studied til noon, class til 3, studied til midnight.  everything i said was small talk. meaningful conversations felt forced. conversation from 1am-3am was good though, class in 6 hours

catch up

dad died

funeral and all that

got into school

live in baltimore

studying nursing at hopkins

first semester is done

i did pretty well

emotionally up and down

school is a good distraction

mostly because i like it

have a girlfriend

dont really know how to do all that though

mostly just study

caught a patient having a seizure on friday

people congratulated me but it was pretty heavy

had a really good talk with two classmates after

got drunk that night and bought a painting with pirate ships for 50 bucks

ate pasta drank beer went to bed with her

saturday studied mostly

watched mayweather and johnny football

today studied all day 

some people some alone

cant sleep

so im here

 

pistol pete soul crusher

As I write essays for master’s programs, I have to mention my father.  I talk about taking care of him in a way that almost makes it sound like some sort of achievement, yet I don’t think of it that way.  i dont actually think about why at all.  As an added layer, I currently work much of the day and am not a caregiver to him in the same capacity as I was prior.  So I am writing these essays in a current fashion that is troubling to me because it is not my place at the moment.  The soul searching turned advertisement has weighed heavy and im only now capable of writing and editing this stuff in spurts as constant dissembling of the minute details of 1000 pound aspects of my life prove fruitless in my own grasping at this monstrosity. With so much else to do, it has become the only time I sit and seriously think about my actions in that my mind slows down enough while editing sentences to scour my words for meaning or intent.

preamble pentameter porcupine perpetuation pony pistol pete parsimonious plaster pills por postal penguins pinching perched partridges patting plots pitched pampers pickle persimmons.

transsiberian no edit

As the creaky train creeps towards the russian border, a group of us wonder how to handle the upcoming stop. Its 6 hours just south of siberia in winter, waiting for russian border patrol to properly inspect the train, switch it to russian tracks, and drink a fifth or two of vodka for good measure. We could stay on the train, drinking heavily while staring into the vacant eyes of permafrost locals, only to have to leave the train to use the bathroom because they lock them all during the delay. Or, we could head into the station, bundled up beyond belief, and peruse the fine displays of glass figurines, which if bought, have 10 days of life in them as they could never survive the transsiberian in the first place. The station is chosen for its bathroom, once it is established we can drink anywhere. Sitting around an iron grate mall table, passing stories and shots, we discuss where we are coming from and where we are going. My bunkmate is an 18 year old british girl, heading home the interesting way from a vacation in china with some friends…they all decided to fly home. She wanted to stop in Mongolia, as many do, but didn’t, as many don’t. So a quick 7-10 day ride home is her agenda. Her iphone and constant check of messages tells me that her family is interested in her whereabouts, but her frame of mind is to find a group like us and relax. Along with Liz, the Brit, are 3 Aussies halfway through a yearlong world tour, a polish couple on the leg back of their honeymoon, and myself, not really sure where I’m going, I just know it is west of here.

The train should sound and doesn’t.  I have to watch other people to see if it is time to go.  A few russians begin packing up so I stock up on beer and vodka.  Everything around us is desolate.  It has been since we left Ulaanbataar, and I guess before that as well.  Mongolia seemed like another whole trip.  Some were just going to and from home, but many came from different places, physically and mentally.  It was an adventurous crowd, exploring. Now there is still a bit of adventure in the foreigners I see, but there is a strong sense of commute.  I picture mixed asians in toyota corollas on their way home from their job in the valley back to south LA, probably should listen to music to make the ride go more smoothly but just want to keep quiet after a long day.  That is, except these people are traveling for days.  From entering russia through mongolia, it will be 5 or so days on a train before western russia and moscow.  People have their lives on them.  Some ride the whole distance, but many stop along the way.

Chinese people are generally not very dark, some are though that is because they have mongolian blood in them.  Mongolians are round.  Their faces and waists, barrel chests and broad shoulders. Russians you have seen.  Kinda.  Russians don’t all look like women’s tennis players, vladimir putin and old tiny short pudgy men and their similar babushkas.  Many are a mix of the chinese, mongolian, ad uzbek/kazhak central asian sort.  They have a name:  _____, and in Siberia, they almost seem to outnumber the light skinned russians.  This is most of my train to siberia.  Quiet, except for the children, which seem to outnumber the trees in the endless forests out the windows on both sides.  They wait and wait for their destination, their commute home having only begun.  Food is a time to let go a bit, laughing and talking.  They eat what I will soon know well.  Sausage and bread.  Big hunking links and long thick bread sticks.

today i learned

ferrets spread disease in a similar way to humans so we make stronger versions of the diseases we already have, like bird flu and give it to them to make sure we know what to do if our current ailments get worse.

today i learned

today i learned about how earth’s organic matter may have come from comets. I guess i knew some of this already, but what was fascinating was how it happened. To sum up, the gravitational pulls of jupiter and saturn are strong, every time they went by each other they pushed neptune and uranus further away from the sun towards the kaiper belt. There, they hit a bunch of icy rocks, sending them everywhere around the solar system. These are comets that hit everything, all the planets including us. They hit every part of our planet. As these comets go from the kaiper belt toward us, they melt, sending icy streams of gas and rocks and such out into space, hence the comets tail. These were analyzed by a probe in 2006 and found to have basic elements of organic matter, amino acids. If a bunch hit the earth, it explains why we have so much organic matter.

today i learned that I need to explain what I write in an essay to suit the everyday reader instead of my professor. Apparently, I am not writing essays for her to read.

today i learned that George Harrison was amazing, yet again. I watched the Scorsesse documentary on him for HBO. It was great; I dont really understand the critiques accusing it of lacking emotion. Maybe I was expecting something different than those critics. I thought it was fantastic. I have never read much on him, and while I do know about many of his interests musically and spiritually, I did not know much of the specifics. The interviews were great.

today I learned that once again, moments pop up with siblings when all pretense goes out the window, honesty and humility rear their head, and a stripped conversation can be had, leaving me feeling a bit more connected even if its just for a few minutes.

today I learned that I am incapable of shopping for myself. name a thing one can buy and I am not good at finding nor purchasing it. Negate that as well and I am also not good an stopping myself from buying things I dont need. I am too impulsive to be left on my own in this manner.

A short discussion/tirade with a friend on capitalism and our reactions

 

Me:

       I think capitalism has had its progression, but our relationship to it is changed. I don’t think the upper class nor the state had the means to distort class consciousness as they do today. Yes they used more violence back in the day, but that seems to galvanize people more than displace. I think the years of (maybe perceived) general trust that has persisted in capitalist culture between the w…orkers and the corporations has allowed the state and the elite to use multi media to its advantage by dividing the masses along false party lines. Maybe now people are more aware of this, but it is also a time where independent minded people are funneled into ideology by these same people due to a lack of quality education, allowing puppet ideas to run rampant without anybody researching anything they say. They think they have a lot of elbow room when they say it, but if they follow their words to their conclusion they will find it concentrated by the thousands of voices that echoed their complaint without an original thought to add

Him:

I would say that half of America doesn’t give a shit about these thoughts and that they would immediately write you off as a whining liberal.. i would then conclude that the “quality education” these ppl need is just as ideological as the p…roverbial education that they would ram down your throat, given the chance.. maybe the ruling class didn’t have the same means to distort class consciousness as they do today but thats only bc the main media back then were the papers, and they damn well tried to mold class consciousness as much as they could since the beginning. most of these papers were owned by the wealthy and naturally influenced by their agendas, either way all the papers had agendas and it all comes back to the problems of democracy. a capitalist democracy is designed for political division.. it influences it, perpetuates it, and we are trained to think that such “freedoms” are the vital ingredient to human existence. weve always pretty much been divided by party lines, look at the Federalists and Republicans for example. furthermore, at this point, with the class, political, with all divisions that have been established and maintained, any “new” agenda will NATURALLY get washed away into a convoluted grand skeptical of puppetry and I believe that the divisions WILL be maintained until death, and by that I mean, the legitimate death of the ruling class… but then what… new power, new divisions, new conflict. unfortunately this is all a natural progression that is really not much different than how its always been. there is no power without resistance and vice versa. with the obvious said, i really like the last sentence you wrote in your post, and agree with you, but i just don’t see things as that different now than they have been in history.

Me:

i totally agree, i guess i just have trouble wrapping my head around it. I know it all extends back and i have done a lot of tracing around the creation of our current repeated broken record of a conundrum. But just like many other of the… world’s centuries old conflicts, I have trouble with the use of such a large context to put todays problems into perspective. I often feel defeated by the endless strings of historical beatings society has taken. I see them repeated over and over with waves of us followed by waves of them. But I often come back to current consciousness as a type of starting point. That doesnt mean that historical record is irrelevent, its just that we are constantly seeing the same things differently, whether it be as individuals or as large swaths of people trying to group themselves into ridiculous ideological categories. I have a theory about technology and modern culture in that our minds are sped up by increased multi tasking and options that we see 50 years ago as ancient history and ancient history as fictional stories, or just purely unimportant. In this context, I see the fundamental problems that you are talking about, the maintained divisions, but an ignorance about any semblance of ebb and flow. If any progress is achieved, its taken in like the blob and stripped of all relevance by the next group of power mongers in charge. I guess what im trying to say is that if things arent changing as quickly as we think they are, and one group just negates the efforts of the prior one, and all we do is grow mechanical testicles until the life is sucked out of existence and the biological line of darwinist chimeras has ended and been replaced by a web of online grouches belting manifestos on mythical financial sums and incomprehensible wars into a soundscape vortex similar to the mind of a schizophrenic where repetition and growing anger supplant actual awareness, only to explode upon the laps of a few people with flailing empires based on toxic commodities while the general populus hopes that the new overlords of need and greed can maintain the collective selective memory or else people might have to think/run for their lives, shouldnt we just think of different ways to fight because we’re always gonna have to?

 

Him:

well, everyone who wants to fight is trying to think of new ways to fight but i still don’t think “new ways” make too much of a difference.. makes me think of a quote from the movie War Games, “the only way to win the game is not to play at… all.” definitely an idealistic quote and further idealistic in the fact that it is pretty much impossible not to play the game (hence impossible to win) but, its food for thought. there is the never ending fight and as long as that is the focus then what does a new way to fight really matter? Obviously I don’t support getting taken advantage of or hiding with your tail between your legs, but I also don’t know what good maintaining and concentrating on the rolls of power and resistance really does…? even tho division is natural, do we really have to create a synthesis within it all to make things “better”? 1 way or another, we’re gonna try… as continually repeated in history. what the fuck is “better” in the end tho, it will always be a double edged sword and lead back to the same redundancy?! every trail has a cause and effect, pretty much the same as power and resistance, so if this is natural and continuous, how could we ever escape it and in the end whats the difference between the good and the bad of the present? O.o I know i’m 1 of the most pessimistic ppl around but god damn, I really can’t say I’m 1 of the most unrealistic. either way, for better or for worse, in sickness and in health, as long as we all shall live, it will continue until extinction, or until we think of EVERYTHING differently (don’t know the right way to think but clearly this isn’t working) and consciousness as a whole elevates (now thats some idealistic idiocy in and of itself, isn’t it?) >.< fuck all, game on.

Sweat off my brow

Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, Acceptance.  Originally these were the stages of the terminally ill, but now they are applied to much more.  I can through the stages when I lose my job or when my girlfriend breaks up with me.  I’m sure it gets more trivial than that.

I can’t believe the bus didn’t pull over to pick me up.  I am so pissed.  Maybe I can convince the next driver to get there faster.  That’ll never happen.  Oh well, I’ll get there when I get there.

I always applied it to those that are dying and their loved ones.  My father was diagnosed with ALS, a terminal disease, but now things have changed and I have begun to look at how I reacted.  I wrote on here of steadfast loyalty and pledged to learn all I could to ease the end.  I don’t think I ever denied reality, nor was I ever abnormally angry.  I don’t remember bargaining.  I don’t feel depressed.  At least not due to my father.  I think I just accepted the situation and began to figure out what I could do.

Did I even have enough time to move up the levels?

Like I said, my father is no longer dying.  He has Myasthenia Gravis.  It is an auto immune disease that has a few similarities to ALS, especially in location, but its outcomes are quite different. Both involve the nerves and the muscles, but instead of a progressive degradation, he now has recuperation.

The science as I understand it is this.  In order for you muscles to fire, they need orders from the brain.  The brain sends these orders along the nerves.  The nerves meet at synaptic junctions and communicate with each other by releasing a neurotransmitter.  There are many kinds of neurotransmitters but we only need to be aware of one here, which I will get to.

So the neurons, the basic units of the neurological system,  meet up with each other along nerve pathways.  In order to get one to pass enough of its message on to the other, it needs an adequate action potential.  This is basically the strength of the message.  If it is strong enough, the message is passed on, if the next is strong enough it will do the same.  Eventually, this message is passed to a muscle at a place called a neuromuscular junction.

Picture a hand with fingertips outstretched.  The tips of the fingers open and tiny little pods are released.  Inside these pods are the neurotransmitter.  The end of the neuron (fingertips) never actually touch their intended target (the muscle).  So these pods carrying the neurotransmitter go across a small open area called the synapse and reach the other side where the muscle is waiting.

The neurotransmitter is release from these pods and connect with the muscle.  They don’t just connect though.  They fit like a glove.  Receptors on the muscle take in the neurotransmitter perfectly.  If there is enough, and the action potential is strong enough, the muscle will flex and you will save the woman trapped under the overturned mailbox.

This is all normal, except for the mailbox part.  What is wrong with my father is that there is something blocking the receptors from taking in the neurotransmitter (the message).

So the neurotransmitter is called acetylcholine.  It is commonly known to make your muscles fire, but it also can help you calm down by slowing your heart rate.  For this instance, its job is to meet up with the acetylcholine receptor and make a whole other set of parts work to make your muscle fire.  Also, there are a few types of receptors in use here but only one that pertains to MG.  It is called the nicotinic receptor, though I don’t know if smoking will fix the problem.

What is the problem?  What is blocking the receptor from receiving the acetylcholine?  Antibodies.

Specifically, acetylcholine receptor antibodies.  Your immune system produces antibodies to fight disease, there are many different kinds but we are only concerned with one at the moment.  These antibodies can come from the thymus, a specialized organ of the immune system that sits behind your sternum, but there are other places where the antibody can be produces and I don’t know how to find where they come from.

Basically, some of the acetylcholine will get through, but not all of it, and if untreated, it could get progressively worse.  The body’s reaction is fatigue.  The muscles don’t work as well.  The good part is that with rest they recuperate and work again to some degree.

To find out if you have MG there are a few tests.  My dad had two.  One was a blood test to check how much of the antibody was in his system.  Answer: a shitload.  The other was called a single fiber EMG.  Its like an EKG in that they send an artificial electric shock to the nerve to make it release the acetylcholine and make the muscle fire.  Answer:  the muscle fired but small tremors shook the pattern of the action, which is consistent with MG.

OK, not dying.  But what is he.  He is treatable.  The medicine consists of immunosuppressants and other forms of inhibitors.  Some people end up with surgery but this doesn’t seem to be one of those cases.  According to the doctor, he should be back to a relatively normal state in 6 months or so with treatment.

Here are my current stages.

Denial:  How could the doctor’s have gotten the diagnosis wrong?  They were so sure; they repeated their assurances many times.

Anger:  The test for MG was ordered initially, but the doctor felt there was no reason for it because he was so sure.  It has been months of this whole ordeal, and over a month with an ALS diagnosis.  I never felt happy with any of this ordeal.  The doctors would take vacations and pass my dad off to someone else.  He was at three different hospitals, the checkups were irregular.  Documents and test results were hard to come by.  Communication between doctors was much less than ideal, and eventually tests had to be redone because the results of earlier ones were lost or never recorded.  An advocate can only do so much, how can a patient control their treatment unless they are a doctor in this specific area themselves and know the process?

Bargaining:  Thanks Fate, I’m not sure of all that was promised you over the past few months but i’m sure you have a few payments coming your way.  I know I will do a better job of expressing my opinion about symptoms in the future.  I will look at life differently now.

Depression?  The reverse is mania is some cases.  Elation, celebration.  The reality is that we all jumped head first into this.  Raised money to go on an ALS walk.  Worried about where money, insurance, work, and time play into the end of days.  Made decisions about what to do and when to do it.  For my father, it is, what do I do now?  Is it possible to accept death, find out youre not dying, and be sad about it?  I would imagine ambivalence sets in for many. Numbness.  A stupor that sends one wandering for a prior life that may exist in a similar way but couldn’t be exactly the same; perhaps like a middle aged man searching the car lot for a porsche.  Skydiving?

Acceptance: Is it as simple as saying, “that was weird” and moving on with where you were?  Accept that you are human and no longer one of death’s associates.  There is still a life to live.  It’s nice to know where you stand with people.  The friends that came by to see you, the well wishers, the donors, the onlookers, the devotees, the angry sky god epitheters, the passing through, the one last times, the see yas, the same as always, the bequeathers, the reality biters, the tell you what they think of yous, the condolences, the fist pounders, the memory lanes, the stoic silents, the awkward silents, the jump to helps, the put it all downs, the play by players, the scaredy cats, the same old same old, and the shoulders to cry on.  It’s nice to know that there always was an order of importance and not a blob of requirements.  Some things are more important than others and they come out at times like these.  The question is whether you were paying attention.

Maybe I am too young to put my mind’s eye upon my father’s gaze at newfound time.  I can’t know what having lived 60 years already does to the knowledge that there should be at least a few more.  The stages of grief are obviously flawed if I can relate them to burning my toast in the morning, but it is obvious to me that there are building stages as well.  Stages that go up and forward.  Where am I now? Is it all metaphors and representations of the swift reality that swept through and is now gone? ‘You are what you are’ is probably repeated countlessly in the minds of millions as they continue to keep their heads down and live day to day.  This sense of self that doesn’t consciously change, even when reality does, leaving you stuck thinking this is it.  You’re on page 60 and you see pages being torn from the end of the book getting closer and closer to your bunny eared diagnosis limbo, only to find a choose-you-own-adventure.  Maybe stop asking too many questions, quit while you’re ahead and just enjoy the ride.  How many anecdotal cliche phrases are necessary?  The answer to the beginning of this paragraph is not that I am too young to gaze into a crystal ball and see clearly, it is that I couldn’t know at any age.  The decision to take stock of the stock you’ve already taken is common.  The get back to work even more.  The freewheeling cautionless hippy soothsayer that knows it all now and ends up with the girl at the end of the movie may be a tall tale.  The aforementioned stages are not fact and shouldn’t be taken as such, they are one woman with a weird last name’s take on what is only normal when you just call it life and death.

 

first off

It’s odd that my first voluntary foray into medicine has coincided with my first involuntary trip of the same nature. I have spent the last 7 months studying the human body inside and out from top to bottom learning and memorizing as much as I can. The first 4 months were charts, fill in the blank type exercises in memory gymnastics. It wasn’t until this summer that the information took form clinically. My anatomy professor is an ex Egyptian general that teaches in southern california and performs all sorts of cosmetic surgery just across the mexican border, this along with what else your money might afford. As seedy as he is, and it is obvious, he happens to be an excellent teachers. Every tidbit of information relates clinically to a certain disease or procedure. I loved every minute of it because the memorization hoops I had previously jumped through were beginning to change shape into an inflammatory gall bladder, etc. The cholycystical confluence gave me a new respect for what I was studying and I don’t think I have ever been more engaged in school. This has all been like learning a new language, though other than class, I have had very few people to converse with.

Enter my father. For the past while, I have only been back in the country a little under a year, I have seen some deterioration in his health. His hand/wrist would ache and cramp; he had trouble talking. The amount of saliva produced in his mouth would dwindle to almost nothing, leaving him somewhat incomprehensible. For a teacher, this must have been difficult. While I saw less of that because I was out of the house a lot, I was around for meals. During almost every meal, he would choke briefly, then eat more, then choke again. Swallowing became more difficult, like his throat was closing. I had talked to him multiple times about these symptoms and he tried a number of different medications, but nothing seemed to work.

Eventually, he went to a specialist, the performed some tests and saw a growth in his throat. A tumor was the first thought, and as the days went by before a second look, we became increasingly nervous. Thoughts that came to my mind: my mother’s recent bout with breast cancer, my dad smoking until the early 80’s, throat cancer, tracheotomies, raspy mechanical voices, awful anti smoking ads featuring the saddest oldest most addicted california raisin grandmother of all time. When they went back in to biopsy, the found acid. GERD was the likely culprit, the movement from his esophagus to his stomach, normally one direction, was sending acid back up. This is dangerous if untreated. Acid can get in the lungs causing nasty pneumonia, it can burn the esophagus and throat. But it is manageable. No cancerous tumor.

Medication is given, and more days go by. When you can’t eat/swallow/talk well, days become difficult and waiting even worse. He came home, but had a bad relapse where he couldn’t breath. He was given a tracheotomy to help him breath. I was worried about the california raisin, but it was ok. He didn’t need a voice box. Then again, it wasn’t ok. This shouldn’t be happening. Nobody knew what was wrong with him. This wasn’t GERD.
A month in the hospital withers away his weight. Muscles atrophy and he lives with tubes to feed and breathe. The waiting is agonizing. I talk every day with a few classmates about the details in search of someone to bounce ideas off of. I mention muscles, tumors in odd areas, faulty glands emitting faulty hormones, everything I can think of with seven months of school. I input the symptoms often in to google and a myriad of medicinal websites searching for a catch all that I hope is manageable.

The Doctors change. They leave on vacation. They are here, there, everywhere. Every time I stop by it is someone different explaining nothing. Everybody needs an advocate in a hospital and we are lucky to have 2 big ones. David and Karen worked our hospital and others from the top down making sure things were running smoothly, and at times, running at all. Through their help we saw a specialist at UCLA.

More quickly than any of us could have, and assuring themselves after a few tests, they told us that my dad had ALS.

I know sports well, and I know the story of Lou Gehrig, the luckiest man on the face of the earth. I know a bit about how his life ended. I know he played for the yankees. I know Cal Ripkin broke his consecutive games streak. I know there were probably a number of lucky things about his life. Now I know that ALS is not one of them.

It stands for Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis. Basically, the motor nerves in your brain control your voluntary movement. You have upper motor nerves and and lower motor nerves. The upper motor nerves control your extremities, this deteriorates and becomes clinical als. My father’s version, most likely, involves the lower portion, and is named Progressive Bulbar Palsy, a form of ALS.

Progressive you know. Bulbar refers to the medulla oblongata, a part of your brain stem that controls many important functional centers, like respiration and cardiac, certain reflexes etc. The nerves associated with this area control certain muscles like those found in the pharynx, larynx, and tongue. Palsy is the paralysis of a body part and is associated with involuntary movement like shaking.

So, to complete the lesson from someone that might have gotten parts of this wrong and doesn’t feel like checking; the muscles associated with the parts I discussed initially, where my father had trouble swallowing, talking, breathing, are malfunctioning due to deterioration of the nerves that supply them with the trigger that sets them off.

The main difference between clinical ALS and progressive bulbar palsy is where it starts. The end is often similar.

Before I go on, I think its important to state that I am not writing this as merely a state of affairs. I don’t really know what this is. I know explaining it on here solidifies the situation in a way. To add, I don’t do much these days other than school and home so its a way to yell out the window without waking the neighbors. I have a few people to talk to and am not really looking for condolences. I guess the best thing would be to know if I make a wrong choice or if I handle something badly. Care-giving, in a way is what I am studying. I want to know all about what to do from here on out because its something a good son does and for the perplexingly normal curiosity that was already there.
I haven’t cried and I don’t think I have any plans to right now. To me, the best way to help is to know all about everything and make things easier on my mother and father. To learn about therapy, disease progression, insurance, social security, life insurance, transportation, recreation, capabilities, relaxation, experts, where to go, who to call, what to read, where to get it, nutrition, respiration, tricks of the trade, nomenclature, clinical studies, inspiring stories, distraction, organization, technology, speech pathology, history, pillows, braces, weights, walks, drives, golf, piano, songbooks, letters, announcements, appointments, drop ins, drop bys, memories, stagnation, inflammation, causation, anatomy, physiology, military disability, medical leave, benefits, faults, liabilities, pensions, allowances, pharmacology, tubes, love, wisdom, and time. If I can’t learn all that on my own then somebody will have to teach me.

I don’t know what I would have done 5 years ago, just before I left the country. I imagine part of me would have shut down. I came back a different person. More appreciative. I don’t need this to tell me I’m lucky. This big red circle around the respect for time I so recently acquired. I don’t need this to tell me about my family. I’d been gone a while and know what its like to be separated from them. I’m going to understand all of this including what I don’t.

I will understand how this disease progresses towards a cocoon, where the brain is trapped alive inside a lifeless body. I will understand how all the doctors can do is try to prolong quality of life before the inevitable. But I will only try to understand how one discusses all this, deals with this, tells people this, tells one’s self this. I don’t know if I will understand that, but there will not be a big growth spurt where hope sticks out his head. That’s something to get used to.

Appreciation is what I will try to have. Being here and not abroad. Being old enough to hear tales and be told the truth. I love history and memory and its fascinating how much of it is false, almost like it is a living being, transforming to its surroundings and putting on its face for company. I have entire childhood memories that my parents have politely informed me never happened when I bring them up. Maybe I have an active imagination.
This is a creeping progression of reality settling under my skin. I feel it there and on the faces of others. The line of loved ones in and out of our house. I also see memory playing its tricks, telling us about the wonders of coping mechanisms and the myriad of distractions at our disposal. I will use a few of them if they pique my interest, but I am going to understand as much of this as I can. I will not try to fill up every minute of the day, the week, the month, the year, maybe more. I will stop to think and make sure I know why and why not.

The Navy

Laugh all you want but it has a lot of benefits.

Yes, I have not been known to do well with authority. Yes, I have a major opposition to much of what the military does and stands for. Yes, I might be a bit old to be considering this. Yes, I could be sent to war.

But if I did 4 years, I would have enough aid to do multiple degrees for free if I wanted. I could try and get a job in the navy that fits into one of the major interests I have, like journalism. I could get in better shape and come out with a self discipline that is attractive to many employers.

Perhaps looking over the website and talking to that recruiter has made me delusional, but I don’t see too much wrong with this.

The main problem I have with many of the future possibilities I have laid out are that jumping into a vocation that involves school will stick me in a shitty economy with a skill that might not be marketable. With military aid, I could have the flexibility to try my hand and a variety of occupations without the hassle and negativity I bring upon myself to start. I wouldn’t have to worry about the costs of something and just do it.

It would be 4 years of my life, and perhaps I would be risking it by joining the navy, but the life risk is not really worrying me, especially when you look at it from a risk assessment standpoint. I am not likely to be killed or maimed if I join the navy, not when you consider the risks of daily life, end of story.

I guess ideology is a big factor, like being surrounded by people with very different realities then mine own. But I would only be 32 or so when I was done and could be debt free and with a degree by 35 or 36.

Perhaps this thought process is a symptom of my desperate mental state. I don’t really know. But I have a respect for life experience, and this would certainly be one.