that (like any American woman of the past few generations) I probably have a weird and unhealthy relationship with food. I would love it if I could just stop eating and it didn’t mess with my mood, my concentration, and my health. That way I wouldn’t have to think about food as often as I do, I could actually be thin (an ongoing battle), and when I REALLY wanted to eat something, I could have it at that time.

So, my point? I think maybe our epidemic of obesity isn’t so much a result of our diets changing as another symptom of a greater cause–the fact that we have so much available to us, food-wise, that we’re engorged with our options. I think that the epidemic of obesity probably has a very similar root to the epidemic of credit card debt. We consume because that’s what we do to entertain ourselves–not because we’re providing for our basic needs. And the consumerist economy can help you lose touch with what, exactly, your real needs are. When I’m in the States and fighting myself about eating what I WANT to eat versus what I SHOULD eat, that very problem is an artificial construct, just as are the problems of a person who is deciding whether they will buy the clothes that they WANT to buy (but don’t need) with money that isn’t theirs or if they SHOULD be good and go home.

Well, anyway, I thought it was an interesting notion, and it was brought on by my realities of being here with recourse only to a dining hall for food. (Because I’m rather suspicious of the trailer-housed fast food places that are gathered around the entrance to the PX.)

Milblogging

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Bear with me–I’m setting up profiles on various sites. I have to do this in order to “claim” my site.

Worship in a war zone

I’ve been able to attend the chapel on Sundays for two weeks now, here in the Embassy complex. The chapel itself is an unremarkable building–it’s not in the Palace itself, the way that the Muslim prayer area is.

That is a very cool room–it’s partitioned off one of the foyers that we enter and leave through when we’re going out through the front of the Palace. The ceiling is extremely high, and it’s got interesting architectural details in the corners of the ceiling, a little like inverted Q-bert pyramids. Each of the blocks in the “pyramid” has a circle in the center with Arabic script. The person I was coming in with who pointed these out to me told me that these are the 99 names of Allah. Well, not just in the pyramids, but also around the rest of the decorations in the room.

Like anywhere else in-theater, we’re not supposed to enter the prayer area itself (though we can enter and leave through the foyer) unless we are escorted by someone of the Muslim faith. And definitely no picture-taking . . .

However, back to my original point. Our chapel is (probably deliberately) the exact opposite of this. It’s a trailer placed apart from the Palace as a whole, hardened and blast-wall shielded. I suppose that if it were to announce its presence in all the typical “churchy” ways (steeple, stained glass, bells, etc.), it would just be ASKING to be a target . . .

So you go into this nondescript space, and everyone is crammed in at odd angles into uncomfortable folding chairs. Others have commented on how odd it is that everyone in there is carrying a weapon into church–I don’t even think about it, due to my rather odd tendency of forgetting that I’m wearing a weapon. I think of it as a nuisance addition to my uniform, because it perpetually swings down into my way and clunks into things. So having the nuisance addition to my uniform in church just means that it clunks into things when I’m kneeling and standing up, which is pretty much what it does as I move around in the office.

As the service proceeds, you can hear helicopters overhead, which is very odd. Sometimes they’re loud enough that everyone has to pause and wait for them to clear out of the area before proceeding. And you can hear the odd bang or boom from outside, though so far there hasn’t been anything too remarkable during my times in there.

What really struck me both times in the service, though, was that we took time in the petitions to pray for all the families and loved ones that we’ve left behind at home–that God will keep them safe and protect them. It just was an interesting thought, because back home, all those people are praying for the safety of the troops–and here we are praying for them. It’s like this overarching network of prayers for each other that embraces the globe . . . it’s cool! I saw that very clearly both times I was in there. Additionally, in our petitions we pray for our enemies here, that they’ll change their minds and want to work with us peacefully, and that their hearts will be changed to enable the furtherance of peace. Isn’t that a strange thing to think of–all these various warriors there praying that their job will become unnecessary? It struck me yesterday . . .

Well, anyway, that’s a little impression of what it’s like to be in the chapel on a Sunday here in Baghdad. It’s still a little strange to me not to have all day off; this “take an hour out of the day for church” phenomenon just feels . . . weird. I wonder if that’s something that I’ll adjust to over time?

Well, just a little note in conclusion: it has now been a month since I arrived here! One down, five to go, eh? While it seems like it’s been forever, it also doesn’t feel like it could possibly have been that long. Intriguing.