Rest Easy Now

In the Fleet, depending on your command, you may have what's referred to as a 19-4 schedule. For an entire deployment.

This is rather ghastly in my opinion. Not that I mind working all the time when I'm awake, but that business of four hours a "night" makes me shudder. (You sleep when they tell you it's time to sleep. Your rest time could be from 1100 to 1500.) I desperately assume that your body adjusts to the weirdness, and hopefully soon. Mine hasn't yet, and I'm still getting six hours a night most nights. Seven is really nice, eight is wonderful. Eight only happens on Saturdays when I'm off duty.

It's possible to live off of micronaps. Very high stress, your body will reject almost everything you try to put into it (including light and possibly air), and you're going to be temporarily insane, but you can live through it, and recover later. What's been proven scientifically impossible, apparently, is complete sleep deprivation. If you're not permitted even the micronaps, your body will be able to sustain for about a week and a half. Before Day 12, your heart will stop. Just can't keep up - sleep is the time for all the little workers to run around and do repair and maintenance while the system's down.

So, it could be a lot worse than the present symptoms. They're interesting, though. Hierarchy of needs in action some days - I can get up and work because I need to, but I can't eat. Just not enough sleep. That's rare, though - the appetite vanishing is more of a stress thing than anything else. Your muscles hang off you a little differently, too. Skin hurts. That's a new one. The dermis aches, and the epidermis stings. Actually, feels almost exactly the way it did when we all got tear-gassed.

But the dreams, man, the dreams! I have amazing dreams at night. And I love the way falling asleep feels, when you actually get there. I didn't realize before this that you could feel "when" you were asleep. Actually, when you're asleep, it feels like everything's okay. The stress lifts, there's a distance between you and what's going on and everything you have to take care of, and you forget how much things are screwed up in your body and remember your body the way it's SUPPOSED to be. Maybe that's why I couldn't read it before.

I actually fall asleep now by dreaming about sleeping at home. On the couch in the living room, with a book forgotten in my hands and flopped down on my chest. Or out cold in the family room in the wee hours of the morning - I sleep there when my room's not an option for one reason or another, and there's something kinda cool in the atmosphere out there when the house is asleep. My room is my lair, kind of, and it's so strange to dream about a bed and space that are "mine" as much as that space is. I don't think about that one very much, because it feels too good, and it's hard to come back to here.

Obscurely, my sister's room is where I best DEEP sleep. I don't know what it is, but if I go to sleep in there, I am OUT, and usually for a lot longer than I normally would.

Anyway, I'm on duty today.

"I Got A Nickel!!"

The problem with gaining some solid perspective on the things we previously feared seems to be that fear is one of the greatest motivators of our lives. Take away that fear, and in its absence, I seem to float in a sort of complacent zero-gravity. When you figure out that you actually CAN deal with just about anything, the stick-shaking consequences don't carry as much weight. You have to actually pursue what's good, because you're no longer concerned about fleeing from what's bad.

Dangerous, dangerous. We're not made to sit still.

----

On a completely unrelated note, I was standing as the Petty Officer of the Watch for four hours on our quarterdeck. The Messenger of the Watch stands next to me - he's responsible for doing whatever running-around needs to be done in those four hours. I'm responsible for everything that's not supposed to happen on the quarterdeck.

During long watches, you find little things to amuse yourself. I don't know how well this would fly on a ship; I'm not there yet. Here, you'll often come in late at night to find the Watch playing The Name Game or something equivalent. Everyone has something. We do our job whenever people come by, but when you're faced with a good three hours of studying the opposite wall, you'll naturally begin to play with something. I like Sudoku, personally. This time around, the Messenger decided that he was going to ask for a quarter. From every person who passed by.

The splendid thing about asking for a quarter is that it gives the impression that you're very close to whatever it is you wanted out of the vending machine. So, even if someone doesn't have a quarter, they might still give you whatever other small coins are to be found in their pockets. He ended up getting three bottles of pop over the course of that watch, plus some 96 cents.

We stand between two flags - the National Ensign and the ship's flag. The USS Franklin was hit during the Battle of Coral Sea by two kamikaze pilots, killing over 900 sailors, but she still made it back to port; she's known as "The Ship That Wouldn't Die." The flag commemorates this incident. All of the barracks are named for ships that served well in battle.

I came back just as two Rovers from the Bonhomme Richard were walking off with our ship's flag neatly rolled. I raised a questioning eyebrow at the Messenger and he just assured me, "It's cool, they're from the Bonhomme Richard." Right. This explains nothing. All right.

Later, the watchbill coordinator came by and noticed the conspicuous absence (unsurprising - it's eight feet tall and a very strong blue), and demanded to know where the ship's flag was. I explained, "The Bonhomme Richard, ask the Messenger." Visibly agitated, she turned to the Messenger, just coming around the corner from some other task.

"The Bonhomme Richard stole our flag?!"
Not hearing her, he cheerfully announced, "I got a nickel!"

This unfortunate timing led to a swift-spreading rumor in the barracks that the Messenger of the Watch had given the Bonhomme Richard our ship's flag for a nickel. While it later transpired that the B.R. had been given the task of collecting all of the ship's flags for a parade that was to take place the next day, we're still hearing some echoes of it.

Wait On Me

Having completed Apprentice Technical Training, I now get to sit and wait a bit.

"I hate waiting." -Inigo Montoya

It's cool to be out, but said waiting period is supposedly not long enough to DO anything. Had I another week, I could schedule time to come home (I was particularly looking forward to that notion.) Had I another three weeks, I could chuck a college course in there.

Admittedly, this just heightens the challenge. The obvious is unattainable - what more obscure challenges could I pursue in this time?

More Technician moments.

It will happen from time to time that I must complete a procedure, but lack proper tools and/or hardware to do so.

The difference between regular class and open learning is that during class, my proctor knows me, or at least knows my habits, and understands that what I'm doing is not, in fact, goofing off. There are times indeed when I AM, but when you spend eight hours a day in the same class, same room, on the same material, your brain requires periodic momentary unhinging.

I swear, if they'd just let me do something with music theory, this would all balance out. I'd compose the snot out of that to contrast how much left-brain activity's going on!

Or, y'know, I'd do that thing at the gym where I bike and listen to my iPod while reading a book and lip-syncing the words to the song and make sure I can process what I'm reading well enough to enthusiastically describe it to Julia that evening. She and I have come to a comfortable relationship of respecting the other's small insanities.

But, by contrast, the instructors at Open Learning DON'T know me. I'm just another apprentice in digis. So they aren't used to the same quirks. They are also grumpy. To a one. I don't know where Petty Officers want to be in the evenings, but it definitely ain't HERE.

Petty Officer comes over to investigate some suspicious-looking connections I've just made. "What do you call this?"
I look up at him, probe and alligator lead in hand. "Jury rigging, FC1?"
He looks at me for a few seconds, then walks off. "Carry on."

Heh. Cool.

Momentous Occasion

And on the heels of that....

I shed my first gray hair tonight!

It's actually silver. And you're thinking I'm darn weird for being so excited about this. And you're most likely right, but fortunately, I don't care!

Oh. Random quote I heard this week. "Of course I'm a *****. I'm a Sailor. We're cocky as *** and we don't give a **** what anyone thinks of us!" This sums up a lot of my friends here, in multiple ways.

But yeah, playing with my hair at ATT (I don't know that this helps me concentrate on what I'm doing, but it does help me stay awake; a valid concern when one's classroom is 85 degrees), found a shiny. I was fascinated - this would probably be less interesting if I was blonde, but it came off of me and it's not dark! This is so strange!

Anyway. That's not exactly news, but I'm excited. I have this thing about growing older - I plan on enjoying myself while I'm at it.

Happy Birthday!

So, yeah. 'Tis my sister's birthday today. She is all kinds of amazing.

You really can't say that you're the only one making sacrifices when you join the military. We're all big on the business of "giving up our freedoms to defend yours," but our families go with us as far as they can, and miss us when they can't. There've been a lot of things over the last six months that I wish I could have shared with my family, and they've all been amazing.

So, I s'pose, when you're thanking a soldier/sailor, if they have any kind of family entourage with them, thank them as well. In my case, my family's been AMAZING about supporting me, so thank them first. :D

Long Time Lost

My friend Dan is one of the vampires over at Mayo, and understandably needed some time off. (Let's face it - you take a lot of verbal abuse when your job is to wake people up at 2 a.m. to put another needle in their arm - even when you're one of the nicest guys on the planet). And where, oh where, could an individual with interests in the arts and life sciences manage to entertain himself for a week?

Well, yes, there was a convention out in Washington that was right up his alley. But instead, he came down to Chicago for the week!

All right, yes, most of that week I was putting in a frenzy of extra hours at school. (I am trying, trying, TRYING to complete ATT by next Tuesday.) But we had set aside Saturday afternoon and evening for us. And he spent the rest of the week hitting the museums and other attractions in the area that made him happy.

We had a fine time together, and were headed back to Great Lakes from Elgin...and something went a bit wrong. And we didn't realize HOW wrong until we were nearly in Indiana. Hmmm. Oops.

But, while we didn't make it to back until almost 4 hours later than we'd planned (which meant that I didn't hit my rack until 0400 - fortunately, I didn't have to get up until 0930 the next day, it being Sunday), we had an amazing six-hour conversation with the extra drive time. It was great! Yeah, we were both crazy-sleep-deprived for the next few days, but we, well, "we talked about soccer and how every man's just the same."

Okay, maybe not. Caedmon's Call has a song, "Table for Two," about two guys staying up all night talking about life, and it always makes me think of Dan. Late night conversations are the best, because your filters are shot. You're not trying to sound good (so, half the time I sound a little nuts), you're not trying to impress, you just hit this point where you're solid. Just solid core, talking about what you really think. Yeah, those conversations always cost you for sleep, but tired is temporary - as long as you can remember them later, there's something cool that happens when you're with a friend at 2 a.m.

Sunday was another series of misadventures, but I'll have to share that with you later.