It looks like I'll get my advancement in February, after the four-month observation period. My Chief and others were trying to put the rush on it for me so that I could be advanced sooner, but I guess the rules can't bend any in this situation. So goes my current understanding.

I'm doing well, though, as far as I can gauge from anyone's conversations with me. Perhaps not the typical, more reserved little bottom-of-the-totem-pole-dweller many are used to in E-3 females, but learning quickly and able to do my job while handling my own. Not that anyone here would try to treat me worse because of my position. My command is really great, and most everyone is quite friendly and all.

It's still up in the air about if I'll have to switch upstairs to the pay department instead of my current, cozy little home in admin. But I'm hoping to stick around, and the good impression I've made on the CO and current XO (who is retiring soon, but I've already met both of his potential replacements) may help me get more of a choice. Either way, though, at least I'd still be here in Jacksonville, on shore.

I may be able to move off base soon. I put in a request for it yesterday, which hopefully will move its way up the chain of command quickly so that I can get word soon. I've got the money and the steady income to back it up, and I found a couple of apartments going for significantly less than what my housing allowance will be, which will leave the remainder of that for utilities, cell phone, and food expenses, while then my food allowance will be extra money for myself -- perhaps. It all depends how smoothly everything really works. Oh, and I'll have car insurance (through USAA though I would have stuck with Progressive if USAA weren't so very much cheaper for servicemembers) which isn't too much per months, and savings which will be fairly substantial. I'll do quite well, I think, financially. And that's a good feeling. Unusual for me, but very, very good. I'm sure it will make those of you who have known the rockiness of my normal financial ground happy to know it's been hoed and smoothed-over, with a nice little flower garden ready to come up in the spring.

Just imagine if I do go officer.. I'll be making roughly twice what I'm making now, with no significant reason to expect an increase in my expenses without similar increases in my allowances.

At any rate, as an enlisted person for the time being, I'm quite happy with it. Less need to be formal (though really I'm kind-of formal anyway, as far as professional interactions) and less folks under me to get in trouble for. It's like being yoeman at bootcamp, when I had to do push-ups or jumping jacks whenever someone else did something wrong. Here, I have no one under me, so as long as I do everything I'm supposed to do right, and quietly try to help those over me, there is no way for me to lose face, really. Of course, since I'm new at this whole game, I don't do everything right. But as I said, everyone here has been very understanding, and I'm learning quickly.

I'm very much looking forward to my New Year's trip down to see my mother, brother, niece, twin brother, and the significant others or friends that may be in tow. I've got plenty of gifts already ready to go, with a few more in the works, and only two weeks from now I'll already have been there and been spending plenty of time with them.

Goodness, one week 'till Christmas eve, and one more week left in the year. Really, that's pretty crazy. It has been one amazing year. In just under one and a half months, it'll be my birthday. A month following that will be a year from my enlistment date, and three months later will be one year in the Navy. I'll have made a lot of progress within that year, to be sure, and in the years to come, be it 5 total or a full career.

Apart from my Navy advancement and adjustment progress, I've had a lot of other progress issues on my mind.

I got this nice journal from one of the CD promotional campaigns I did nearly a couple of years ago, and I took that out of my storage space the other day so that I can start writing the stuff I won't put here, whether because it's too small or too complicated or not really what I want to put in the complete open about myself between this blog not being anonymous and knowing about certain readership. I haven't really broken it out too much just yet, but I will this weekend. I've been needing to for a very, very long time.

I am tired of getting to know guys in a completely platonic and just-for-the-moment kind of way (talking for a few hours, with the idea I'd never see or hear from him again) and then getting the questions about keeping in touch, sometimes even the persuasions if I initially decline. And so I give him my number, my email, whatever I deem appropriate, and he never calls or writes. Why did he ask, then? Had he never requested we keep in touch, I would have walked away having had a very nice evening or weekend or whatever of getting to know some new person and then leaving him at that spot in my life. No need to be curious years later as I am with longer-term friends about what he's up to or if he ever thinks about me. Just a few nice memories of conversations and shared moments. Half of loneliness is having no one to share the moments with, and sometimes strangers are better than friends for curing that. But when he asks for my number or to otherwise stay in touch, he's asking me to commit him to memory, to move him from the side of my brain that is just temporary encounters into the side of people who I know, who I interact with regularly. (And regularly can be a very varied term, of course .. sometimes meaning once-in-a-blue-moon while other times it means much more often.) And once he's settled in over on that side of my mind, I figure out that he's just another one of those guys who doesn't actually follow through on his request, but makes it from some unknown reason.

Seriously, did he ever intend to keep in touch, or was he just saying it because that's what he thought he should say? Perhaps I'll ask the next requestor that. I've been tempted to before, and I think I even have asked one or two guys. The whole thing is about keeping things in perspective. We talked for a few hours, maybe we had some good conversational chemistry. If we meet again randomly at some point in our lives, that would be great. But are you the guy I am going to marry or at least have a very deep and rich friendship with? Odds are highly against that, especially since I'm a person so in need of tangible people, HERE with me.

When Andrew and I were best friends, there was a time when I lived in CA and he lived in FL. About ten months of that, and then another two or three afterwards when he was still at school in Pensacola while I was back with my mother in South FL. During that time, our friendship grew significantly through the exchange of letters and care packages, with phone calls as often as either of us could afford -- perhaps twice a month. When I was in foster care for three months on the tail end of my CA life, he called me every Sunday just to talk. Our friendship grew, yes, despite the distance. But it had already been built on a very strong foundation of nearly a year of friendship. We had already become best friends in a very deep way. His expressions of our friendship when I left for CA were incredible, and came from someone that knew me much better than all but a small handful of others ever might have.

In contrast, when I meet a guy at a music festival and talk with him there throughout the weekend, my departure is not so sad, and his goodbyes not so bittersweet.

Why do I still heed their requests, then? Because I have indeed kept in touch with some such people, male and female alike, who I have become friends with during an evening or a weekend. And those have blossomed into very great friendships. After all, anyone you meet outside of school and work is likely to be someone you meet for one evening and may not see again. Once you're done with high school/college, you've got work, church or other weekly events, and random meetings left. In a working environment like mine where the people come and go so fast you barely have time to find out how they tick, it's a bit harder to make deeper connections at work. And I've made a few such at the church I've been going to here, but still rely on my other random meetings (the hangout on base, the friend-of-a-friend, etc) to provide more chances for friendship.

So I still give my number or my email if I think there's any reason I'd want to stay in touch. And then he doesn't call or write. And there is no way for me to answer the ever-present question of why.