Weekend in Review

We might live on the most stressful Naval base on the planet, but there are benefits to being a student. The occasional four-day weekend, for starters.

Friday, I got to meet Allan's mom and grandma. Wildfire would be the best steakhouse I've been to in the Great Lakes area. So, so good. Admittedly, it's probably also the first steakhouse I've been to this year, but it was wonderful.

Saturday, I was on duty. Spent the day doing laundry and watching movies that I hadn't seen before. Cars was good and fun and I now want to take two weeks out of a summer to drive Route 66.

I made the mistake of watching Alien late at night - wrapped up around 0100. This would be the first time I'd seen it - had it recommended to me by my mild-natured Pixar-loving friend. I forgot that my mild-natured Pixar-loving friend also loves Sci Fi, and has a much higher fear tolerance than anyone would suspect. Owing to the fact that I'm a night student, I was up late with the lights off out of respect for my sleeping roommates. Owing to the fact that I'm a little behind on sleep and it's the middle of the night, the phantoms of my imagination seem much more solid. Owing to the business of me sleeping on the floor...it's just really easy to picture an adult Alien coming in and leaning ominously over your vulnerable, unconscious form. I didn't fall asleep for about an hour, just shaking.

Note: For anyone concerned about how we DOD personnel handle fear - there is a massive difference between imminent danger and movie-fear. Movie-fear is confined to the screen, and there isn't anything you can do to change the situation, because it's in there and you're out here. You can't help the physiological response, and that actually kind of makes you mad, because you're not really scared, your body is just jacked up on adrenaline. Real situations are different, because there's enough time to drop a load of adrenaline in your system, but you're anything but paralyzed - you know exactly what to do and where to go. This actually came up at Camp a few times - as long as we have something to do, we're not going to melt down. I need to be actively engaged on some kind of work, even if it's just talking someone else down from a meltdown, or hauling down some tents or something completely unrelated to the situation. Throw myself into something, and we'll be cool until everything's quieted down again. Tell me that there's nothing I can do or work on here, and then all the adrenaline meets up with all the emotion, and you get a big mess.

Sunday, Julia foisted a Harvard Lampoon parody on me. "Night Light." You can guess what it's parodying. I have indeed read the Twilight series, but I don't feel the need to repeat the experience. (It was mostly, "Well, I work in a bookstore; I should probably at least be able to TALK about these. I don't have to like them." Similar viewpoint on Hemingway, but for different reasons. Can't stand Hemingway.) I finished Night Light in about an hour, and returned it to Julia's roommate with the words, "Tell her that this is the worst thing I have read in my life." And it was. If you haven't read Twilight, you'll still be thinking of Night Light, "This is awful," but you won't entirely grasp WHY it's so awful. The simple fact is that if you're parodying something that's already pretty bad, your best option is just to make the result REALLY bad. I'm pretty sure this was indeed the worst thing I've read in my life.

I make no apologies to vampire fans I have just offended. You want good vampire lit, read an Anne Rice novel.

Also met up with Allan and family for the base theater's showing of Inception. That was a good time. The first time I saw this with friends, we had to skip out on the ending in order to make it back before liberty expired. So, seeing this the second time, caught a few more details, don't know if I enjoyed it more, but it was still good. Ending had me thinking of the story we three girls heard, about a man who leaves home looking for Paradise, has his course thrown off by a demon, and comes into a house with a woman who looks like his wife, and children who look like his whoask him to stay. To please them he agrees, and lives there to this day, "never knowing if he is in Paradise or not."

Monday was a splendid day. The night before, my friend Avery was on the watch closest to my deck of the barracks. The best part about late-night ladderwell watches is that you can do a LOT that isn't exactly watch-related, as long as you're standing where you need to be and keeping an eye on who's coming and going. (Myself, I prefer sudoku or having a decent book - this most likely will not fly in the Fleet.) So, my friend Wilki and I are keeping Avery company - she's coloring a velvet highlighter poster (these are oddly popular on base), and I'm reading excerpts of the Harvard Lampoon travesty. And somehow over the course of the hours, Avery and I make plans for Emily's the next morning.

Emily's isn't in the same category as Wildfire at all. It's not as pricey, not as amazing, and, well, they're not a steakhouse. They're a pancake house. And they're pretty good. Wildfire's more like, "We're going out to celebrate something special," but Emily's is the place that I'd go every Saturday morning, if I had every Saturday morning off. They have pancakes. They have waffles. They have blintzes. They have crepes. And they're really, really nice.

Also, thanks to Avery and this Monday, I now have a decent, reliable cab service in the area to call. This is a big deal to us - we're dependent on the cabs to get around, and we don't particularly LIKE the ones that just show up to base. They're okay, not great.

After breakfast, we regroup. What's next? Well, Avery's got something to return at Best Buy. Pulls out his phone, which in his case is also his gps. Best Buy's six miles from here. No problem. We start walking.

Found a thrift store - closed for Labor Day, but logged that away for later. Thrift stores are a lot of fun. Found a Salvation Army - went in looking for flannel shirts. Fall's coming, that's why. No luck. Flannel suit coat is something I didn't need to know existed in this universe - although if I'd been thinking, I would have gotten the lot for the Aires for their Christmas show. Red, green, and tacky seems to be the theme for our elf-gear. Randomly ran across a Frank Peretti book - got that instead. Yay.

Crossed from Waukegan into Gurnee. Learned that Avery doesn't do so well identifying plants, pointed out a half-dozen that he's planning to forget as soon as he gets back home. Found a church that looks interesting. Found a park that holds a Farmer's Market every Friday - had Avery send a picture of it to Julia, it's a lot closer to base than the other one we found. Found a Dairy Queen. Stopped for Blizzards, had a conversation about family (mine's awesome, his drives him nuts). Passed the road to Six Flags, and the hotel where everyone stays when they do a Six Flags weekend. Found a Starbucks, and a Chuck E. Cheese (the last is significant to Avery - he's planning on coming back). Found the Interstate. Huh.

Look at Avery. He looks at me. One of us is wearing a Navy t-shirt. One of us CLEARLY has a military haircut. Both of us probably shouldn't be doing something visibly illegal like walking across the highway. If word gets back to base (as word has a sneaky way of doing when one does not expect it), we will be in A Lot Of Trouble. And neither one of us can afford to lose our program, which is one avenue that Trouble can take if the Captain's feeling cranky. We go back to Starbucks. Call a cab. Get Starbucks.

Travel two miles via cab, hit Best Buy. In my experience, sending a guy into Best Buy is right up there with...well, a guy sending me into a bookstore. I took the opportunity to catch up with people-I'm-supposed-to-call. Right in the middle of a decent debate about DADT with one of my civilian buddies when he came back. Headed over to the mall.

Salt was good. I have a thing about kick-butt girls in movies. I simply have little use for any other kind. Princess Buttercup and Snow White come to mind. Yes, they're pretty and all, but crisis situation, their first response is to throw up their hands and desperately sigh, "Oh dear." This is well and good when the guys are around and get to play the part of the bold and brave hero, and we applaud them for that, but if it's just you waiting on a hero to manifest, you're probably going to get eaten.

Note: I'm not sure WHY I feel this way, because for the next six years, I will probably NEVER be in a situation where there aren't any guys around. 10:1 ratio's the best one I've heard so far, my base is 35:1, and carriers are still 50:1.

But, yes, Salt was good. Open-ended, but you get the feeling that it's supposed to be, that this is establishing where the character Salt came from for the future saga. Really felt like a prequel, just out of order.

We got decent Chinese food (not great, but quite a bit ahead of the nonsense that the galley masquerades as being Chinese). We'd already had Dairy Queen, Starbucks, and Emily's. Foodwise, it was a very good day.

Company-wise, it was splendid - Avery's like everyone's big brother, with a very solid element of weird-goofy to balance it all out. He's also like a big Doberman that has the personality of a Labrador - everyone's really intimidated by him, but he's a huge goof. Good friend. Good food. Good day.