Demographics

An article I read today has been causing some comment among the blogs I read… The article talks about the population decline in Europe, and what it comes from, and what it might mean.

I thought this section was interesting, talking about how cities could plan for shrinkage over time:

According to some, a declining population presents certain opportunities: to increase efficiency and livability, to change lifestyle and environment for the better. The plan that Akbar’s team came up with was for 18 cities in the region (two cities now share one government) to submit to an exhaustive process of review and soul-searching under the direction of Bauhaus planners and, by the year 2010, to come up with long-term redevelopment strategies appropriate to each – to find a way for each city to shrink constructively.

Dessau itself, Akbar said, had two distinctive features. One, as Karl Gröger indicated from the sausage-factory lookout, is that it is surrounded by protected national forest. The other is that it has no historic town center (80 percent of the city was destroyed in World War II) and thus no core. The plan, therefore, calls for demolishing underused sections of the city and weaving the nature on the periphery into the center: to create “urban islands set in a landscaped zone,” as Sonja Beeck, a Bauhaus planner, told me. “That will make the remaining urban areas denser and more alive.” The city has lost 25 percent of its population in recent years. “That means it is 25 percent too big,” Gröger said. “So far we have erased 2,500 flats from the map, and we have 8,000 more to go.” Beeck and Gröger walked with me through an area where a whole street had been turned into a grassy sward. Many residents were dubious at first, they told me, but as we walked, a woman recognized the government official and marched up to chat about when promised trees and flowers would be planted in front of her building.

Eisleben, another of the cities in the consortium, has a picture-perfect 16th-century downtown but is losing people fast, and many of its historic buildings have been long unused and uninhabitable. Eisleben’s shrinkage strategy centers on history: it happens to be the birthplace of Martin Luther. The city is laying out a tourist route – from the house in which Luther was born to his first church to the church in which he gave the last sermon before he died – that shows off its old center and turns its many derelict buildings and empty lots into art installations related to the father of Protestantism. The idea is to attract more tourists and money and build up the locals’ pride in their history. There is a certain paradox here: thanks to its Communist heritage, this part of Germany has the distinction of being one of the least religious places on earth. Eisleben gets 100,000 religious pilgrims a year, but only 14 percent of its population are churchgoers, and hardly anybody expects a turnaround.

Interestingly, I think that the declining birthrate is linked to the falling societal status of parents and parenting, which, in turn, can be linked to the free-falling status of teachers and the teaching profession. (No; not so much professors at the university level, but teachers, associated with mandated K-12 education in the U.S.) I keep reading editorials about the sad decline of the teaching profession, the need for more and better teachers, the need for math and science teachers… Attempts have been made to pay teachers more, to reward them in various other ways, but I think at its heart is the fact that teaching is not considered a status job. Teachers are providers of a service, and, consequently, part of the “service tier” in our cultural status hierarchy. We may or may not be polite and kind to them, depending on the day and our mood, but we don’t revere them. At times I suspect we don’t even respect them. (And yes, I spent a short while as a high school teacher–some of this comes from first-hand experience.)

I think something similar is happening to the status of parents, culturally. Having children has lost its cachet as a milestone–one’s real entry into the adult world. As this article points out, a culture hypervigilant and paranoid about child rearing has made the costs of parenting skyrocket–both in terms of money and also less quantifiable ways–and childlessness has moved from being a regrettable state to one that we expect from some of the highest-status members of our society. Exceptionally large families are viewed with derision, contempt, and sometimes outright hostility. (Check out some of the message boards about the Duggars, a family with 17 children that has filmed a series of TV programs for TLC. Granted, much of the hostility seems to be toward their rather off-the-norm version of Christianity, but then, that’s why they’ve had so many kids in the first place.)

We’ve moved to being a nation full of nosy neighbors and nanny-staters. Charges of neglect and/or abuse for quite normal behaviors seem ever-more prevalent. I remember from teaching the dictate that one was not allowed to touch a student… it could be construed as either inappropriate touching or as an assault. When you hamstring people into operating by a set of legalistic, abstract rules such as we’ve developed over the past few decades, it’s hard to get the practical work of dealing with children actually accomplished–be it teaching or parenting. Despite the Rousseaunian ideals of the elites who champion the nanny-state (or is it we, the children who want Mama Government to take away all our problems, who’ve created this Frankenstein?), kids don’t mold like plastic into model citizens, and they’re not always going to like the process of being shaped into adults. We’ve created an unsustainable societal model.

Wow. Listen to me ramble on! Me, who as a single childless person really has an outsider’s perspective. I do know that, after watching my friends and family with children, and watching them deal with some of these very issues, I am more hesitant about having children myself some day. It’s hard enough without the government and every other interested party breathing down your neck, waiting for you to make just one false move. No one’s perfect… so why are we acting as though only perfection is acceptable? I just don’t get it.

As far as the wider issue, that of declining population… I wonder what this means for the world as a whole, that global growth rates are slowing so much? It spelled doom for the Roman Empire… Like a tree rotten at the core, they eventually fell to outside forces. What happens if that happens on a global scale? Do we descend into a global Dark Ages? Interesting questions.

20080626 blog snippets

Random Thought #1: Oh dear… I must be an utter, benighted nerd! (I store file records chronologically using YYYYMMDD and then a description, so that I can find all my stuff based on when I was working with it. Something I create today, for instance, might be called “20080626 blog snippets” and so on.)

Random Thought #2: Can’t write creatively on the computer? This blogger talks about how her poetry disappeared when she tried to compose it online… I’ve noticed that all my fiction and story thoughts get swept aside in a digital medium. There are too many other distractions; I don’t go into that world inside my head that I need to inhabit in order to tell a story. But writing longhand seems ridiculously slow and stilted; I wonder if there’s an easy compromise?

Personally, I find that I write outlines and bullet points much more easily on a computer than full sentences in paragraph form, at least when I’m writing “officially”. If I’m able to adapt a conversational tone, I write as a substitute for talking… it’s pretty much what I would say if I could sit down and plan out what I was going to talk about ahead of time. Interestingly, I find the conversational tone that I take in blogs and emails is increasingly pervading all my writing–it’s been more and more difficult to pull myself out of it and revert to “speaking from on high” in the way that you tend to do in formal essays and such things. I wonder if that will be another side effect of the rampant use of instant-access text tech?

Random Thought #3: Oooh! And (not being a complete tech geek) I just heard about Google’s Android phone system today… Wow, is that ever cool! I hope by the time I get back to the States (next summer), I’ll be able to buy a smartphone that conveniently uses it! I know that in some circles Google is the Big Bad Wolf, but I like their approach to things. (Hmmm, they’ve got a rep for approaching things in the math-nerdy way… maybe it’s like calling to like? Sigh.)

Random Thought #4: Last, I read all about our emerging hive mind(s?) today… I am quite fascinated that we individual humans may be unwittingly creating Borg-like collective intelligences out of ourselves just by banding together to solve frivolous puzzles. It’s interesting, though, because the common refrain that I see among the producers of this sort of entertainment is “we keep underestimating their capabilities!”. I’ve noticed that this adds to increasing complexity (and thus interest) in more traditional media–TV shows, for instance, have taken to having increasingly complex and intertwined story arcs over whole seasons or multiple seasons, and we keep crying for more… What an interesting time and place to be living in!

Sidetracked

I found a terribly interesting essay about the way that the internet is shaping our social environment, and it’s been taking over my life for the past couple days…

Here’s a slice from the article in question:

Starting with the Second World War a whole series of things happened–rising GDP per capita, rising educational attainment, rising life expectancy and, critically, a rising number of people who were working five-day work weeks. For the first time, society forced onto an enormous number of its citizens the requirement to manage something they had never had to manage before–free time.
And what did we do with that free time? Well, mostly we spent it watching TV.
We did that for decades. We watched I Love Lucy. We watched Gilligan’s Island. We watch Malcolm in the Middle. We watch Desperate Housewives. Desperate Housewives essentially functioned as a kind of cognitive heat sink, dissipating thinking that might otherwise have built up and caused society to overheat.
And it’s only now, as we’re waking up from that collective bender, that we’re starting to see the cognitive surplus as an asset rather than as a crisis. We’re seeing things being designed to take advantage of that surplus, to deploy it in ways more engaging than just having a TV in everybody’s basement.

This solitary voice was speaking my language… Someone who sees the trends in our technology and relates them to social phenomena… More and more I’m seeing the digital revolution as something on the scale of the introduction of the printing press… it seemed just a convenient invention at first, but the change that it wrought at a societal level brought down seemingly invincible power-institutions of the day. See this essay.

It seems very clear to me now that we’re seeing the beginning stages of a major transformation. Like any change, this will be very painful for lots of people, and may include some unpleasant upheavals as a result. I bet that many institutions will feel the pinch before this change is complete… newspapers and the music industry are among the first hit, and others are in process… I actually find myself wondering if Big Business and Big Government (of which I am a part, as a military member) will survive the transformation intact. It seems to me that the kind of huge, top-down, centralized organizations that came about with the Industrial Revolution may become outmoded. The next set of cultural heavyweights may well be the Googles and Microsofts and Facebooks of the world… or their next-gen equivalents.

Anyway, after reading Clay Shirky’s blog and several other spin-offs, and subscribing to several science and tech news feeds, I feel like, for the first time in a while, I’m seeing the shape of the future. My vision isn’t complete, but I feel like I’ve got the edges of it, and boy, are we in for a wild ride! For instance, I would not be at all surprised if in the next century the notion of the nation-state becomes completely outmoded. After all, why define identity by the silly matter of where you are physically placed, if all or most of your meaningful interaction happens in a virtual, international setting? I think that the boundaries that may matter more are ideological ones, religious ones, and things like that.

For instance, I remember reading an article about how a lot of Europeans are very concerned about the upcoming elections… it is disturbing to them that a person with the kind of political and international clout of the United States President is chosen by a nation of often ignorant, isolationist boors. And just recently I visited the website for petitions to the UK Prime Minister, and it struck me how it seems almost… artifical… to require that a person be a UK resident to sign a petition.

Granted, it’s going to take a while for this changeover to take place. I’m not sure what government would have to look like on a worldwide scale… it’s pretty evident that the current experiments in international governmental institutions we have can be hijacked by people with agendas that aren’t in the interests of all humanity. Power corrupts, and power on a global scale would be HIGHLY tempting to the worst sort of people. But perhaps if a good system of checks and balances was in place, a truly worldwide government could work? I have no idea… but I bet it’s coming down the pike!

I even read an article today that suggested that postmodernism is outmoded. We’re into a new era, post-postmodernism, this philosopher argued! After all, all the relevant texts of postmodernism were written decades ago, and the only place where we see postmodern thought (self-conscious irony, etc.) reliably displayed in pop culture is in irreverent cartoons aimed at the K-6 set. (And their parents.) When any movement has been that thoroughly digested by the culture at large, you know it’s not cutting-edge anymore. Just like when the women’s department at Wal-Mart starts selling a style to the masses in middle America, you know that it’s out of date!

I know I’ll always err on the side of the future. I like thinking about what’s coming next, and what might happen. I always hoped that one of the Star Trek vessels would come by someday to “beam me up” and let me explore the galaxy and the future…

Now the process of waiting for some of the things to actually happen is going to be one of teeth-gnashing and hair-pulling frustration! We still have most of the adult population who’s barely digested the notion of email, let alone social networking, wikis and the thought of collective intelligence… Getting to the next phase is going to be a combination of waiting for the old guard to retire, and the slow and torturous process of retraining people who are fairly happy to be set in their ways. But by the time that the people my age are in their 80’s, we’ll probably be seeing a fairly substantial change in world order! Of course at that point I’ll be too old and crotchety to enjoy it, but maybe I can point to stuff I wrote in the dark ages of blogging and say, “See, I KNEW it was going to happen!”

Gap or not?

I found this article about the rise in the American practice of the “gap year”… a year between high school and college that young people take to gain life experience away from school. I started to scroll through the comments but they could be summarized as either “gosh, I wish I had a gap year! It helps you focus!” or “That’s a wussy idea for namby-pamby elitists who waste their entire college time on drinking and partying!”

Personally, I’ve come to think that taking a year… maybe even a couple… between high school and college might not be a bad idea in the abstract. My own personal experience of college was that it was an extension of high school, only with more fun living conditions (no parents!) and the ability to choose your classes (somewhat). I had very little sense of college as a privilege, as a time in my life that was unique and worth being appreciated for its uniqueness. Instead, with the callow self-centeredness of youth, I spent a large part of my time feeling victimized and oppressed because anyone (professors, parents, etc.) expected anything of me.

It only took me a few months out in the real world to realize my mistake. No more guaranteed summer breaks. No more choice of how you spend your time each day. No more setting up all your classes to be after noon or concentrated in two days, leaving the other days free. You can’t afford a nice room like the one in your dorm… you end up living in the seediest circumstances you’ve seen in your life, or with more roommates than you’ve ever been willing to consider before. Or (horrors!) back at home with your parents. It doesn’t take long to realize that you had it REALLY good when you were in college.

That’s why I favor the notion of a gap year. I think it would have helped me to appreciate my collegiate experience as the gift that it was, if I’d had to deal with some of the realities of life past school… before I started those last four years of formal education…

But I’m romanticizing, here. I used to think that, before I went back to graduate school full time. At least during grad school I knew I had a good deal going on (full salary plus tuition covered…), but I quickly reverted to my old practices, sleeping in whenever I had a chance, procrastinating par excellence, and otherwise not being tremendously responsible with my time. Granted, a full decade had gone by since my bachelor’s degree, so I had more maturity to bring into the game, and I studied hard when necessary, but I wasn’t the driven workaholic that (in my dreams) I should have been.

So… gap year or no? I don’t know. I have a growing uneasiness with the length of time that we’re prolonging adolescence in our culture. I understand that life expectancies are greatly improved, but it seems strange to me that so many people are facing the “I have to grow up and be responsible” milestone around their 30th birthday… that’s a full three decades of irresponsibility! Think of all the man-years of potential productivity that we’re wasting! (ha ha–should that be called “person-years”?)

Personally, I think that joining the military, getting in a couple years of enlisted service, and then going to college–something that the military very much encourages its junior members to do–is a really good way to build life experience, responsibility, character, and a sense of knowing who you are and what you want before you commit to a major. Every person that I’ve seen who’s taken this route is the better and the richer for it… and each one of them valued their college education in a way that the clueless 17-year-old that I was when I started school could never have imagined.

The good with the bad

Yesterday was a rough day for me. I got an email early in the day, telling me I was a “no-show” for mandatory training. I was able to truthfully respond that this was the first I’d heard of it, and (I hope) deflected the bad karma to the people who should have been keeping me in the loop… but I was still mad about it, because I like to do things right and not mess up.

However, in the course of the crisis cleanup phone call, I managed to get the name of someone who actually knew the details of where I’m going to be working when I’m in Baghdad. After a rather absurd follow-the-trail phone calling game, I have by this afternoon exchanged several emails with the person that I’ll be replacing, my soon-to-be section chief, and a couple other people I’ll be working with over there. All courtesy of a “bad girl” notice that I was hoping not to receive. So sometimes good truly comes out of less-than-ideal circumstances, I guess!

I will say… it’s awfully nice going into this knowing approximately what to expect. The details of what I’ll be working with are different, but it’ll be the same tools and I’ll be producing similar types of products. I’m familiar with the databases they work with, and I know a little bit about the layout of the camp where I’ll be stationed, all due to a one-day conference that I attended during my previous deployment to the other side of Baghdad. I will say that I have my doubts about whether the “powers that be” can actually get me there on time… they’re optimistically scheduling me within a very tight 5-day window to get all the way from home to Baghdad–having watched this process, I think they’re not leaving much room for the inevitable hiccups that occur… but they act supremely confident, so who am I to question?

So, my optimism is restored today, after having been rather knocked around yesterday. I was as close to a pre-deployment meltdown yesterday evening as I’ve been so far… I hope there aren’t too many more days like that between now and the time that I get to Baghdad! It’s all very well and good to go into the process knowing it’s going to be painfully confusing and slow… I completely intended to be calm and zen-like about the whole thing and think “what happens, happens… I’m going to get there one way or another,” but when the inevitable happens I still get frustrated!

filler

Well, I find myself singularly uninspired today… Don’t know why, exactly, but I haven’t come up with an original thought all day long. I spent most of the evening working on my city… Do you want to see what it looks like these days?

336 inhabitants, and counting!

I’d received word via email that a big order of perfumes I made a couple weeks ago was coming in… it was sent on June 14 (Saturday), and was supposed to take 2-3 days to arrive, so I rushed home after work today, a-flutter with anticipation… and no box. It’s funny how something like that can really just crush your entire evening! So I hope it will be here tomorrow…

I’d thought about writing about the big new bloggers-vs-mainstream media drama, but I find I don’t particularly feel like adding my voice into the fray… it’s pretty evident that (as a blogger) I come down on the side of freedom of information and no ownership of information. Personally, I think that sometime in the last couple centuries we went a little hog-wild on this idea of “intellectual property” and all the spasms of the past couple decades are proof of it. I think we need to get over ourselves, work out sensible regulations and collectively stop trying to own ideas. That’s just plain stupid! Ideas petrify and stultify when they’re kept behind lock and key–ideas, like money, need the free range of unfettered exchange in order to achieve their maximum potential!

(but then, I’m a blogger… doesn’t that practically translate to “information anarchist”?)

Thuggery

There’s a scene in one of the Belgarion books by David Eddings that I thought of over the weekend. For a short backup, this is a fantasy epic with a young man with a destiny who goes on a quest with lots of varied characters. Good reading; I highly recommend both the Belgariad and the Mallorean, its follow-up series.

However. The scene in question happens when our young hero, Garion, has just discovered the troubling extent of his newly-discovered abilities. I’m trying not to do much to spoil the books if you haven’t read them, so I’ll stay vague. Anyway, he’s wracked with guilt over hurting someone, and his mentor, a blacksmith named Durnik, pulls him aside, and talks to him about the nature of power and responsibility.

I haven’t found the exact passage in question, so I’ll summarize (I’ve read this series easily a dozen times; this should be simple enough). Durnik tells Garion that as a youth he was apprenticed to the town blacksmith and, over time, he became very strong from all the hammer-slinging and bellows-pumping that the job entailed. Some other youths came along one day and were taunting him and calling him a pansy, and for some reason (I don’t remember that), they got Durnik riled up enough to fight. Well, it turned out he was far stronger than the kid who’d egged him on, and ended up beating him to a pulp, nearly killing him. Durnik felt horrible about this and from that day realized that BECAUSE he was so strong and so capable of hurting others, he had a responsibility NOT to do so.

Basically the idea was that whenever a person has great power over other people, there is a great responsibility associated with it. If you have the capability to kill people, then you are responsible for restraining yourself and never doing so unless it is a situation where that is the direst necessity.

Well, fast-forward to this weekend and the fact that I was watching through Season 1 of Smallville. (Yes, I’m embarking on a new DVD adventure…) At one point, Clark Kent’s father is highly discouraging him from playing sports… not because (in a standard superheroes move) it might expose him, but because *he might hurt someone else*. And the young Clark eventually realizes why that’s an issue.

Anyway, seeing the same young man and his mentor conversation that I remembered so vividly from my book, I wondered if this is a purely male rite-of-passage that I’m seeing vicariously through the mode of TV. It makes sense that boys turning into men would have to encounter this… at a certain point, especially the taller and stronger boys realize that they now have a capability to hurt other people that they didn’t have before. But using it would make them bullies and thugs… So their very strengths are something that they have to learn how to NOT use, and in doing so, they become stronger men for it.

The interesting thing about this is that I’m not sure if there is a good parallel in the contemporary female experience… we never reach a point where we could easily hurt someone else, and as a female you go through life with the knowledge that fully half the population — probably more — could quite easily hurt you and only do not because of societal constraints. I don’t know if we ever have that moment where we realize–”I have this power, and in using it, I would become a lesser person.”

Perhaps some of the problems you see with hard-charging women who are trying to make their way out in the world is that (similar to men who have always been slight and weak) they’ve never had to deal with the power/self-denial dialectic that comes with growing into height and strength and the ability to hurt other people… Perhaps because we’ve never experienced our own power in such a visceral way, we keep pushing to have more power over our environments, and in doing so, don’t take responsibility for our actions.

Indeed, I wondered, do women even have such a dynamic where they have to overcome their own innate desire to take what comes easily? And then it struck me–traditionally, that’s been in the realm of sexuality. The female equivalent of the male bully or thug is the seductress who leverages her sexual power over men in order to get what she wants. And the equivalent of the rite of passage I detailed above is the heated conversation that you have with your mom (or usually multiple heated conversations) about exactly why you will NOT be wearing that “cute outfit” outside the house… The women who aren’t taught that lesson are less sensitive to their impact upon other people, less thoughtful in their choices of behavior and wardrobe, and so on. Like a bully, a seductress exerts her will upon other people because she can. It’s equally unprincipled in essence.

Anyway, it was an interesting thought, and I’m still mulling it over.

*You’re* in the military?

Over the past few years, I’ve run across this question more than once… “You’re in the military?” spoken in a tone of surprise. Most often, it’s been from people I knew in school and lost touch with afterwards, and re-encountered via one of the many newish networking capabilities available to us these days. (Three cheers for Web 2.0 and beyond!!!) It’s also been said to me when I presented an ID for a military discount at such decidedly un-military stores as Hot Topic, for which I have a decidedly un-military fondness (rarely expressed as of late, what with deployments and needing to look professional most of the time and all).

I’m always a little surprised by the question on two counts. First, why is it such a surprise that I am in the military now–am I that un-military a sort of person? And second, what is the public perception of “military types” that make me not fit in that box?

On the first issue, I suppose I can see their point, particularly the people who knew me back when. I have never been a big fan of being told what to do by anyone, and spent a lot of time in my youth complaining about such things. At the same time, I worked in the system to get good grades and check all my boxes, so while my rhetoric said one thing, my actions said decidedly another. Besides which, I have a dad who had a military career for 30 years, whom I admire greatly… and it’s pretty common to choose a career path based on what you’ve seen the people you know doing.

But as for the strangers who express such surprise, I’m a little more confused. Is it that, on my own time, I present more of a granola / West Coast / urban “hippy” image? Is it that I love books and words and weird music and have a strange fondness for all things goth? Is it that I don’t bark commands at people and dress in a rigidly preppy circa 15 years ago style? Is it my long, unrestrainably frizzy-curly hair (which, admittedly, has caused me a few headaches of the emotional sort as I’ve tried to tame it into military appropriateness when in uniform… at one point in early training when such things were more of a problem, I had to resort to gluing it down with gel on a daily basis)?

I suspect, though, that it probably has to do with issue #2, the public perception of military types. I think our common mental image of folks in the military has been very much influenced by our entertainment, in TV and movies and such. I find this a little troubling, because with a few exceptions, much of the treatment of military types in these venues has been of a negative nature. It’s better now, of course, but people my age were force-fed the notion of blood-hungry Nazi-esque emotionally-stunted killing machines as the typical soldierly type… I personally knew this to be in error, since my dad was decidedly nothing like that, but if you don’t have a personal connection to someone in the military, you don’t have an object lesson in the fact that stereotypes can be WAY off-base.

I suspect that we also expect a certain demeanor particularly of women who are in the military… that they’re all hardened, deep-voiced and manly women who scoff at wimpy civilians and can reduce a new recruit to tears in a single gruff command… (Though come to think of it, I’d like to see if I had that kind of power… an experiment of sorts.) I’ve met lots of military women, some of whom are decidedly more… ahem… masculine than your average club-chickie, perhaps, but no one I know is quite as scary as the ones I’ve seen on TV.

A last thought occurs to me… when I visited a friend a while back, who was pursuing a graduate degree at a prestigious institution of higher learning, I met several people who were absolutely shocked that I was in the military, and yet was able to follow the flow of their conversation and even contribute to it. They asked me strangely naive questions about whether all the troops had suppressed Oedipal complexes and a weirdly erotic love for President Bush (not a fan favorite at this particular institution). When I did not flare up in anger at the questions, and attempted to answer them in a logical manner, I think it only furthered their cognitive dissonance. I suspect that among certain segments of the population, there’s an expectation that only very stupid, suicidal, or homicidal persons would consider a military career. When they conversed with me, it was evident I wasn’t (openly) any of those three, and thus I was a bit of an enigma.

I suppose this is a side-effect of having an all-volunteer military for a couple of generations… there is a large population in the country who have absolutely no contact with real people in the military, so they don’t have anything to counteract the rumors and suppositions that inform their ideas about who we are. I hope, though, that with the increasing interconnectedness of the global community, and a more visible military presence because of the war in Iraq and Afghanistan, people are beginning to see that we military types are as diverse in character and characteristics as any other large community within the nation. Here’s hoping!

Now, why would anyone think that I don’t look like a military type???

Pre-deployment goings on

I thought that I’d take a break from weightier thoughts and go through a status update on where I am with my process of preparing to deploy this time through. The process of getting back to Iraq is almost as fraught with anxiety as getting there in the first place was. The sheer amount of paperwork and front-end preparation has been causing me some insomnia as of late… I keep waking myself up with worries about whether I’ll have everything in place by the time I need it.

Over the last couple weeks, ever since I came back to work from my time off, I’ve been scheduling appointments and working almost exclusively on the deployment prep… I’ve had no fewer than three medical appointments already, and a fourth scheduled tomorrow. I’ve had blood drawn twice and two immunizations–my arm is still sore and swollen from either the Hepatitis B shot or the Anthrax one… while I know it’s all for the best, it’s annoying when you’ve got a big itchy welt on your arm for several days. Thankfully, as of tonight it seems to be going down. (Finally!) Medical stuff to go: two more immunizations (another booster of both Hep B and Anthrax), a dental appointment, and the medical clearance appointment–but since I was just in to see my doctor last week, I don’t anticipate any problems that way.

Today I spent the day doing CBT (that’s our shorthand for computer-based training). I did a dozen online training courses, everything from SABC (self aid buddy care, or what the rest of the world knows as first aid) to M9 familiarization (though why I should take a computer course about the weapon that I just certified on a month ago is anyone’s guess). I also learned about the laws of armed conflict (LOAC), and now know that I’m not supposed to shoot noncombatants… ummm… I hope that would be a no-brainer… and I’ve had a tutorial on Iraqi history and culture, which was annoying because it was out-of-date and my last deployment left me with more working knowledge anyhow. But it was all useful stuff, and if I was going over for the first time, it would be good for a “lay of the land” perspective.

My current headache is my security clearance… it may be expiring during the time that I’m there, and that means that I’m going to have to work with people long-distance in order to get it updated. This is like pulling teeth even when you’re right there and you can go in and bother the people who are throwing hurdles in your path, in person, daily… I think I may have to invoke some higher powers (read: supervisors, colonels, maybe even a general or two if it comes to it) in order to make that happen. However, I have faith in the fact that once you’re there, people make things happen that would be next to impossible stateside, where no one feels that much of a sense of urgency about ANYTHING.

I’m inside the 60-day window where I need to really get going on things, and they’re finally moving. Instead of feeling like I’m slogging through mud uphill, my earlier efforts are now starting to pay off. I’ve got almost all of my uniform items issued to me, and merely need to wait for one more hat to arrive before I can pack off hats and jackets to get name tapes and rank sewn on them. I still don’t have official orders, so I can’t schedule my appointment to get movers to come in and pack all my stuff and store it away for the year that I’ll be in the sandbox. You aren’t OFFICIALLY going until you get the medical clearance… so, Lord willing, tomorrow will be that next step out of the way.

As an aside, I’m quite glad to be going at this time of year and not at the changeover of a fiscal year the way I did last time. I almost didn’t get my orders last time because they needed to be on the new fiscal year’s budget, and Congress was being recalcitrant about approving the defense budget–I had to wait two extra weeks, a mere 10 days before I was scheduled to leave, in order to get the orders cut. That was not fun. So what I pay in several more months of excessive heat on the front end, I’m not paying in worry that I’m not going to make it there in time.

Let’s see… on the personal side, my house is still not where I’d want it to be. I sincerely wanted to be able to go through my apartment and get rid of all my excess stuff, so that I wouldn’t be storing boxes full of miscellania that I’d just have to get rid of later. However, that has been a difficult thing to get moving on, so it appears that I might just have to do my serious junk-culling in summer/fall 2009. Oh well. On the bright side, however, I’ve managed to get any remaining financial kinks out of my way. The State of Ohio is finally convinced that I don’t owe them taxes for 2004, my pre-Air Force 401(k) is days away from being rolled over into my military thrift savings plan, and aside from needing to cancel a few subscriptions, wrap up the household bills, and set up a good savings fund for the money that tends to pile up when you’re deployed (because you don’t have much to spend it on and you’re making extra because it’s tax-free and you get bonuses for being in a combat zone)… well, other than that, I’m looking close to being done.

I’m working on a shopping list for all the personal-care necessities on drugstore.com… that wondrous site is a lifesaver for deployed Americans! You get all the choice of being in a good drugstore/superstore, and they will ship to deployed addresses. More retailers should get into this market… I’m sure there’s good money to be made there (recall what I just said about having money to burn and nothing to spend it on!). Heck, I’m even building a mental list of books and DVDs for my few spare moments when I’m not working.

My cats will be staying with my family again, as will my car, and I’ve already got a partial plan in place to spend my mid-tour R&R leave with my mother somewhere in the Mediterranean… It will be a nice mid-winter break for her and not as much of a headache travel-wise for me (and much less jet lag involved–believe me, the time-zone adjustment when you’re going halfway around the world is not a quick one!).

Thinking back to the online training, I was amused to find that my proficiency with a couple of the courses was actually really helped by my TV-watching habits. Grey’s Anatomy turned out to be a real help with my first-aid course… You pick up enough about common problems like shock and dehydration and immobilizing fractures and stopping bleeding when you watch whole TV seasons of hospital shows to get you through a fairly difficult multiple-choice test on the topic! Similarly, my background of 24 and Stargate helped with “Use of Force” and “Laws of Armed Conflict”, though sometimes in real life the right answer isn’t to go charging directly into the path of enemy fire, safe in the knowledge that you’re the hero of the series so they won’t kill you off, to save a small child… I thought it was funny to see how fiction and real life can overlap in such a weird way.

Otherwise… It will be interesting watching a big election happen when I’m completely out of things and out of the country, to boot. Particularly an election that could have direct impact on my job, though I doubt that even if someone decided to pull all Americans out of Iraq immediately, it would significantly shorten the length of my projected tour. (Why not? Because I’m not going to be a member of a regular battalion out there fighting in the streets… the headquarters-type staff are typically drawn-down by letting their tours expire and not sending someone to replace them when they’re done.)

Once again I’m in a strange limbo about shopping and buying things… I’m making a big dent in the stuff left in my pantry, trying to eat up all the staples there so that I don’t have to throw out too much. I don’t want to buy any civilian clothes, because there won’t be opportunity to wear them, and by the time I come back they’ll probably be going out of style. I don’t want more furniture or household stuff, since it’s all going into storage anyway… same goes with cool gadgets and electronic equipment. (Though I’ve been flirting with the notion of purchasing a new laptop to take with me… all that holds me back at the moment is the unpleasant notion of transferring all my files over from my old one!)

It’s really hitting me how I’m going to be out of the loop for a year. Even six months over in Iraq was enough to make me feel “reverse culture shock” when I got back home… readjusting to the rhythms of normal life took me most of this past year. I finally realized–tonight–that maybe I’d adjusted when I was watching a TV show with a hostage situation and didn’t automatically think “how on earth can one neurotic person with a little gun be keeping a roomful of people at bay?”

So, that’s the Captain Kj deployment status update. I’m sorry if it’s boring… these are the things that are occupying my time as of late, coloring most of my waking moments and far too many of my sleeping moments, too!

book collecting

I have a fairly obsessive relationship with books, I’ve got to admit. It started early on–my family all remarked on the tendency of other books in the house to be “absorbed” into my personal library. This didn’t really get to be a problem until I moved away, and for a few years when I was in college, I’d get some annoyed questions from my family about whether this or that book “just happened” to be in my bookshelf at school… (often they were correct). Thankfully, as time has gone on and I’ve had the funds to subsidize my habit, I’ve managed to return (almost) all of the books that are not rightfully mine… though after a certain number of years on a person’s bookshelf, doesn’t ownership revert to the keeper, rather like common-law marriage? I’m fairly certain that’s a bylaw somewhere…

Anyway, I happened across this article (The Book Collection that Devoured My Life) and was really pleased to find a kindred spirit on the book question. Like the author, I’m not particularly a bibliophile, not in the sense that I collect rare volumes or first editions–I just like books. The more, the better. This occasionally has resulted in my collecting several copies of the same book, and other such problems. Some of them I read and reread as often as I think of them, others have never been read but I intend to get to them some day. Some I keep because they should be on an educated, literary person’s bookshelf, and others just looked cool. I like the mishmash of cover styles and sizes, and the way that you can peg a book’s contents by looking at the cover typeface and illustrations. I just like books.

Back in the day, I used to carefully weigh all other purchases… If I buy this skirt, it’s letting go of 4 possible paperbacks–is it worth it? Often, it wasn’t. I’m a nightmare for librarians, when I come up to the counter with a couple dozen books carefully stacked in a neat pile that the librarian can never recreate. (Of course, some places I’ve lived have thoroughly inadequate public libraries and because of that I’ve been buying more all the time… especially since the advent of the wondrous site Amazon…) I love used bookstores for the eclectic offerings that you can find, and mega-bookstores for the fun, trendy current reading featured there. They’re definitely the best bets for “chaff” reading, lightweight fluff to entertain you for an afternoon or part of a plane trip. But online stores are definitely my place of choice these days, because you can read reviews about the books in question to see if they’re worth your while, and also, you can discover books that would appeal to you based on other things that you have loved in the past. Now that is a true delight!

I will admit–with my peripatetic life of late (I haven’t lived in one place longer than 2 ½ years since the early ’90s), my ever-growing library has its disadvantages. It’s kind of funny to see the dismayed looks on movers’ faces when they enter my packed library and unfailingly say something flatly like, “well–you have a lot of books”. I’ve had intermittent library clear-outs, when I got rid of the books that I read and disliked, or things that I picked up on an unremembered whim and now don’t remember why. I’ve found that library clearance sales are particularly dangerous for me in this regard… when they start selling you books by the bagful, something snaps and I lose hours, only to wake up in a car stuffed with grocery bags filled with books, many of which I may never actually open. It’s a disturbing thing… I’ve only allowed myself to attend two of those in my recent memory.

I love the feel of having a book in my hands, the way that a good story transfers you wholly into another world in a way that never truly happens with movies or TV. I love that you can spend days reading a series, immersed in the political turmoils of lands long ago and far away, or completely imaginary worlds that come straight out of an author’s head. I love printed words. I love the smell of the pages.

One of my little back-of-the-mind ideas for what I might do with my life someday is to operate a used bookstore. I wouldn’t really care if it were particularly lucrative… I just like the notion of having so many books at my fingertips all the time. If I could, I’d incorporate more of my (slightly obsessive) interests, like a cafe and maybe a side yarn business. What an odd (but fun!) crowd that might bring in… Well, it’s one of those “maybe someday” dreams I return to now and then.