Raining Cats and Dogs

It's been pouring non-stop since I woke up this afternoon and since I don't have a car down here, I get to walk everywhere which means when it's raining, I get to sit in my hotel room. I've literally exhausted everything I can think to do, and you really don't want to know what that list includes.

One of the things I have been doing is checking the "personal ads" on craigslist for the area I'm in, just for shits and grins. Here's some of what I've come up with so far:

re: ASSHOLE AT FT. *******

Oh I have notice that he email me as well replying to my ad. Thanks you so much ladies that i don't have to waste my time on a low life jerk like this

Yeah, well apparently you didn't waste too much time in English class, did you sweetheart?


Any men with class?

Are there any UNMARRIED men with an education and class in *********?

No

I have not come across one. Either I hear vulgar language or much anger. I am not responsible for your life or your lack of class. Does any man have any manners?

Sometimes but only when we want to get down your pants. You must be either ugly or a bitch or both.


Well, if there is one out there that knows how to behave around a woman, i.e. do NOT bring up former women, complain about your job, complain about your children, complain how everyone is out to get you, then I'd like to hear from you.

Jesus, and find me one woman that doesn't complain constantly. In fact, you were just complaining about how men don't have manners.

I am over age 40 and you should be, too, but less than dead. Oh, I am not interested in your basic lying man, far too many of those, too.

Good luck bitch. I hope you die alone.

Where are you.... - 33


WHITE guys on here looking for a big girl???? 5"10" blond, kind of cute! Please be white, single and like the bigger girls. I am real, send a pic!

Hmmm... racist much? Or is it that you've had too much black dick over the years and want to try a little variety. Good luck finding a white guy willing to pork your fat ass.

And just so I'm not making fun of only the pathetic ladies out there, I'll add some of the "man looking for woman" posts as well:

Looking for cute girl to watch Battlestar Galactica - 23

Its a rainy night, and I'm going to stay in, but I don't want to do it alone! I'm a 23 year old guy who's pretty new to Savannah, and I haven't met anyone to spend time with yet. I am thinking about starting Battlestar Galactica (I haven't seen it yet and I heard it was the best show around!). Anyways, I'm looking for an attractive, possibly nerdy girl to come over and hang out. I'm an employed, fit, pretty good looking guy. Hit me up with a picture if you're interested, and I'll gladly answer any questions!

Right, if you're an employed, fit, and pretty good-looking guy you:
1. Wouldn't be home alone on a saturday night watching Battlestar Galactica.
2. Would have posted a picture to prove it.
3. Wouldn't be looking for a date on CRAIGSLIST.

Companionship - 19

I am 19 year old white male, thin, brown shoulder-length hair, and hazel eyes.

I'm a pretty laid back guy. Not much bothers me. I have taken an interest in astronomy, psychology, technology, comic books, and video games. I'm the quiet, shy type. I listen to Red Hot Chili Peppers and Nirvana, among others. I'm the typical geek who spends his lonely night just looking up random bits of information with no particular goal in mind, other than just reading. I play the guitar. Not well, but i'm better than the dumbasses who think they can play.



Yeah, the poor guy included a picture of himself. I kind of feel bad for him. I guess that's what he's going for. "I'm a loser so can I get a pity fuck?" Sorry dude. On the bright side you only have 2 more years before you can go to the bar and pick up wasted whores!


I could be your Prince Charming in disguise - 21



Yeah, in the disguise of the kid from Superbad.

Ok, well now that I've taken out all my frustrations toward being bored out of my mind on random people from craigslist I think I'm going to go to sleep, and by that I mean lay in bed with the TV on for a couple of hours til I pass out.

As a military member I am offended by:

He first says "my unit." Second he says "you would have never come close to what I've done where I've been." What the hell? Did he stab some Gook with his pen? Did he blind the enemy with his camera flash? This man is the anti-christ. No self-respecting human should watch his show. And if you think he's just an asshole to people on his show, get a load of this:





But my favorite so far is this one:





That's right, Bill takes the speaker's line completely out of context and then balks when the kid takes something from HIS OWN BOOK out of context. I love it.

Thank you for joining me on the "Bill OReily sucks giant balls" edition of Overseas tales of a Texas Ranger. And to play me off is -- what the hell is that? I can't read that. Geez, this thing Fucking sucks...

/wrists

Monday, March 23
All names that follow are made up. All events that follow are true to the best of my reckoning.

So training started today. I wasn’t there for it. The military has this awesome way of waiting until the last minute to get things done, and then panicking when they realize that… there’s no time to do it. Originally I was supposed to be there two days ago, plenty of time to get settled in and find who the hell I have to report to and where. Instead I have a day to make up, no contact information for anyone down here, and no clue how to get to base from the hotel (or how I’m going to do that with no car, for that matter). At this point all I really want to do is get my room, power on my laptop, play some video games til my wife gets home from work, and call her on skype. Instead I have a laundry list of things I need to do before I can even consider relaxing.

I did have an interesting weekend though. Had some people over, had some drinks, good times were had. By far the most interesting was Saturday night/Sunday morning. After I had gone to bed and advised the others to remain inside if they were going to be loud, everyone decided to go on a beer run (walking, don’t worry). After obtaining said beer, they were stopped by a cop (mind you only one of them was “legally” allowed to consume alcohol). One of my buddies, we’ll call him Adam, decided he would take the fall for the other two, since the other under-aged guy was military and he didn’t want the eligible guy to get busted for providing. In his infinite wisdom, he decided the best course of action would be to act like a complete asshole to the cops to draw their focus away. The cop asked him where the beer can he was carrying was and he denied having one. The cop said “I saw you carrying it,” and he “And I say I didn’t have one but here’s the thing, you’re a cop and I’m not so they’re going to believe whatever you say so go ahead and say whatever the F*** you want ‘cause it really doesn’t matter.” Then another cop showed up and said “I saw you—,“ “Shut the hell up. You just F***ing got here. You didn’t see S***” Hilarious. So, he obviously went to jail, the cop instructing the other two guys “If you want to see your friend, bring $100 to the [local] police department.”

So they went to the police station and bailed him out. Then they decided that Jack in the Box plus more alcohol would be a great thing for Adam to have. He chugged half a bottle of schnapps to go on top of J.I.T.B. egg rolls and God knows what else.




Adam with his MIP

At roughly 7am I was woken by the sound of glass shattering in my living room, not one of my favorite sounds I can assure you. Jumped out of bed and, I think, kindly inquired as to what the F*** was going on. I see couch cushions everywhere, Adam sprawled between the couch and coffee table, various items from my coffee table that used to be whole and intact strewn about the floor, and both Jay and Tony “facepalming.”

“He’s a little drunk,” explained Tony.
“I see that. What’s going on?”
“I don’t know, we all laid down to finally go to sleep when that happened. I think he tried to get up to go to the bathroom.”

It was at that point that Adam looked up at me with the look that Clarice had on her face the first time she met Hannibal Lector, arched his back like he was competing for the loogie long-distance record, and vomited the brownest, most viscous liquid I have seen this side swamp mud 3 ½ feet across the room at me.

The rest is history.

Tuesday March 24

So I guess it wasn't as bad as I thought it would be. I'm sorry, that's an understatement. It's actually pretty cool. Class runs 4 days a week (although we might go Friday this week) for roughly 5 hours a day. The hotel they have me staying in is pretty sweet:







As you may or may not be able to tell there is a mini fridge and microwave to go along with the king-sized bed. The hotel also has a pool and spa, neither of which I have been to yet. But hey, enough with the silver lining and on with the bitching.

One would think having 3 day weekends for a month would be great but what the heck am I supposed to do in Fort BFE? There is literally nothing here. A couple of restaurants that I'm sure are supported in whole by the military and a Wal Mart and other assorted super markets. The nearest "anything to do" is an hour drive and, guess what, I don't have a car. Awesome. So I think my free time is going to be spent playing video games and watching tv. I know, exciting.

I really don't want to get started on the training but I think I should for entertainment's sake. It's basically a shoddy tracking program on a linux platform on an archaic computer. The best part is that I get to take this class with a handful of Army guys and boy are they smart! One tried being a tough-guy over the keyboard to me and told me "You look like a peer queer," which I am assuming is a reference to a seaman (navy). I wish I could have mustered the effort to justify that with a response but I was too hung-over to care about exchanging wits with, I'm sure, the army's best. The class is literally "point at this button, click it. You should see this. Any questions?" I swear to God those neanderthal bullet-catchers raised their hands every frickin time: "uhh, what button?" God save me if these are the people I'm working with for the next year...

Welcome

Hopefully this is the first of many posts.


I'm deploying and have received several requests to create a blog so people can stay updated on whatever crap I decide to get myself into while I'm in training and over in the AOR. I'll try to include as many specifics as I can but we all know that, with the military, certain details can't be discussed openly or on a medium such as this. I will promise that everything I include on this blog is true to the best of my recollection. I say recollection because I may not be able to update this as much as I would like while over there; maybe never, who knows? I will at the very least be keeping a paper journal so I put everything down that happens over the course of the next year that will be the bane of my existence.


As you may or may not know, I'm not exactly pleased about my current situation. Let me explain:


To say I skated through high school would be to say that water is damp. I barely graduated but not because I didn't understand the material; my diction may lead you to believe I've taken a few english classes in my day. I skated through high school because I couldn't muster the motivation to get off my butt and do the homework I viewed as a pointless exercise. I was never one to practice anything. If I wasn't instantly good at it, it wasn't worth my time. So I didn't do my schoolwork. I don't pretend that I'm the first or the last person to underachieve, it's just a fact of life.


My lack of motivation to get my schoolwork done directly resulted in my lack of motivation to apply to more colleges after getting rejected by my first 3 choices. I had a good ACT score (29) but nobody wanted a student with a 2.4 GPA who had to take extra classes his senior year to receive enough credits to graduate. I'm sure I could have gotten into community college but I was above that. Instead I decided to take myself into the "real" world. That's right, I got a job. But even more than that dude, I got a Dell.


I worked for a company that did subcontracting for Dell. I received work-orders in the morning and went out an repaired computers that needed hardware replacements during the afternoon. It paid good when there was work to be done but more often than not there was only a couple of work orders to be split between 3 technicians. The money wasn't cutting it. I was stuck in a job that wasn't paying the bills in a small town that wasn't going anywhere for me. I needed a catalyst for change and that catalyst turned out to be the Air Force.


I got the glory story that every 18-23 year old receives. Talk of the money, the benefits, the job experience, the fact that I could retire at age 39, etc. etc. etc. I heard everything I wanted to hear and was told everything I wanted to be told. It was too perfect. So I put the pen to paper. I signed up to be a computer programmer for two reasons. (breaking news: I'm watching CBS and they are running a section of Facebook Faux Pas. And I just heard the reporter use the word "newbies." Just thought you should know.) Reason number one: I thought I wanted to do that for a living. I also thought wrong. Reason number two: how many computer programmers get deployed? Honestly...


Fast foreward one and a half years. I've been at my first assignment for just over a year and it's not bad. I guess you could say it's like any office setting. There's people I really like and there's people I will never miss when I leave. People gave me a hard time when I first got there because, well, you could say I'm a smartass and needed to be taken down a couple notches. I think there's probably a better chance Will Farrel putting out a genuinely funny movie than a few hopped-up upper management I-so-fucking-important jerks bringing me down or adjusting my attitude for long. Thankfully most of the people that had a hard-on for me left or deployed after a while so I kind of got to adjust my surrounding to me after a while. A few people learned to take me a lot less seriously and I learned to take them a lot less seriously. Trust me, the military has enough seriousness as it is, it doesn't need me to add to it. I think most people that know me there now realize that I joined for one reason: to mop up the mistakes I made when I was younger. I'm not in it for the long run. I'm not the most patriotic person in America. I'm not all "HooRAH!" about the conflict in Afghanistan and Iraq. I don't hate my country, I just don't always agree with it. Horray for freedom, right? I want to get my college paid for. I want to have a decent and secure job while I'm earning that. I want that job to get me valuable experience for when I'm on the outside.


So needless to say I didn't exactly volunteer for this assignment. My whole attidute the last couple of weeks that I've known about this has been "psh, I'm not going to do that. What's the worse they can do, not deploy me?" While probably false, that's my mindset. I'm going to miss my wife, my friends, and my family. Hell, I'm going to miss my dog more than all of them! The only upside to this is that I'm going with a good friend. That's honestly the only thing that has kept me from trying to botch this in any way possible to get out of going. That being said, this should be very interesting. Hopefully I can come out of the experience with some funny stories. I'm going to be bored over there so I'm going to have to entertain myself somehow. I'm not going to lie, 75% of this blog will probably be me bitching. I'm 9 time zones away from everything I know, what do you expect? But hopefully I can pull enough out of my day to fill the other 25% with tales of adventure, comedy, and debauchery. If I can't do that then I'll just fill in the rest with white space.


PS,
As a computer programmer, it depresses me that I had to put html tags in this to get it format the way I wanted...