Jason\

I could have sworn I wrote something… granted, it’s entirely possible that I wrote something and then never actually updated it…

Oh, right… I wrote it in a text document because I didn’t have internet at the time…

Here’s how the trip has gone so far:
We left Okinawa just fine, got to Tokyo (to Narita) and fortunately didn’t have to do the silly transfer-to-Haneda thing. Left out from there on-time, and now I’m (only) about three hours into the eleven-hour flight to Chicago.

So, I ordered a vodka-and-OJ from the flight attendant lady, and she told me that she’d be “back in a minute” because she had to go get vodka. Well, about ten or fifteen minutes go by (or half an hour… I was reading my magazine and lost track of time, I’d glance up every now and then to look for her, but didn’t see her around). So, by the time another flight attendant came around to pick up trash, I tell her, “Hey, ma’am, I’m still
waiting for a vodka and some orange juice.” She comes back a couple minutes later and says, “The other lady forgot about you, but she said to tell you she’s sorry. As a matter of fact, she bought you another drink.” And proceeds to supply me with two mini-bottles of Absolut and double-cups of OJ.

I was happy. It was completely unnecessary, but quite welcome.

The point of this (that wasn’t it)–that is, the thought that got me to drag out my laptop and work on typing something up–is this. I’m reading through this month’s issue of “Wired” and I’m noticing a trend. There were a couple articles about various people doing various things–one of them was Hulu, the internet-based video-sharing site that makes certain broadcast network’s shows and movies freely available on the web. In the article, it says that the idea came to fruition because of a childhood experience. As a 10-year-old
child, the guy would run home every day to watch “Speed Racer” at 3:30. He said that it didn’t matter what he was doing, he’d always run home for it, and if he was late, he’d miss it. That turned, a couple decades later, into the idea that given the amount of choice the modern child has, no ten-year-old is going to rush home to catch a TV show, so TV should be more readily available.

Another article in the same magazine comes from a woman, an anthropologist, who ignited/incited her career as a result of an ides scribbled on the back of a cocktail napkin. Her idea: “How do I make anthropology relevant to the military?” (Fine, so that’s really a question, not an idea).

I’ve always been jealous of people who can identify something within their life that dictates the course of their future. The people who knew at ten years old exactly what they wanted to be when they grew up. The people who, whether through actual self-awareness or just through diligent stubbornness, picked one thing and stuck with it until it put them in a position to actually accomplish something. Just being able to identify a goal and have the discipline to keep working toward it no matter how many times something comes up that would otherwise make you (me) change your (my) mind about continuing in that direction–granted, a recent post on Tim Ferris’ blog (or Zen Habits?) tells me that it’s not a matter of determination at all, but instead it’s a
matter of maintaining motivation. Either way, when you don’t know where you’re going, it’s hard to motivate yourself to get there.

I guess that’s been me all along. I find a path, but instead of doggedly following it no matter what, I hit a bit of a roadblock, or find a muddy spot and turn to head off in a different direction, because all the roads lead -somewhere- and I really don’t have a specific destination in mind.

Is that a bad thing?

I was reading someone else’s blog about McCain’s choice for VP, and several of the comments were praising the selection of a Governor rather than a Senator. They went on to say that a Governor-as-President has more experience at “governing” and thus would be better suited to fill the position. The discussion peaked with the statement, “It is generally well known that Governors make better Presidents than Senators.”

Obviously, this wasn’t well-known to me, so I did a little googling and came up with a list of Governors-to-Presidents: Geoge W. Bush, Bill Clinton, Jimmy Carter, FDR, and a few others (16 total).

By the time I lost interest, I’d decided that it really doesn’t make much of a difference whether you were a Senator, Governor, or neither… and at that point I had already distracted myself by looking to see if “Commander in Chief” ever came back on TV after the first season. It didn’t, maybe it will now (or maybe it won’t, I don’t know if it would help or hurt McCain’s campaign).

Thanks, Del for showing that this isn’t gone from the legitimate side of the web (I’ll admit, I did already download the whole thing from mininova).

For everyone else, however, here’s:

A little late to the show, but seriously… if you haven’t seen Doctor Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog, stop what you’re doing and go look at it now. You have until midnight… I’m not sure which timezone, but assuredly it’s one of the American ones.

It’s been a long time since I’ve written. There’s been a crap-ton of stuff going on, and I could probably just browse Crystal’s blog to see what I’ve been up to.

Sitting here on the couch on Sunday night looking back on the past two months, only a small number of things stand out.

We’ve been watching Dexter, and Greek, and Eureka. They are in no particular order. I had tried to think about how I would rank them if I were to order them by preference, but I couldn’t come up with anything. It’s really a matter of how I feel on any given day.

We went out to one of the local bars on Friday night for Tyler’s going-away celebration slash Brandon+Tyler’s band playing music. It was a decent show, and Crystal thoroughly enjoyed the japanese metal band that played first.

We saw “Hancock” at the theater this afternoon. It wasn’t as much of a comedy as I’d wanted it to be, but I still liked it.

We finally went diving for the first time in about six months. It was the weekend before last, and we just went to Maeda. Maeda is perpetually ridiculously crowded now, between the locals, the japanese tourists, and all the americans that flock out there on any given sunny day. We took a boat trip from Kadena Marina out to the Keramas, too. It wasn’t a bad trip, but I didn’t feel that it was a $70 experience for me. I didn’t leave with the impression that I’d seen something I couldn’t see anywhere else on the island, and I still had to haul my gear to the rinse-bucket at the end of the day.

We took the PADI Project AWARE class back at the beginning of the month. There’s something else that wasn’t a worthwhile experience in my opinion. At least with the Keramas boat trip, I at least came away with the ability to say that I’ve done it. This class, however… well, the class was free, and there’s at least $20 worth of interesting information in the book.

That’s about all I can remember of the past month. We haven’t been caching, since it’s been too hot. I’ve still been working more than I’d rather, and speaking of work…

The new “Post-9/11 GI Bill” has made several improvements to the program that make it much more attractive to me. For being a full-time student, we get tuition up to an amount equivalent to that of in-state tuition at the most expensive state school in the state you’re enrolled in. So, while I’m not necessarily forced to go back to Florida for school, it’s the only state that will give me in-state tuition easily. In addition to tuition, the new GI Bill pays a stipend for books and such, and last-but-not-least, E-5 BAH (which translates to ‘just as much money for housing as I’d get for staying in).

Needless to say, this has led to a lot of waffling on my part–seeing a viable avenue for me to separate and go back to school rather than reenlist. It’s certainly attractive, but then some of the same apprehension I held before is still valid: post-college employment, or even employment while I’m in college since I still won’t necessarily be able to go to school full-time without working… despite starting off with $1000 more a month than what I had the first time around.

It would definitely be easier to reenlist, not separate, and just continue getting a paycheck… but I really feel like I’m ready for something different. And not just the sort of different that I’d get from taking another assignment somewhere else that has me doing something only slightly different from my current job, but something completely and radically different.

Crystal and I have been talking about it a lot lately (unfortunately, I’d had too much rum and don’t remember most of the conversation), and really aren’t any closer to figuring out what we’re going to do. As far as I can see, I’ll send in my application to FSU in August and see if I get accepted to come back… that’s step one. If that doesn’t work out, then I still have reenlisting… I still have an application floating around somewhere that would send me back to language school for another language… provided I can get a better score on my next language-proficiency test.

And with that, I’m done.

There’s an(other) tropical storm/typhoon headed our way. We were supposed to have some sort of out-of-the-office event tomorrow (Beach Olympics), but it seems that we’ve canceled it because of the impending doom weather.

Things are still about the same on the home front. We still haven’t moved–that’s something that should be starting over the next three days. We get power to the new house on Tuesday, and then actually have the movers come to get our stuff over on Saturday. It looks like it’s a good thing we set it up for Saturday since, barring the approach of a horrendous typhoon that lingers through the end of the week, Saturday will be the only day I’m able to hang out around the house supervising/unpacking.

---

I’ve been entertaining a line of thought lately that intrigues me. I’ve been finding myself pulled/pushing toward going back to school and going through a computer science program… much like seven eight nine years ago when I somehow came to the decision that it was a bad idea to do so. I figure, there’s got to be some advantage won by virtue of the fact that I’ve managed to hold an interest for over ten years now.

We’ll see what happens. Honestly, there’s no telling really. For all I know, I may just reenlist and live out the rest of my service time until retirement in Omaha. Ick.

It’s come down to this, pretty much, I’m working on planning/arranging things for my separation in May of 2009, rather than sitting around doing nothing until an as-yet-undetermined time when I find that my reenlistment scheme fell through. That would be an even crappier situation, since that would leave me with a mere three months to figure out what I’m doing as a civilian.

Currently on the table: going back to school somewhere to finish up my bachelor’s degree. Perhaps in computer science, perhaps in chinese or some sort of ‘asian studies’. Not sure where I’d end up for school–I’ve been looking for jobs that would cater to my strengths… that’s not exactly it… I’ve been looking for jobs that will hire me based solely on my clearance and ability to do what I’m told without fussing too much while still in earshot (really, that’s the greatest skill I’m bringing out of the military).

The bottom line is that I still have no idea where I’m going to find myself nine or ten months from now. It’ll be a surprise.

Someday, if I ever get any free time again, I’ll finish writing up my notes from the China trip so Crystal can finish her webpage.

Yea.

I never did post anything about this, but Crystal has already given it a brief mention. We came back from our vacation to find (actually, a few days after we came back) that the owner had sold our house to some people from northern mainland japan who wanted to move someplace warmer. The housing agency called us Tuesday to let us know we’d be needing to move, and I asked if we couldn’t just stay. The answer to that came back Thursday when we went in to talk to them and found out the story and started talking about the places they had to offer us. There aren’t many–actually, there are only two that she says we can look at today, and then another where the people don’t move out until the end of the month–that one seemed to be unacceptable to them because they’d rather we move sooner than that.

So, in about two hours, we go look at the places they have to offer, and ask them about a couple other places Crystal found on their website that they didn’t tell us about. Granted, we have no idea how often they update their website, if ever at all.

The German owns the fish, lives in the green house (house number 4 on the row), smokes Princes, and drinks coffee.

I forgot to take a picture of the finished product, but here is the initial setup and ’stage 1′ of my solving process:

And ‘Stage 2′ which is pretty much just taking all the clues at face value and not yet analyzing what else the clues affect:

April 12th.

Today started at 6:30, with breakfast at 7:00am, and a subway ride to the military history museum. Unfortunately, the museum doesn’t open until 8:30, so we went to a nearby park to kill time. I don’t remember the name of the park (children’s park?), but it was huge. We paid 10 yuan each to get in and see some cherry blossoms deep, deep inside the park. It seems that the Chinese enjoy their parks just as much as the Japanese (but not the Americans). All throughout the park, there were groups of people dancing, doing tai chi, jazzercising, and the collection of outdoor fitness equipment was enough to rival most US gyms. By the time we finished at the park, it was 9:20, and as we were getting in line to buy tickets at the military history museum, Justin says, “Don’t we need to get back in time to pack?” To which the rest of us say, “Pack what, we’re packed.” Justin wasn’t. So, between that and needing to show a passport to get in (of which, Justin and I weren’t carrying ours), we headed back to the hotel without having seen the military history museum (Crystal didn’t really want to go anyway).

Today, we went to the rickshaw and hutong tour. “Robin” was our hutong guide, and rode his own bike as we were in bicycle-driven rickshaws. We learned about the hutong doorway–it has beam-status markers in even numbers 2, 4 (government official level), 6 (prince level), or 12 (Emperor-level). To provide balance to the even-numbered beams, the hutong doorway has an odd number of steps (following the same sort of status tiers as the beams). The final marker in the doorway was the cement drum on either side of the doorway–round for military, square for civil service (scholars and such). Once our doorway lecture was complete, we were taken to another “quadrangle” to eat lunch with real people–well, to eat lunch with “Nancy” and “Robin” since they were the only ones who hung around for the meal, the ‘real people’ were too busy cooking and serving and sitting around downstairs playing game boy.

We were reintroduced to the newly-embraced chinese custom of “saying goodbye” when Robin encouraged us to “give them a small tip… like, oh, ten dollars.” To which I said something about it not being a tip when it’s a fee. When we left, we tipped “Robin” twenty dollars, thinking that we gave the other guys ten each for actually putting forth some physical effort to haul our fat american asses around the hutongs, so I thought it perfectly reasonable, if not excessive to give the guide twenty dollars in addition to what he was already paid for the tour (plus the free meal we bought for him). But no, since as we were getting in the van, I hear him telling the other people standing around (rickshaw drivers) that we ‘only’ gave him twenty for three people.

Then we rode the van to the train station, gave the driver a thirty-dollar goodbye, and nancy a five-hundred-dollar goodbye. We did get her e-mail address and should send her some pictures when this is all over.

So, then, we’re on the train and we have a soft-sleeper this time. There are four beds to a compartment, and we take up three of them, with nobody in the other one. It’s pretty cushy, and makes for a much nicer ride than the soft-seats, especially since I can just sleep until we get there.

Eventually the train ride was over, and we came to meet “Judy” waiting for us at the train, so that we didn’t have to wade through the crowd like when we met “Susan.” That was a funny story, as we had several people come up to us and say, “Hello, you have room for the night!” and we thought they were our guide to take us to the hotel. In actuality, they were trying to sell us a hotel room for the night, and ‘you have room’ meant “You have room?”

So, “Judy” and “Mister Yan” brought us to our hotel, the “Taihechun” hotel. It’s definitely a smaller town–they roll up the sidewalks at 6pm, and there’s not a bar in the hotel, and they can’t change currency. It’s another hotel that advertises stuff (even with pictures) in its brochure that it doesn’t actually have: in this case, a bar, an internet cafe… but they’re ‘building it’ in the basement, so it’ll probably be here in time for the Olympics, which seems to be the only thing anyone really cares about at all.

There’s a side-note for anyone traveling to china (or Korea)–apparently you’re allowed to advertise things in your brochure that you only intend to build eventually… or things that you have built only long enough to get awarded your stars, and then you can tear it down, or just empty out the guest room that you packed everything into.