Writing is 90% perspiration, 10% inspiration

As a self-described news junkie I think the thing I’ve been missing the least from home is the news. Due to the lack of consistent TV and internet access at times, I am no longer available to the 24/7 cable news bombardment. The little exposure I do get now makes me feel like one of those kids that has a seizure from watching a Japanimation cartoon.

Anything that has been truly newsworthy I usually get e-mailed about from friends. This probably happens less than weekly, and a majority of it is usually from my dad about cool new gadgets (that I strain to not blow my deployment earnings on).

I challenge anyone else who is a card-carrying member of the Society of Professional Journalists, or who acts like one, to limit their news uptake to once a week. It is a liberating experience. I’m talking dreaming that you’re walking around high school in the nude only to realize it’s not a dream but you still don’t care, liberating.

Is the oil spill in the Gulf terrible? Sure. But is that constantly newsworthy? No. But our networks make it newsworthy. What’s interesting or important is no longer that the Gulf of Mexico gets 150 MPGs, but Obama’s handling/mishandling of BP.

Who the EFF really cares? You shouldn’t. Someone should, but not everyone every day. By not reading my usual 2-3 hours of news a day, I read The Iliad. In a week. On my Sony Reader that’s over 800 pages! I’ve also read more than a handful of other books.

Now I’ll be honest, one of the things I do miss the most is my daily cruise to work with NPRs Morning Edition. Despite it being National Public Radio, it is some of the most balanced and comprehensive news you can digest. What do you miss by trying to keep up with the cable news cycle? Time spent being a productive member of society. Seriously, my once-a-week news experiment left me out of the loop on NOTHING. Oil was still leaking, only slightly faster than Congress, I was still fighting in a war that barely has a budget, and the Cubs still sucked (okay, didn’t have to read that page for a century, let alone a week…love you mom!).

I did read a new study that found compelling evidence that our constant access to information, which has been thought to increase our multitasking abilities, has actually hurt not only our multitasking abilities, but our regular ‘ole single tasking. (Remember that one? Doing one thing, well, until it was done, before checking your facebook messages?)

People are no longer processing. We are becoming regurgitators. In my college journalism classes we used to have pop current events quizzes. Unless you are being tested on the daily beast appetite, I suggest limiting your news uptake. We need more people reading comprehensively, thinking critically, and having people who listen well.

I’ve already deemed this generation “The American Idol Gen,” who doesn’t vote on anything they can’t text in, or read anything that is longer than 160 characters. We now consider people “well read” who can wikiquote a facebook status and name the last three “Biggest Loser” winners. We need a current crop of modern philosophers. We need a generation of people who know education isn’t something people used to die for – it’s something people who know its worth are still dying for.

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At this point I start to wonder if the Army hasn’t really outsmarted us all; if all the training at alien-like landscapes for city-slickers like myself really has effectively desensitized my mind and morale to the culture shock of deployment. Maybe the sleeping in aluminum-framed mushy bunks, showering in cold water behind fluttering curtains, and eating food that doesn’t taste quite right is all part of the Army job in America for a reason, and not for lack of funding and planning. But to deploy most of the world away and have the exact conditions as the usual field problem?

There is a bar where Marines en-route home after finishing their tour can drink two beers ever 20 hours and sing karaoke. There is a BX (base exchange) with a scaled selection of even the best shoppette back home.

Or maybe it’s the fact that even in Kyrgyzstan I manage to have a wifi connection at my bunk and Dr. Pepper and the Stanley Cup playoffs in the chow hall.

Either way, at this point, everything is ‘no big deal.’ The commercial planes had pretty decent food and good movies. We are now just stuck in the cliché Army hurry-up-and-wait status. A flash of light at 0200 local time and they started collecting information for our flight that was scheduled for 0600. An hour later the flight was canceled, for some unknown reason.

Kyrgyzstan outside Manas Air Force Base, in the shade of snow-capped Himalayas, may be in the middle of a bloody coup, but life at deployment-in-transition is melancholy. There are no briefings to attend. There are no drills to rehearse. There is a copious amount of American food, and the only thing we’re killing is time.

The hardest part right now is switching my sleep schedule by 13 hours. It’s dark outside, so my brain is convinced it’s time for sleep. But my internal clock is skeptical, knowing my circadian rhythms are punching in for the day back home at 9 a.m. Most of the guys are dealing with this by simply sleeping the entire day and night.

I’m also trying this caffeine detox thing. I’ve had a single cup of coffee since we left, compared to the usual 4-6 cups a day. The headaches didn’t start until today, and I think that will be the worst of it. Once my body clock, like my Windows laptop, gets set to the Astana time zone I’ll get back to a modest regiment. But for now I’m reaping the benefits of a fully stocked PSP kit, a 110v outlet for my laptop, months of ripping movies to a 500gb hard drive and multiple books.

Inshallah, we’ll leave soon.

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There are so many good sources of information that don’t get enough press, and I can only flood my facebook so much, that I’m compiling some of my current reads on health care.

Sure, the health care bill is now the law of the land. But that doesn’t mean we have to be happy about it. And actually, most people aren’t. A new Rasmussen Poll shows that Obama’s administration has been suffering from declining public support since May 2009.

A sizable majority (68%) still believe the nation is heading down the wrong track, but that’s down three points from two weeks ago when 71% felt that way. The latter finding was the highest level of pessimism measured in 14 months.

Leading up to Obama’s inauguration, the number of voters who felt the country was heading in the right direction remained below 20%. The week of his inauguration, voter confidence rose to 27% and then steadily increased, peaking at 40% in early May 2009. Confidence has declined since. As is often the case, there was a brief burst of enthusiasm at the beginning of this year when 32% said the country was heading in the right direction, but that quickly faded.

Not surprisingly, “These findings are a sharp contrast to how Democratic voters feel. Forty-eight percent (48%) are confident in the nation’s current course, while slightly fewer (44%) feel the country is heading down the wrong track. Still, in May of last year, 68% of Democrats said right direction, and just 26% said wrong track.”

Even with the passage of the health care sausage it hasn’t appeased many, and the political cost of “transparent” meat packing has been brutal. “Republican candidates hold an eight-point lead over Democrats in the latest edition of the Generic Congressional Ballot.”

Enough of the right-wing crazies. Enough of the left wing socialists. There can be bipartisanship in facts. Besides what terrible reports you may read from lame ducks like USA Today, or the most recent blurb from the nightly news, there is plenty of real, accessible information for people to become educated.

Here is a MUST READ from the bastion Obama Times in the Big Apple titled Checking the Math on Health Care:

Who ever would have thought that after more than a year of vitriol, the whole health care reform question would result in a win-win bill? Actually, a lot of people still don’t see it that way. Why? As the Economist once put it, “As a creature of Congress, the C.B.O. is required to pretend to believe many impossible things before breakfast.” Some would say the same of Ezra Klein.

The governor of my newly adopted home state said this on the troubles Tennessee and others will face from another mega-entitlement:

Bob and Bart, the problem we are facing is simple: by 2013,we expect to have returned to our 2008 levels of revenue and will have already cut our programs dramatically – over a billion dollars. At that point, we have to start digging out — we will have not given raises to state employees or teachers for five years, our pension fund will need shoring up, our cash reserves (“rainy day fund”) will have been considerably depleted and in need of restoration, and we will have not made any substantial new investments for years … In this environment, for Congress to also send along a mandatory bill for three-quarters of a billion dollars for the health reform they’ve designed is very difficult. These are hard dollars – we can’t borrow them – and make the management of our finances post-recession even more daunting than it already is

With states struggling to keep their heads above water, and with the federal government basically being owned by China, how are we supposed to pay for such a Rube Goldberg of an entitlement?

Oh, but the bill is all balanced out, right? How about considering the last entitlement the government set up?

Even “Obamacare’s” worst-case deficit projections are likely to prove overly-optimistic. In 1965, for example, government accountants predicted that the hospital insurance portion of Medicaid would cost $9 billion by 1990. It wound up costing $63 billion. Even after adjusting for inflation, that’s still twice as expensive as the government originally estimated.

Is health care or insurance even an inalienable right? Something so fundamentally a part of the human condition that the government must control it in order to provide it for everyone? This, even at the expense of a redistribution of wealth to the unfortunate? (If you don’t think a massive entitlement fund, requiring healthy/stupid/free people to pay into a system in order to manage risk, is NOT a redistribution of wealth, I don’t even want to talk to you).

Or could it be that through a better, more open health care system, where people are drawn to it’s benefits, could people have an unadulterated pursuit of happiness in the achievement of health insurance? Even our Northern neighbors have come to grips with the follies of an over-managed, one-size-fits-all health care system in this article, with my emphasis added.

The evidence in this case shows that delays in the public health care system are widespread, and that, in some serious cases, patients die as a result of waiting lists for public health care,” the Supreme Court ruled. “In sum, the prohibition on obtaining private health insurance is not constitutional where the public system fails to deliver reasonable services…

Dr. Chaoulli, who was born in France, has long called for Canada to adopt a two-tier, public-private health care system similar to those in France, Germany and Switzerland. Supporters of the current system, however, have argued that a two-tier system will draw doctors away from the public system, which already has a shortage of doctors, and only lengthen waiting lists.

I can’t really sum up better than some classic philosophy from Ludwig von Mises:

The modern revival of the idea of collectivism, the main cause of all the agonies and disasters of our day, has succeeded so thoroughly that it has brought into oblivion the essential ideas of liberal social philosophy. Today even many of those favoring democratic institutions ignore these ideas. The arguments they bring forward for the justification of freedom and democracy are tainted with collectivist errors; their doctrines are rather a distortion than an endorsement of true liberalism. In their eyes majorities are always right simply because they have the power to crush any opposition; majority rule is the dictatorial rule of the most numerous party, and the ruling majority is not bound to restrain itself in the exercise of its power and in the conduct of political affairs. As soon as a faction has succeeded in winning the support of the majority of citizens and thereby attained control of the government machine, it is free to deny to the minority all those democratic rights by means of which it itself has previously carried on its own struggle for supremacy.

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This doing nothing thing is really overrated. Being fairly helpless and incapacitated from my normal lifestyle is getting old, fast. Most of what I do revolves around Facebook and my new camera lens.

While in Glen Carbon visiting Britt’s fam for her birthday I stopped in a Creve Coeur Camera. It was a pretty decent store, considering there isn’t any camera store in Clarksville closer than Nashville. I’d been looking into getting a smaller lens than my 18-105mm that came as a set with my Nikon D90. Being quite the novice, I didn’t fully understand what I was getting myself into. But I read some great things about Nikon’s 50mm lens that has been out forever. Because of its tried-and-true, minimum design it is great for low light and is the fastest lens they’ve ever made.

Here are a few of the first shots:

We always stop at Panera on our way out of the Glen Carbon area. I swear, the first person to open one in the Ft. Campbell area will be a millionaire. Here I was testing out my new aperture limit of f/1.8, since my other lens only goes to 3.5. At that aperture the focus is like an inch, so I can get some awesome artsy, blurry shots.

When I travel I let Dozie roam around the car. She loves to sit atop the back seat and stay silhouetted in the rear view mirror. I couldn’t stop playing with the new lens so when we stopped at a gas station I got this shot.

I was also practicing a few night techniques I had read about. Here’s one with the new 50mm lens:

Here I was able to adjust the aperture so that the speedometer was in focus but got a nice blur in the background from a car on the opposite side of the highway. Again, this lens rocks in low light.

Here’s one with my zoom lens, which I learned is called a zoom technique:

With a 1″ exposure, the key was to focus on the “Moonrise” sign, fire the shutter and wait about 1/3 of a second before zooming out. This maintained the initial focus on the signs before “pulling” the lights out. I also picked up a polarized filter for both lenses that will come in real handy in Afghanistan. Next up is to get some macro filters to substitute for the $1,000+ macro lens I’d love to have.

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Here is the screw they took out next to a nickel for comparison.

Yesterday I had the long awaited surgery and finally got “un-screwed” by the Army. The procedure was relatively easy but with a slight complication. The doc said the screw was definitely backing out. That caused it to slightly tear the tendon on the outside of the foot. So besides taking the screw out she also had to repair the tendon.

The recovery is going so easy it’s hard to imagine I even had surgery. As you can see below the wrap is much less intense than last year. And with keeping up on my Percocet regiment I haven’t had any significant pain.

Actually, everything feels so eerily the same it’s almost as if I’ve been transplanted back to last year and nothing has happened in between!

Brittany has been amazing at taking care of me, too. She’s been on top of my meds schedule, preparing my ice packs, and making me food and, most importantly, coffee!

Everything has screwed up my sleep schedule a bit. Coming from the guy who falls asleep whenever I site in one place for too long, taking two Percocet last night actually had me up until about 2 a.m.

Here is a comparison between my surgery last year and how the recovery looks thus far.

I’ll be in this post-surgical wrap and on crutches until my follow up appointment on March 2nd. More than likely the doc will take out the stitches then and put me in a boot (best case scenario). I should be walking in that boot for a few weeks before moving to normal shoe walking. However it will probably be some time before I do anything dynamic. I imagine I’ll be doing physical therapy a few times a week until we leave for the deployment.

Speaking of, the doc doesn’t see a reason for this to delay my deployment. I won’t be in as good of shape as I’d like to be, but you gotta make do with what you got.

Here you can see where the ridiculously large screw head was protruding out the side of my foot.

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Tuesday I’ll finally be getting “un-screwed” by the Army, almost exactly one year after getting “screwed” by the Army (and yes, I just linked to my own blog, so I’m pretty sure that elevates my blog status out of the noob phase).

In July after my initial recovery I started having pain in my foot. It wasn’t too bad at first, and I chalked it up to standard recovery pains. I thought I was coming back to running and exercise at a decent pace but who knows. I was able to run through the pain for about a month before deciding the pain was more than normal recovery pain.

I went to our unit physician and he said it was probably plantar fasciitis. Even though I didn’t fit the usual bill for a PF patient (over 40, over weight, extreme runner) it was probably a complication of my recovery. After taking his advice and not running for a month, the pain still hadn’t significantly subsided.

It took a full month to get an appointment with a podiatrist. The diagnosis was plantar fasciitis, but that wasn’t all. She said I had another broken bone in my foot, and that the screw put in last year was backing itself out. The other broken bone is a small circular bone under the first joint of my big toe. She seemed to think this bone broke in the last few months, but I think it broke around the same time as my original break and went undiagnosed (the bone is barely visible on an x-ray, and my first doctor was only a general orthopedic, not a podiatrist).

Ironically that broken bone didn’t cause me any pain. But that bone is what the plantar fascia tendon attaches to and dissipates 130 percent of your body weight while walking. So like a stretched rubber band that starts to tear at its stress points, my plantar fascia was being pulled wrong because of that small broken bone.

Further irony arose in my treatment options. The plantar fascia is treated with anti inflammatory medication, stretching, physical therapy and wearing a night splint. The screw needed to be surgically removed. The stretching and physical therapy couldn’t take place during and after surgical recovery. So, both had to be treated independently. At the time the plantar fasciitis pain in my heel was ten times the hardware pain, and the screw doesn’t necessarily have to be removed. I opted to try the heel treatments first and see if that would take care of the problem.

Oh, she also said one of my legs was shorter than the other and that, combined with my scoliosis, was probably affecting the way I walk and the heel pain. Therefore the total prognosis became anti-inflammatory drugs, physical therapy, wearing a night splint, an MRI to measure the length of my legs, custom boot inserts, and chiropractor treatments.

FML. I’m a walking shit show.

After a month of that craziness the pain in my heel went down significantly. That, however, revealed how much more the screw problem was affecting me. So at my follow up I talked to my podiatrist about surgery.

That was the first week of December. Surgery was finally scheduled last week for February 23rd.

Three cheers for government health care!

Anyway, this surgery is expected to be much less invasive than getting the screw put in. I’ll only be on crutches for a week or so, and then some time in a walking boot. All in all I should walk normally in one month. Time before running again is TBD.

I’ll be ready to go for Afghanistan, but I definitely won’t be as physically ready as I thought I would be when I first envisioned deploying. Other than that I’m hoping for the best and I’ll be enjoying my 30 days of convalescent leave to the fullest — I think I’ve deserved it.

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So I’ve never been a big “Global Warming” guy. Considering the love of my life is an Econ major, I’ve been forced to reconcile with my beliefs. I’ve mostly never been a GW “believer” for the simple reason I think most people aren’t — I’m too lazy to want to think otherwise.

Then I read Thomas Friedman’s “Hot, Flat and Crowded”. Now, not only does Brittany feel like my intellectual superior, but I feel like the Emperor at the ball.

For all of you soon-to-be GW believers (because trust me, it’s only a matter of time before you “believe” it) I highly recommend this treatise on why you should care about the energy future in this country. More on this book later.

For all you non-reading types, check out the “Extreme Ice” series by Nova. Besides some amazing photography from one of the leading nature photojournalists of our time, this is the epitome of physical evidence of human-affected climate change.

More to follow…

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Knowledge, learning new things, is like heroin. Or at least as close to a heroin addiction as I can extrapolate from movies and pop culture. Gaining knowledge makes the hairs on the back of my neck and arms stand up. It’s like my soul trying to leap out of my body; like my brain refusing to wait for my physical body to keep up with chasing the answers to all the world’s problems.

Then there’s the Army — the antithesis of knowledge and unbridled progress. In the modern world of light speed communication and a war based on unpredictability and chaos, it seems that protocol is a road block set up by the enemy’s double agents to undermine ourselves from within.

Not much going on besides feeling under-utilized for my talents and ambitions. Some may need 18 months to be a second lieutenant, but I don’t think I do. Hell, some need 36 months. I’d like to think I evolve in my new environments faster than most. I grow to the size of the pond I’m thrown in to. But lately I feel like I’m being asked to shrink. Going home at the end of a day and being able to look back and confidently conclude that I accomplished absolutely nothing feels akin to slitting my own wrist. I’m huffing the noxious fumes of inefficiency to purposefully retard my performance to fill the spot of a warm body. And it’s only been 10 months!

Now it seems every empty moment I get is used to wistfully dream of future challenges.

“It’ll be better when I make captain,” I tell myself. Or, “It’ll be better when I’m in a different battalion/branch/etc.”

The happiest I get is when I think of where I could be in ten years. Do most people have a ten year plan? I don’t know. But it seems the ten-year mark is my short term goal lately. Reading books and the news about the strategy our generals have for the war, and reading about the grand-scale problems that face the middle east regions we’re involved in right now, captures my imagination and stokes my intellectual curiosity. Being required to regurgitate information in differing forms of PowerPoint does not. After almost a year in an active duty unit, almost zero professional development. I actually feel much less motivated and much less utilized than when I was a cadet.

When left unconstrained I can see myself in graduate school and writing stories and papers for professional publications. Or at least going out every day and trying to make something happen. I dream of the day I may end up in law school and push my intellectual capacity past the red line. Maybe I could work for a non-profit agency that works on international security policy issues that can pressure corrupt and oppressive regimes into modernity. Maybe I could consult members of Congress on energy policies that would solidify the United States as the shining beacon of innovation and leadership in the next century. Maybe I could clean up Illinois politics?

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Well despite the “southern snow storm” (less than an inch which preemptively closed schools the day before) we are ready to leave for JRTC. Even thought this post is via my Centro, it will be staying at the office and I’ll be going dark for the next 24 days. So don’t expect replies or posts, and don’t fill my inbox!!!

This will be the longest that Britt and I will have gone without talking. Needless to say she is less than thrilled. But she has been invaluable in helping me get ready, to include driving all the LT’s to work this morning so we can leave our cars at home!

Thingshave already started as a Charlie Foxtrot and I have yet to hear anything promising about the future. It looks like in a month we’ll spend 5 days actually shooting (howitzers). Apparently the JRTC cadre is also under the impression that we won’t have communications in country, hence the cell phone ban.

The only other breaking news is that i’m still waiting for a surgery date. The doc is supposed to have it scheduled at the end of the month to take place sometime mid February.

Ok, blogging on a smart phone is pretty sweet, but my thumbs are getting raw…

Adios civilian world and January 2010!

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“Thou Shalt not shop at the commissary after work on a Monday, especially those following a four-day weekend”

Broke the cardinal commandment of Army life today. The self checkout, 25-items or less line was a 20 minutes wait. Long lines make for contemplative moments. The most contemplative lately being “should I stay in this crazy Army world?”

There is much yet to be seen. But one thing seems for certain: Simplicity follows Civilian…ity.

The world around me gets more bitter with ever drop in the mercury and day closer to the deployment. I maintain that I’m an optimist, but people make it reeeeeeeeeally hard some times.

Everyone knows the Army is on the brink of crisis mode between two wars. One of the large challenges that gets frequently brought up is the lack of, and decline in, quality officers in the officer corps. So even though I’m not from a military background, and even though I became an officer so that I could do my part for the nation in her time of greatest need, why do I feel bad thinking about getting out of the Army when my contract is up? If I was unaware that the officer corps was hurting, or if I thought I couldn’t contribute in a positive way, would I feel less guilty?

Why would I even feel guilty just thinking about leaving the Army once my initial commitment comes to pass?

That, ladies and gentlemen, is called duty. And she is a coy mistress.

There is a looming cloud that darkens the shadow cast by my stature, making me look fitfully around every corner. If one man stands by and lets evil take place, is he not guilty? If I’m an officer capable of contributing to the solution, and not willing to fix it, do I become part of the problem? The Army needs smart, ambitious people to lead the Army through one of her darkest hours. People who could otherwise hang up their boots for six-figure paychecks that don’t involve weeks and years away from their families and running/rucking miles in freezing/blistering temperatures.

Then again, the Army needs advocates in the “civilian sector,” too. People who were insiders, know what makes the culture tick, and can help bring about necessary change.
I also think it may be a self fulfilling prophecy to do an internal review on personnel quality during a time of war, when the armed forces are built to be torn down during a conflict.

So, should we disregard our initial intentions for honorable, yet brief, service and at last fully commit to the greater good of the institution that invested so much in us for its own future, therefore possibly giving up part of our own future we thought would be waiting on the other side?

Exactly. Don’t go to the commissary after work.

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