Here is a blog entry I typed up last night at home, where I do have a computer but do not have internet access:

March 23, 2004 --- Tuesday --- 2:04-3:17am

It has now been nearly two weeks since both my enlistment in the Navy and my first shift at the local diner. In these past two weeks, I've been doing a lot to make both of these factors, as well as my personal life, much more pleasant.

For the diner, I'm fortunate enough to now not be working third shift on occasion at the one uptown, and instead am working nearly-full-time at the one downtown, every day from 11-6. We have great regular customers, and I absolutely love the three other ladies that I work with each (or at least most) day(s). It's nice being part of a small group of people working together every day in a relatively small area, yet with enough other people coming and going, and with each of us working different enough schedules that we all have plenty of breaks from eachother as well. These are interesting women, too, each with very different (and sometimes very similar) stories, personalities, and opinions. So, I'm a part of things there, and working hard, and they're teaching me how to cook/prepare all of our various menu items this week so that when I'm closing with just the one other woman, she can take some breaks once in a while. We close at 6, and are usually out of there by 6:30, so I'll be closing pretty much every time I work, and am already starting to get that routine down. (My first closing shift was on Friday, and again today, Monday, so I'm still new at it.)

In my Navy life, I've been working out at least every three days, and usually every other day, since I enlisted. In fact, I worked out for about two hours Friday night between the double shifts at the diner downtown in the afternoon and then overnight uptown. I've been doing sit-ups, pushups (I'm up to being able to do between ten and fourteen REAL pushups most times. I can do a stinkload of sit-ups sometimes, and then not many at all others. Most of the time, I'm doing inclined push-ups and various abdominal strengthening exercises, but give the real things a go every now and then. Meanwhile, my friend Barbara taught me this other exercise when I mentioned wanting to get rid of my lower-belly pooch, where you lay on your back and alternately bend and straighten your legs, keeping as close to the ground as you can for extra impact. I'm doing those each time I work out, too, and have been adding in heel lifts, lunges, squats, and random other strength-building exercises more recently. And I run, a lot. Well, not a lot compared to half of what I did when I actually was a runner, but a fair amount, nonetheless.

Also in my Navy life, I'm daily prooving to myself what a dork I am. I decided that I will most likely want to try for the Recruit Division Commander while I'm in boot camp (or Recruit Training Camp), which is the Recruit who is there in training but is in charge of their platoon/division/etc under the various officers and petty officers that will be there. It would be a difficult job in some respects, including taking a bigger fall when an order wasn't carried out properly, and getting treated differently by my fellow recruits, especially in a mean or gossipy manner. However, both of these are things I'm used to enough to not be too concerned with, and the pros outweigh them, including a good piece in my Navy history when I'm up for advancements and whatnot. Now, this is sometihng that you are picked for, but I imagine it is also something that I can at least increase my chances of getting, which by default would also increase my chances of other meritorious advancements even if I am not selected for the RDC position. To this (or these) end(s), I've already memorized the Eleven General Orders of a Sentry, and am working on the various ranks and other information that will be helpful in boot camp and the rest of my time in the Navy. Even the physical training is partly towards the goal of not being Miserably Sore and whatnot at boot camp, and partly with the idea that a girl who can lead a crowd mentally but can't even do 20 pushups (or 30 or however many we'll need to do) is only going to be so respected and advanced so often. I'm really quite excited about my upcoming Navy life, and have decided that I WANT to put in time on ships so that I can see various ports during shore leave, and (as I was told by a retired Chief Petty Officer that is also a diner regular) if I'm on a small ship I'll have less to do besides studying and working towards a college degree and military advancement. I've really not been a terribly ambitious person in many ways, and even some of these new ambitions are not nearly enough to get me to sign up for some of the higher-up positions that have various reasons for not appealing to me. However, it's nice to have goals and to have goals that are actually focused on bettering myself in ways that most people can agree really would be bettering myself, instead of my modus-operendi of untraditional, hard-to-figure-out ambitions that most people don't agree with at all.

In my personal life, having a job I like and having long-term goals both have helped me a FANTASTIC amount in being less stressed-out, and more focused and satisfied. I've got the various friends that I can call when I'm wanting to hang out, and the various places I can go alone when none of them are available at the moment, and the various books, cleaning, and other objects or activities to keep me occupied when I am spending time at home. I'm working on getting the same ambition towards my Spiritual Life that I have with the Navy life, because I think it's really pathetic that I've already (in less than two weeks) memorized the Eleven General Orders of a Sentry, and yet it's been at least two years (I guess) since the last time I memorized a Bible verse, and my reading of the Bible at all is not nearly frequent enough the way that my reading of Navy literature has become very frequent. Now, part of this is that I'll be bringing a small Bible with me to boot camp and whenever we have personal time, that and writing letters to friends and family will be my only activities, I suppose. However, I also want to have plenty of time to build relationships there, so I don't really want to just assume that I'll have time to read the entire New Testament or something like that. I want to be reading now. And I will. Especially now that I'm voicing that desire (just to my computer for now, but to my blog as soon as I can get to a computer to post this).

In the midst of all this, I have been reexploring my relationships with my family members and my feelings about them. Of course, I love and adore my brothers and niece, and I love my other family members too, in a different way. I am disappointed that (as is usually the case but seemed to be getting better for a while) whenever my mother says "I'll call you tomorrow night", I can bet on not hearing from her for at least two or three weeks unless I call her again. I am disappointed that my grandfather, upon loaning me money when my car broke down in SC and moreso upon my return to VA and inability to pay him back as quickly as I had hoped to (though with this Navy joining, I'll be able to pay him back MUCH faster overall, just had to start late because of the lack of employment), has decided that his reaction to what he sees as my financial irresponsability should be to treat me like a bigfat sturpid turd, once again not acknowledging my birthday (last year, at least he realized by the end of February that he'd forgotten it .. this year, nothing whatsoever) and responding to my thorough update emails with one nasty line or a two-word statement. There is an extremely strong temptation in my life to either write him a letter explaining this crazy term called Unconditional Love and exactly how I feel about him and his current (and maybe even past) behavior, or to send him an email that just says "I'll be paying you back what I can as soon as I can, and will have finished within the next six months, max. Other than that, no more contact with you 'till you learn to love me and love yourself more." But the man is elderly and sick, and I can't get the picture of my last few visit with him out of my head. Janell is wonderful for him, and I think has the same strengths as my grandmother had of being able to remind him of his place when he makes particularly rude and nasty comments, but he's still the same man that I always had a love-hate relationship with since before I knew what hate was. So I don't know if writing him the letter or the email would help anything at all, and for the time-being am going to put it off. Perhaps I'll send something later. In the meantime, I had to once again (as so often before) give up on having a good relationship with him at the moment and give up on ever making him proud and give up on thinking that maybe now that he's a lot closer to the natural end of his life, maybe he'd start appriciating the people in it a little more. So, when I gave those things up again, I stopped crying about the way he treats me again. I'm still saddened to think of how sick he seemed during my FL trip over the holidays, but that's an entirely different (and not self-pitying at all) sadness than what I was feeling when I received those emails from him. Finally, I am disappointed that my father is still his constantly uncommunicative self, although we did have a fairly decent discussion when I called him to tell him that I was going into the Navy. However, much stronger than the disappointments are the love I have for each of these people, tested as it has been over the years. And even stronger than that is the love I have for my brothers and my niece, and the hope to spend time with them during my various leaves and such throughout the next five years.

Well. C'est la vie and all that, eh?

I will sleep well tonight, post workout and continually less stressed (especially because I have tomorrow off, which will give me time to clean this place up a little before Aleksandra, one of my best friends from FL who is currently living in DC, gets into town on Friday for the weekend. I'm so glad she's coming down to visit, and then Caren and Katy will apparently be here from Germany (where her husband is stationed with the Air Force) in April, and I'll get to see them a lot, too, and who knows what other exciting visits may lay on the near horizon). I don't think I'll likely make it up to MA before I go into the military, but I'm going to be talking with my Recruiter, who has been a friend of mine for over a year now, about the chances that a port near Boston would be someplace I'd find myself, or if that's something to plan on during one of my earlier leaves. Since my training school will be in MS in August and September, MA would be a fantastic break from that if possible.

Mmm.

Exciting times, as always, in the life of me.

Oh, and I'm working on some writing projects apart from reading through and gathering/editing old blog entries. I'm working on a short-story in the allegory genre cleverly disguised as a short-story in the confessional/true-life account genre, and I'm working on some various magazine-article type writings that may or may not actually get sent somewhere one of these months. And I'm gonna be keeping a journal during bootcamp and training and whatnot, and may explore the possabilities of getting that published (or partially published) if it's anything people would want to read.

Yes, and Aleks (when we were together for my birthday weekend just outside of DC) bought me, at my choosing, the Frederick Buechner book The Sacred Journey. That's been a great read so far, and I'm excited about the other books I have to be read either between now and RTC and/or afterwards, whenever I find myself in an environment in which I can centralize my material possessions and get to them sometimes. There's a lot still to be figured out, but also a lot that's plain as day.

So, when c'est la vie, yay for vie. Well, nomatter *what* such is life, yay for life anyway. And especially yay for coming through partilarly dark times to find that the darkness was hiding your own cleansing and the making ready of you for the world and the world for you, and yet that these things were going on all the time.