[ echoface ]

...

Fri, 20 May 2011 22:00:47 GMT

I wish I had a pill.

It's my fault for giving up in the middle of everything and not getting one, I know. I just...wish I could have one somehow.

I used the last of my spoons early this week, hid from the world for two days and thought I was feeling better just because nothing had come to frighten me for a while, and now...I don't have anything left. I have all these people that I need to call or talk to in office visits and really I don't even have the energy anymore to force that cheerful lilt into my voice or animate my face so that I don't have that blank, dead stare that I get if I don't put the mask on. When I caught sight of myself in the bathroom mirror this morning, I thought, My gods, I look sick. You can see the disease in my eyes. I try not to look anybody in the face.

I wish it were possible to find someplace hidden where I could lie down peacefully and stay there until I expired from starvation. But probably people would come looking for me and everything would get ruined.

Barring that, I wish I had a pill, something to recharge my spoon stash and make me magically able to fake everything I need to fake in order to get by with other people.

Oh well.

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insert relevant title here

Sun, 20 Mar 2011 08:35:55 GMT

(I changed my DW layout to a simple design using the Thorns' company colors. Hope springs eternal...? It feels odd to have a page that's so bright, compared to what I usually use.)

I have been going out during this week because, of all weeks, this had to be the one when I am stricken with the itch to just leave our home and go places, desperate to be continually in motion--if gas didn't cost money, I think I would literally just get on the highway and drive loops around different parts of the city, because that's the sort of itch that this is. (And it's unfortunate because of all the work I left to do until this week, but I've bitched about that issue enough already.)

One place that we went was one of the larger bead stores. When we were there, one of the ladies who worked there presented herself for my possible future relationship considerations ("tried to pick me up" sounds sort of aggressive and pushy, which this was not, I think). I have her cell phone number, though I tried to explain my workload and related issues, but...I couldn't say important things at the time, and I can't really say that I regret not saying them or that I'd go about this differently if I could do it again, because I am only rarely brave enough to even think about them by myself.

Bullet points because I would rather not have this take too long. Also, I hope I don't end up sounding annoyed that the offer was made--I'm frustrated, but it's about my own response and all the baggage surrounding it.

( More in the vein of gender, age, and related topics. )

Getting too late, brain shutting down. Need to buckle down tomorrow and not let up until at least...possibly Thursday.

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Well.

Thu, 02 Dec 2010 03:42:39 GMT

I keep thinking about what I should say, but then I don't get time or I reconsider or something happens that renders what I was going to say irrelevant or no longer true, so in the net sense I have had nothing to say for a while now. Mostly I'm posting because I feel obligated to update somewhere every once in a while, although this post also doesn't feel quite right or necessary, but... I am bitter and fucked up (as usual), and I need to get myself to a point where I can do work due tomorrow, and since I can't seem to do anything useful with myself right now I will treat journaling as a default idling behavior.

( Not long, but really no good news--I'm alive, but that's the best of it. )

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Degrees of Failure.

Tue, 09 Nov 2010 04:06:54 GMT

We got back from the FTX later than usual. Things happened there that have caused me a great deal of grief, but largely of the private sort that may not have been visible to anyone else; consequently, I am trying to process as best I can, but I expect to do it offline because I'm unhappy even talking about it to myself. There was a bit of collective grief as well, but I think that was to be expected since there appears to be a rule against ROTC events occurring with zero grief. Consequently, I suspect that there was a conspiracy to ensure that our grief quota was successfully met over the course of the three-day event. (I am only sort of joking, in the sense that I really have no evidence of an actual conspiracy, per se.)

I have one class on Mondays and Wednesdays, and I ended up sending in the homework electronically with an apology for not attending class tonight. True, my sickness is lingering like a champ and I am now hammering at it with OTC meds as best I can in an effort to get us back to some semblance of health. Also true, the combination of brutal sunlight, accidental dehydration, and being in a place where it was just too fucking cold to sleep has left me pretty damn tired. On top of that, the cold medicine supposedly causes drowsiness. But I think that, if these were the only things wrong with me, I could have made it to class tonight. Really, I wanted to go, because I'm so sick of ROTC causing me to miss class for various reasons. Ultimately--and forgive the theatrical overtones--I was too tired in my heart to feel alright with going outside and interacting with people as if nothing was wrong. I just wanted to hide in the safest place I have and try to get myself back into one piece, since I have to at least be able to pretend that I'm 100% by tomorrow morning.

( Difficult theological problems. )

Gods. So fucking tired.

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Ambivalence.

Fri, 08 Oct 2010 08:27:22 GMT

So...the lab was on Tuesday.

My feelings are all messed up right now. I know my emotional compass is not famed for pointing due north, but I'm especially conflicted at the moment. At the same time, there's not a lot that I really want to say about this week, other than that it was the latest in a long series of growing disappointments.

At least I remembered to put this entry in the right damn place. It bothers me when I try to leech audience from the main journal--the whole point of having a half-dozen journals was so that we could make it easy to keep lone-author posts identifiable.

Before diving into the fail and counterfail, I will confirm that when I got home on Tuesday I did go straight to Amazon to pick up Cfcf's The River album.

I had been doing some buying a couple of days previous as well. Rain (as my choice of name/title may suggest) is a powerful thing for me--a wall of water, all-encompassing, enclosing. I crave the water, though clearly only in certain forms. Florida had a lot of beaches, but I only went to them once or twice because I enjoy the ocean only in conceptual form. (It's like the night sky on earth.) Rain, though...

I was praying for rain. I had been for some time, futile as that is in Arizona--I love this state, but the lack of rain makes me subtly crazy for reasons that have nothing to do with a desire for moisture or plentiful plantlife. Over the weekend, I finally caved in and found several long MP3 tracks on Amazon that feature different intensities of rain, from a hour of even downpour to a couple hours of overhead thunderstorms.

Ironically, right after I got those tracks and spent a day or so basking in them, it started to actually rain outside. Probably this is an application of Murphy's Law, but I don't mind very much--I probably should have bought rain recordings years ago for the sake of my sanity.

And then I picked up an album by Erik Wollo, which is sort of like standard space music that has been infected by viral New Age elements and has had its DNA warped out of true (not necessarily in a bad way--I haven't had new New Age in a long time), and yet another Steve Roach album. With Roach, I keep hoping that I will somehow chance across another album that is as purely excellent as Structures From Silence. Sigh of Ages is not such a thing, but it's also not especially bad.

I wonder if it's difficult to make very simple Youtube vids just for the sake of putting music samples into the Internet wilds. I'm not especially averse to putting up single tracks for download somewhere, but I can understand better the desire to try before you buy, in longer chunks than the 30 seconds or so that Amazon allows. I think that someone on Youtube posts Dousk music, which I'd like to sample in full before picking up more digital albums--"The Novel" quickly became a permanent feature of my aural landscape, but it was technically a gamble when I bought it. It's hard to know how a song longer than ten minutes will ultimately evolve when you can only listen to less than a minute of it. :/ My sound collection is apparently weird by the standards of the mainstream Internet, so if there is noplace where a person can go to get offbeat electronic music, semi-old New Age tracks, and other odd crap, then I feel pressed to create such a thing. (I say this knowing that I would likely not have the time to produce vast fields of content, but it's not like I'm making a promise. :P)

Well...I am avoiding the uncomfortable part, so I'll take care of it and then I can feel justified in never speaking of any of this again.

( All my usual reasons for cutting material apply here. )

For now, though, time to sleep. I'm lucky in that Columbus Day has given us ROTC DONSAs for tomorrow and Monday, so this is the first actual vacation that I've had for a while. At last, some space where I can lick my wounds.

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Wearing the Inside Out.

Sun, 12 Sep 2010 00:20:22 GMT

( Misery, which I must get used to somehow. )

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facepalm

Thu, 26 Aug 2010 05:03:17 GMT

( Skip this shit. I'm bitching about RL again and just felt like I had to make it pseudopublic because...I dunno, bitching where people can see is liberating or something. )

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Tired.

Sat, 12 Jun 2010 01:19:46 GMT

( Cut for by-now-familiar, low-grade woe. )

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The Quest Continues.

Wed, 02 Jun 2010 03:39:54 GMT

- Odd experience: I'm at the point where I'm combing individual schools' websites for nitty-gritty info on their programs. So far, I believe I've looked at one for a private university that's on the edge of Ivy League. (If everything works out then the government will be paying my tuition, so I'm not considering cost as a factor. :P) And holy shit, their website was designed in such a sprawling, unintuitive fashion that I spent an age on there and finally just had to give up on it.

Perhaps this is a subtle screening method for potential grad school applicants. Using only a PC and the university website, can YOU figure out the date when your application is due? "You must be THIS RESOURCEFUL to RIDE OUR PH.D PROGRAM --------->"

Or perhaps it was just a case of a top private university suffering from oddly craptastic webfail. X(

In contrast, most of the websites for schools catering to the lowly commoners have been very navigation-friendly. Gosh, the rich really are different. ^.^

- FurAffinity opened up account creation again, so I have a separate account there YAYYYYY. Of course, this would happen when I am too busy to do anything with it BOOOOOO.

- I have been annoyed for a long time over the way that LJ has been triggering a fullscreen popup ad every time I log in. I already consent to look at the damn things all the time on my friends page, on my profile, on my own journal...and half of the time they're those creepy ads that are so badly made that they cause my Inner Graphic Designer to die a little from just the briefest glimpse. But now there's this Sims promo which is creating that obnoxious, primary-yellow wallpaper on the homepage...

Really, I need to look more deeply into ways to get myself off LJ without losing contact with the people, if that's even possible. I never got a MySpace because it was already swarming with crappy ads before I even got curious about it, and now LJ is dribbling down that same hole. I'm starting to really hate having my eyeballs assaulted every time I check in, but I am definitely not going to give them any money just to spare myself the pain. *sigh*

- Okay, back to work. Trying to stay focused. T_T

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GRUMP

Sat, 29 May 2010 06:29:43 GMT

For the last two days, I've been spending hours straight combing and organizing info on possible grad programs. It still does not look good at all, but pffffft, by now there's not much I can change, so I will start getting used to the heavy stink of my own failure.

But the key point is...I'm finding good stuff. Great stuff, in fact, like places with lots of grants and interest in the spirituality/psychology overlap and access to populations I want to work with and entrance criteria that I might actually be able to make AND THEN, in a fit of squeefulness, I hit Wikipedia to learn more about these mysterious universities that I have longed for all my life.........

.....Only to discover that they are private institutions hooked up with some specific, aggressive Protestant ministry.

My heart shatters into a bajillion jagged fragments of destroyed pseudoBuddhistqueerliberalweirdo love, and, sniffling back tears, I turn to hit the numbers again.

This has happened enough fucking times that I desperately want to punch something, even though Protestant America is so much bigger than I am that it would be comically futile. I will honestly admit that there is a very childish part of my soul that wants to travel the country and sneak onto all of those campuses that I, in my innocence, so longed to attend, just so that I can stealthily spit in every single public drinking fountain. Their water supply will be contaminated with my fearsome pinkpurpleblue tie-dyed cooties, and suddenly ALL THEY MENS WILL COME DOWN HARD WITH T3H GH3Y. Horrified, they will search for the creature that has destroyed them, and they will hear only a distant giggle drifting in from somewhere on the fringe.

Taste my supafab vengeance, Pepperdine, Azusa Pacific, BRIGHAM FUCKING YOUNG!! I live for the bitter flavor of your tears!!! XD

The sad part, of course, is that I'm just plain ignorant of what the big-name schools are and why they're important. Like, Brigham Young kept sounding familiar for some reason, but I had to look it up before I learned that it's the Mormon academic capital of the world. -_-;;; It's been that way for a couple others too. What can I say--I'm charmingly oblivious to things.

Hey, Naropa? Naropa, you there? *TAPTAPTAPTAP* This thing on? Hey, GET YOUR ASS APA-CERTIFIED, LIKE, YESTERDAY, OKAY? Come on, people, the Orthodox Jews did it, so you can too.

It's funny how the Jewish grad school and a couple of the previously Catholic schools are now far more inclusive, but the Protestant ones are still so fiercely restrictive that I can't imagine trying to go stealth there. I would fear the populace. :_( Dammit, America, you shouldn't have to be an evangelical to study spiritual applications in daily life!!

In summary: I am disappointed by the human race. I will crawl back under my academic rock now to sulk and weep and feel miserable because I am not a mainstream Christian and don't get to play with their shiny nerd toys. ;_; FUCK MY LIFE.

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sigh

Sat, 08 May 2010 01:56:22 GMT

( As the title says. )

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Class Has Ended.

Thu, 06 May 2010 07:10:12 GMT

The last day of regular class was yesterday; all that's happening from this point on, for the rest of this week and next, are finals.

( My brain leaked and I typed about random things. Spewwwwww. :P )

...Also, now that I'm preparing to wrap up, I realize that I forgot to write about one of the things that I had originally meant to write about. It'll have to wait. Note to self: you know, the crap about the provost's office. X(

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Too Many Memories.

Sun, 02 May 2010 12:56:58 GMT

I had meant for today to be very productive, because I am still very busy and finals start next week. Unfortunately, I happened to start reading Alice Miller's analysis of Franz Kafka in Thou Shalt Not Be Aware, and it sucked me in so completely that I could not resist finishing the chapter, punctuating the reading with long stretches of painful introspection. In a sense, I feel as if today was extremely productive, although I do rather regret not giving time to all the textbooks and things that I was supposed to have been focusing on. I'm hoping that if I get up early tomorrow morning and keep myself motivated, then I'll be able to remain on schedule.

The retention board meeting on Wednesday did happen. Obviously, I am still alive...and, at least for now, I seem to still be in the program, although I am not certain of this fact. But because there is so much else going on and I'm being pulled in so many different directions, I can only put the issue to one side and proceed as if it were no longer a problem, which I hope is the case...

( Miller, her writing style, and my reactions to her books. )
( Past experiences with four mental health professionals as evidence for the existence of 'poisonous pedagogy.' )
( Continuing to consider compulsive buying. )
( Intro to memories. A woman's correct ambitions. )
( Priesthood and the awe of deep space. )
( Learning to hate the artistic urge. )
( The acceptability of asexual creative urges vs. sexual physical urges. (Possibly NSFW) )
( Hopelessness from a predetermined future. )
( Regular interstate moves cause a lack of connections. )
( Soul retrieval fails due to unwise self-disclosure. )
( Tangent: Returning to the subject of feeling unsafe at home. )
( Finale: Experiencing past negative emotions actually prompts more realistic understanding. )

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Grief.

Mon, 26 Apr 2010 20:41:11 GMT

Two days now until the retention board.

I was able to work up the courage to ask one of the third-year advisors about the specific details of my case. He seems to think that it's almost entirely due to the length of time that I've been on profile...but if that's true, then why isn't the other long-term profile person also going before the board? Considering especially the fact that I've been able to take and pass the PT test once already this semester, and see no reason why I would be unable to do so again on Wednesday. I am up to standard already.

I've been coping just by keeping my head solidly beneath the sand. I let the others calm me down, telling myself that there's surely nothing to worry about. I let myself get distracted by any sort of little shiny thing that wanders by, and I go looking for distractions if they fail to present themselves when I need them. I've been keeping it together that way. But I just don't know if I can do it for that much longer.

My mom have been bugging me about the GRE and my grad school work, which I admit that I've not been doing. It's shameful to say it, but keeping myself distracted enough so that I don't have a complete meltdown has been taking up a lot of my time. And it occurred to me today that if I get thrown out of the program, then all of that stuff won't matter anyway. Maybe I'll end up being glad that I didn't spend $150 on the GRE earlier in the semester. Maybe I'll find myself future-rich on account of not having to pay maybe $2K just to package and send out grad school apps at the end of the year.

It won't matter. None of it will matter. I've been working so hard at all of these things, going through so much pain and frustration and loneliness for years, and two days from now it could all be worth nothing. All that effort, trying to get myself to a place where I could help other people and be useful in some meaningful way...just a waste of time, money, energy, life.

The people making this decision don't have to care about how it affects me. They've got me over the barrel already, since the Army owns me financially and now just has to decide at its leisure if it's going to make me an officer or an NCO. And of course they'll let me enlist if I get thrown out of ROTC--they're so desperate to get meat in the grinder nowadays that they'll take any idiot who can run and pull a trigger.

It's a job. A lot of people are having trouble getting jobs right now, and at least it would be a job. But it wouldn't be my job. I've spent years already working at jobs that I didn't care about just to get money, and I moved out here and made these changes because I was sick of it and I wanted to do something that I actually gave a damn about. If I enlist, I don't have any way to get a doctorate. They won't even let me get a master's in counseling psych, for some fuckheaded reason that must have made a lot of sense to some general in Washington. They'll keep me for as long as they want me, and I'll get to spend even more years doing a job that I don't care about until suddenly I'm 40 and I'm looking at my life and wondering why I was never able to do anything that I actually wanted to do with myself.

The other people on the board list seem resigned to their fates already, making me wonder if my optimism is not hopelessly deluded. I want to try and keep up the last bit of hope that I have, right up until the moment when somebody in the cadre tells me to my face that I'm disenrolled and hands me my GTFO papers. I did not need to be standing next to some fool in formation this morning who was saying things like, "I don't even know why I came to PT this morning, since I'm going to be kicked out on Thursday!"

I guess I don't know why I did either. I don't know why I'm still prepping to go to lab tomorrow and put myself through all that stress when I might get the axe the very next day. It's just...I don't know what else to do because I feel helpless to really do anything, so I can only keep moving in lockstep and pretend like all of this still matters for some reason.

I feel so powerless and terrified.

One of the office ladies asked me what I was thinking about the board and all I could do was quip that at least I hadn't killed myself yet. They said that I should be careful with that kind of talk, but what else could I be expected to say? That I'm looking forward to it? That it's done nothing to my stress level whatsoever? That it doesn't matter to me if I get retained or not? It should be no shock to learn that people might just take a massive downward turn when all of their hopes are shattered and they're saddled with a huge debt just because. (People keep seeming surprised to learn that I'm on the board list. If everyone has trouble thinking of reasons why I'm on it, then why the fuck am I on it??)

But if things get to that point, they'll have washed their hands of me already. No one in that organization will have to care at all what the consequences are for me. I won't be one of them anymore. Some of the other cadets who used to be friendly with me are already treating me strangely--I wish that the whole board issue would have stayed hush-hush, but some of the people on it are the type who can't keep shit to themselves, so anyone who's curious likely knows all the details by now. I'm already being separated from the group, I suppose.

Still haven't told the parents. I will give them the bad news when it's all over.

Intellectually, I know that the best possible thing for me is probably to give myself enough time to curl up in the dark and cry my fucking eyes out, just feeling all the terror. I haven't done that for myself at all, because every time I start dwelling on these thoughts I push them back under the carpet so that I can focus on getting day-to-day details right. Maybe if I just soak in it until it all runs out of me, then I can get my head clear and I can actually think about it instead of running away all the time. I do need to prepare some kind of statement, after all...fuck, I wish I knew more about how these things are run.

I'm so scared of losing it. There's this fear that if I let it all out at full strength, then I won't be able to get myself back from it again. I've held on for this long...gods, I'm so tired. I'm so damn tired of everything.

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More Assorted Things.

Fri, 23 Apr 2010 05:55:55 GMT

Just got done two exams today, though I don't feel particularly optimistic about either, particularly the no-review ROTC final... -_-; I just need this semester to be over. It went in the tank so damn fast and has just stayed there the entire time, and at this point I have little energy or interest in desperately trying to salvage all the mangled bits of it.

There are things that I could be doing, but since there is nothing gun-to-the-head vital to do for tomorrow and since I am sick of all my various forms of productivity and the things that they do to my mind, I am journalling instead. Perhaps if I get it out of my system now, I can use Friday for more useful pastimes.

*
( I wish I had a gender space. )
*
( Considering male vs. female nurturing styles, plus a wish for more flexible mental software. )
*
( My abnormal psychology class is teaching me too much about myself. Fear, concern, and denial result. )
*
( What is and is not a game. )

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And Then...

Fri, 16 Apr 2010 04:40:54 GMT

( Misc. life updates. Nothing much new. )

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As I said before...

Wed, 07 Apr 2010 02:28:31 GMT

( ...It is always possible for things to get worse, even after they have already gotten worse. )

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Because it is always possible for things to get worse.

Fri, 02 Apr 2010 00:57:48 GMT

( As the title says. )

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brood

Wed, 31 Mar 2010 03:11:21 GMT

( Sad because little artificial things make me happy. Brain is broke, continue on. :( )

--Riss.

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So, then...

Sat, 13 Feb 2010 00:13:41 GMT

The last post that I made was symptomatic of the Inside conflicts that we're having. Things are reaching a peak, it seems. BT has said that he will declare war against me if I make myself into a jailer and an enemy, and the Dragon appears to be supporting him... [S] has given conditional support, stating that there should be no violence or genuine chaos, for everyone's sake. Although BT seems aware of the "psychic wars" that threw us into a mental health death spiral a decade ago (when it was largely the Dragon and I fighting for dominance and exhausting ourselves so completely that we couldn't spend any effort on the Outside anymore), he claims to have no reservations about tearing everything apart to protect himself and his interests.

A complicated situation...one that I won't fully detail because such things are not really of any concern to people Outside unless the war actually begins and we collectively start losing functionality. At the moment, he and I are engaged in the Inside equivalent of macho posturing, guns pressed to each others' heads, standing our ground until one of us turns chicken and agrees to the other's demands. Things are not especially peachy. There is a lot of eggshell-walking going on and cruel truths are being lobbed across the lines like grenades.

But they have their preferred weapons, and it's not like we've stopped talking entirely. He and [S] considered ways to undermine my perceptions about duty and security, and today they were able to collapse a fairly important part of it...not completely, but enough to prove their point, and further research might finish the job for them. But they have shown that there are holes in my logic that I cannot continue to ignore.

And they were right. When that part of my thinking was proved to be false, I was glad. It became something loose and free, suddenly full of formless potential.

We'll see how the weekend goes. For now, I'm tired and aching from the semester's first ruck march. Possibly we'll watch a little Dennou Coil and then go to bed insanely early so that we can be productive during the weekend.

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Tangles.

Thu, 11 Feb 2010 04:15:36 GMT

--- Have a little bit of time before I need to do some computer work. Eating on the side as I type. Getting used to my exercise glasses, which make things seem superfocused, possibly due to the curved lenses and our astigmatism--usually I never wear glasses during PT, but since we're adding D&C onto the ends of things, I need to be able to see farther than ten feet in order to steer a squad without running into things. This morning was wonderfully embarrassing. :/

--- A few days ago, I went to put our chain training collar on and discovered that the new lock that we'd bought for it not too long ago now refuses to open or even to let the key all the way in. It had been acting strange the last couple of times we used it, but I suppose that I wanted to have faith in the superior workmanship of these new locks and ignored the signs. Now I need to find a pair of bolt cutters to get rid of the broken lock if I want to try this a third time.

Much as I wish I could have a collar to wear again (I'm still not completely used to the sensation of having it on my neck, but I'd started looking forward to wearing it on non-uniform days), I don't feel too inclined to search out the hardware necessary to make this happen. It's rather distressing to have the brand-new lock fail so quickly...

I'm not sure if this is the universe's way of telling me that I should not be wearing collars for any reason, or if it's saying that training wheels are for losers and I should just scrape up that $250 and get a big kid's collar before I find a way to bleed all that cash out on Amazon MP3s over the next few months. :/

( Dealing with a certain form of disrespect. )

( How I am able to look my limitless potential in the face and still turn away. )

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A Wandering Story and a Confession.

Sun, 07 Feb 2010 10:56:15 GMT

( In which Riss tells stories about old music. AGAIN. )
***
( In which Riss admits to part of the dirty truth behind its obsession with WH40K. )

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Wait, What?

Thu, 04 Feb 2010 02:03:01 GMT

I learned Tuesday that I'm somehow already considered a member of the local Scabbard & Blade group, even though I never did the induction work. I'm confused because, back when they were first rebuilding that program in AROTC, I asked both the cadet commander and the cadre advisor about it (because people said that I should belong to it) and got two promises of induction info to be emailed; when it never happened, I figured that this was a subtle way of telling me that I should not try to gain entry, so I quietly dropped it.

...It weirds me out because, really, I probably don't belong in it. My GPA is the only remarkable thing about me, and even so I'm fairly certain that I'm not the only one in AROTC with a 4.0+. (Getting a high GPA is a matter of game-playing, not of actual intelligence. I am living proof.) S&B is a pan-military honors society designed to include the top 10% of a battalion's cadets, based not only on GPA but on leadership potential. When I learned this, I realized that the cadre should really be choosing members carefully--better to induct well-rounded people with decent grades and proven command ability than to just include all the nerds by default.

*sigh* Well...I dunno. I went to the first meeting of the semester tonight, and it seems like their primary purpose is to plan the spring military ball...only half the jobs were already taken and they were talking about stuff as if they'd been planning it for a while, so I'm not sure what they expect us new people to do. The cadet commander mentioned some things about working with homeless veterans as the S&B community service project this semester, which would be interesting for me, at least--I was hoping to maybe get involved with local VA hospitals in the hopes of getting an internship sometime in my senior year.

Sometimes I wonder if I should be less mercenary. S&B would certainly look good on resumes and the like, so it's certainly useful to join it, even if I have no idea who decided that I deserved to be in it. A hookup with VA would be useful because I need an internship to further feather my hat when pimping myself to grad schools. And hey, the Army and I are already using each other in a decently symbiotic sort of way.

I notice that not being able to do exactly what I want with myself tends to make me rather cold and vicious, though I do as much damage control as I can to keep the hurt from overflowing onto anybody else. (Who knows if I actually succeed--I'd better be, with the way I worry about this shit and about how other people are feeling about what I'm doing.) I'm aware that it's rather childish to be angry over not getting my way...perhaps if I got my way just once in a while with something actually meaningful to me then I'd be able to deal better with having most of my life ruled by other people. I do get vaguely disturbed whenever I catch myself thinking that I don't care whose throat I need to step on to get to where I want to be. (How sad that Type Double-X humans are not allowed in combat arms. Were I able to usefully harness this total lack of concern, I might make a quality stone-cold killer. Another life, perhaps~)

Still dealing with some chronic pain that's been going on for a while now, though the tiredness and breathing problems have been gradually improving; nonetheless, physical evils may be making me extra snarly and in hate with the world at the moment, so perhaps this mood will pass once I recover somewhat. I have a couple of tests to study for, but also some time tomorrow morning and in the middle of the day since a class got canceled, so...I'm debating how much I feel like doing tonight. Perhaps I'll be back after showering, who knows.

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Tired of Everything (Literally, This Time).

Wed, 03 Feb 2010 03:03:13 GMT

I am so glad that I already have a "bitch-n-moan" tag on this journal.

A little something pleasant: In the process of texting all my underlings the PT info, I got a "Yes, sir" text back from the newest of the new guys. Yes, sir...*sigh* Ah, if only I deserved that one. Anyway...

( Bitching and moaning, as promised. )

Well, time to sleep. Again.

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Thoughts on the Military.

Sat, 23 Jan 2010 03:18:02 GMT

I need to stop stalling and begin doing in-depth self-examination work, on top of moving along RL projects that needed finishing a week or so ago. But today a person in my behavioral psych class (side note: odd that the university describes these courses as fulfilling a cogpsy requirement, but it is all good, useful information anyway) came up to me and asked if I was in ROTC. She was also, but on the Air Force side, and we talked in the hall after class for the better part of an hour, comparing the two programs.

( Continued. Long, rambling. )

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