Today, I went to church, where I was sorta recruited for the protestant service choir. Not that they said I could sing well, just that they have only a few people in it and they don't really care so much about singing well anyway, and I know almost all the songs they ever do. The choir robes are really hot, but it was nice to be up there with my roommate and the other choir members, even though sometimes we were rather unclear on what we were supposed to be singing when. I was also volunteered to help count the money for both services, collect the offering at the protestant service, and lead the responsive reading portion of that service.

When I was maybe 11 or so, my family switched from the Lutheran church we'd been going to since we'd moved to FL to this tiny little Lutheran church filled mostly with Carribean Islanders in Fort Lauderdale.. and by filled I mean there were about 20 of them and 7 or so others, including the 5 of us in my family.

One of the first things I noticed is that the choir was both loud and off-key. Very much both.

This choir reminds me of that one. Except for the loud part. And there're those with very nice voices in the choir, mind you.. but the few of us that aren't so graced, even if we sing quietly, still break up the beauty. And we're not supposed to sing quietly anyway. And then there's that some of the ones with great voices still don't know the songs too well, so that's a whole nother factor.

So, after the church service and my assumed responsibilities therein, I went to the galley for some grubbage, and then came here. I'd gone to breakfast before church, too, and back to my mod since I had a while before breakfast and church. On my way back to my mod, I was walking up a very muddy hill, and thinking about how much I miss walking around barefoot, and especially going to church that way. How much I miss wearing headpieces, and holding children. (When I got to church, the Catholic service was just letting out, and all these couples had little tiny babies or toddlers among them, and I wished I could've held one of them.)

While I was still adamently against myself and the Navy sharing one life, I was in the recruiting office talking to Murray about any leads he may have for jobs in that town. Dean, the other recruiter, and Murray were trying to convince me to join the Navy, and one of the reasons I gave them against it was that I'd have to give up who I really was. My clothes, my way of life, etc..

Dean, in typical recruiter style, assured me that I wouldn't. I'd only have to wear my uniform 8 hours a day after getting out of bootcamp (and we'll go ahead and leave these two weeks here in which I've had to be in uniform anytime I'm outside my mod as part of the boot camp experience) and then I'd be able to wear my own clothes. But what I knew inside then and didn't voice was that I still wouldn't be barefoot, I still wouldn't likely be wearing my headpieces, I'd still have restrictions on what I could wear.. which (considering how modest I am) is hard to make me care about.. it's rare I feel restricted in my clothing choices, since you don't have to tell me to cover up decently and all. But here, there are restrictions indeed, and I feel them. And in the fleet, if I'm on a base there will still be restrictions, along with those 8 hours a day of uniforms.. some of which, by the way, are really not comfortable. I'm really hoping that wherever I work, I don't have to wear my working blues in the cooler months, because they button all the way up to the top button, and freakin' choke me to death.

And I may not technically have to give up who I really am beyond how I prefer to dress, but the Navy, and the population within it, is different. So very different. It's like the people here, in the civilian world, would have made up maybe four or five of twenty or forty possible social groups. You've got the men that are macho and the men that are players and the men that are drunkards.. the females that are preppy and the females that're macho and the females that're likely to jump into bed with more than one guy a month, or even a week. I had plenty of friends or acquantances in each of these catagories in my civilian life, but there were OTHER people then. There were more to choose from, more people to spend time with, more people to get close to. Here, there're only so many others. At least that I've been able to find yet.

In my indoc class, we had a day when we were talking about sexual harrassment, AIDS, and life choices.. The instructor asked who in the class was a virgin, obviously expecting no one to raise their hands. (We had maybe 25 or so people in that class.) I raised my hand, and it was quite apparent everyone in that class was surprised. Likewise at bootcamp, when most people in my division knew I'm a virgin, and that I was the only one I know of there that outright admitted it. I'm sure I wasn't the only one there, but no one else was about to step up and be in that crowd. Not that I heard of, anyway. Now, again, in my civilian life outside of my church crowd, the percentages are nearly the same. But again, I HAD a church crowd, I had other friends (non-Christians or Christians alike) that had morals more similar to mine in this and some other areas in which I differ from the mass Navy thought process.

I'm feeling the homesickness, the desire to be at my old church, to be around the people that knew me so much better because I WAS me then.. I'm feeling all of it strongly these days. Which isn't to say I'm alone here or not having any fun. In my usual style, I met and got to know a number of people quickly, and have been entertaining myself (along or with friends) quite well, thankyouverymuch. I just miss my old life, too. Especially knowing that I'll have about two weeks there when I get outta here, and then will be off again, and I don't know where to.

I was looking at concert dates in my emails today, out of habit, and suddenly realized that I could look from now 'till about October 7th (my expected graduation date) in MS, and for mid-Octoberish back home (the dates are far from certain just yet), and then had no idea where I'd be. The concert dates more than anything else helped kick it into my reality that I don't know even that near of the future just yet.

These two weeks have been very interesting, very eventful, but I'll just mention a couple of things here.

Wednesday morning, 5am, I officially PT'd for the first time since I got here, and we had a good-length run after the regular workout of pushups, arm circles and jumping jacks (etc). Lots of pushups, btw, because anytime someone in the group I was in (the holding company, since I was waiting for the personellman class to start up) messed up the count for jumping jacks (ie, after finishing the number 25 jumping jack, put their hands up starting another jumping jack when we were supposed to stop), we had to do 25 more pushups. That happened twice. Anyway, so we're running, and I start really having trouble breathing. I run through it and finish the run, calming down a lot during my shower. But by that evening, it was really painful to breathe remotely deeply, and the shallow breaths I could take painlessly weren't cutting it. So then I'd breathe deeply, and it would hurt and keep hurting for a while, with this vicious chest-pain type thing. So I gave in and went to medical Thursday morning, and it still hurt. They put me on four medications (I swear they get paid every time they prescribe something to us), including zithromax and something I can't pronounce or spell, that's supposed to break up congestion. They diagnosed it as something else I can't pronounce, but basically similar to bronchitis and a very severe case of Recruit Crud, as it's known in bootcamp. By Friday mid-morning (I'd taken the first two zithromax that day as directed), my chest had stopped hurting and I was breathing better. I can still feel all the congestion in my sinuses, and my voice STILL hasn't entirely returned from the last time losing it at bootcamp, but I'm really glad to be breathing almost normally again and that it was nothing particularly serious. And ... now I know how the medical system here works, which is helpful.

Also on Wednesday, the Personellman who will be in my class and I started our typing week, which means our real class will start this upcoming Wednesday. In order to be qualified to start class, you have to perform to a certain level on the five-minute typing tests. For non-petty-officers, that means typing 25 wpm with less than five errors on at least three of the tests. You just keep typing and testing 'till you qualify. We had to do at least four before she'd qualify anyone, and my four results were something like this (where the top number is the wpm after some adjustment for errors, and the bottom is number of uncorrected errors): 75/0, 79/3, 83/0, 85/1. Yes, I qualified.

Friday, we had a command picnic to raise money for the Morale, Welfare, and Recreation fund on this base. MWR funds were cut a while back, so now commands, ships, etc have to raise money to support that organization in providing sailors productive and entertaining things to do with their time. It's an MWR computer I'm on right now, for example. So they'll be doing a junior Navy ball for the students here in November, which is what most of the money we gathered up Friday will go towards. If you paid five bucks, you got to wear civilian clothes (even if, like me, you're still in phase 1 which means no civilian clothes for your first two weeks here) to the picnic, which I was very grateful for. It was SO nice to be wearing a pair of cords and a tank top and actually be outside with other people dressed normally. It actually looked like your typical high school or maybe college function in a lot of ways, but I guess that makes sense, as that really is the largest age group for training commands. My fellow Personellman-that-have-qualified and I helped set up since we had nothing better to do while waiting for the class to start, and we had a lot of fun doing so. The picnic, too, was a great time, in my humble opinion. But then, I wasn't as bothered by the heat and humidity (what with having spent most of my life in Florida and all) as many of my shipmates were. And right as the picnic was starting, one of the highest-ranking PN students brought me a package from mail call, which was from Jim and included my cell phone charger (STILL haven't gotten my cell phone.. grr! argh! Murray, what the snot did you do with it?!?), three CD's (two of mine and one he got for me), and a few sets of photos. So then I had the photos I'd taken just before leaving for boot camp, which was exciting and several of them came out very well, and I also had the photos of my hair from before I shaved my head the first time when I was 19, and some from when I had a mohawk for a few days, and when I was bald for a few weeks. I got to show those off to some of the people I've come to know here, which was very, very fun.

I still can't put my hair into a neat bun as is acceptable in uniform, but I can almost do two french braids (the hair behind my ears still doesn't want to tuck into the braids) and it's plenty curly enough to wear down without it going below the bottom of the back of my collar. Hopefully, by the time it gets long enough to be a problem that way, I'll be able to pull it into a bun or some such.

Yesterday (Saturday), I spent the day getting a few more clearance-priced civvies (civilian clothes) and groceries, and then cleaning and reorganizing my tac (the room I share with my roommate) and my belongings within it. I feel much more at home and prepared for class now, but there's still some more cleaning to be done today, along with the paperwork for joining the choir, and I want to actually finish up the letters to people I'd started before leaving boot camp, and maybe write a couple of others. To that end, I'm off now.