A Little Bit More About Me ...

It's been a while since I've blogged but I'm ready to start again.  I've got things going on in my life that make this a superb outlet for blogging.  I'm old now ... really old.  I'm 40 and that doesn't sound old, but when you can remember when you having a pager was cool ... hell, that's old.  But I stopped blogging before when life caught up with me.  It's a hard job to keep saying something witty and relevant everyday aside from idle bitching.

I'm in the National Guard right now and we're getting ready to deploy to Iraq.  It's for roughly a year but with the Army, who knows?  We know where we'll be but I'll tell you about that later.  Anyways, being in the Guard was something I did years before I met my wife.  If had been with her at that time, I wouldn't have went back in.  What I mean by "back in" is that I spent nearly 6 years on active duty back in the early 90's with a short little detour to Saudi Arabia and South Korea along the way.

Right now, I'm in Ft. Sill, Oklahoma.  My unit is doing just enough training so that we'll be unfamiliar with everything when we get there.  Right now, we're kind of in limbo waiting to actually pull out of this place.  We completed all of our training so we mostly just stare at one another and get annoyed with each other and even ourselves.  It's what happens when you keep grown men locked up and treat them like children.  We can't go off-post and have to sign a roster sheet showing where we're going at all times.  I think residents on daily meds at a retirement home have more freedom than we do.

We're constantly on our toes waiting for the next shoe to drop.  Some people say that this is actually good training for what we'll see over there.  I disagree wholeheartedly.  This is utter bullshit 90% of the time.  You see, I understand the whole Army bullshit mentality of "be ready for change".  I get this and I understand that things constantly change.  But there is a difference between changes in situations and what my unit does: last-minute training because some jack-off didn't plan out things well in advance so we get to jump through hoops so that said jack-off doesn't look bad.  

You can say "Well hey Cincy, my boss does that shit as well."  Not many of you work until 6 PM and then get called in on your day off to go do something that you're already certified to do.  If you do, then you can understand the hell that is the National Guard.  We truly are like the Army's Junior Varsity team: we work harder to prove ourselves; but if we did shit right in the first place, we wouldn't have to work harder.