Some thoughts from yesterday:

1) If you have a customer service job or that is in any way a major part of your job, whether your job is civilian or military, and especially if you are Active Duty working with Reservists and thus are military serving customers who are civilians, you will ALWAYS, regardless of the specifics of your job, get people who think that you are either there to listen to them complain and take out their anger/frustration/irritation/childhood-trauma on you in the midsts of whatever they're ACTUALLY there to do, or that you are somehow going to be able to help them with the vast majority of OTHER issues in their lives that are entirely and completely unrelated to whatever it is that you do, including somehow having a telepathic connection with the person at the store a few miles away who they hope will keep the store open an extra hour or two because this person will otherwise be inconvenienced, and so they can call YOU because you will answer the phone when they don't even have anything at all for you to do and they just want you to telepathically connect to that person and demand exceedingly great customer service and self-sacrifice on this person's behalf in order for this person to get what he or she wants from that person.

(Whew.. my fingers did all that in one breath! Okay, fingers.. breathe now.)

2) When one is told to make six copies each of 7 files, it uses up a lot of paper. No matter how frequently you go by to reload the paper, it's just a lot. And when one types quickly, with good accuracy, and seems to not be terribly busy all of the time, one gets tasked with many menial jobs. And if one knew what all of the different menial jobs were going to be beforehand, one could, in one's efficient way, multitask and arrange them in such a way that one could complete them in comparably little time and with minimum energy, especially as far as typing in names and addresses for paperwork AND mailing labels. If one knew that one was going to do the paperwork AND the mailing labels, one could do them both at the same time and be done that way, instead of typing in the same 40 names over and over. But, I am really quite convinced that my LPO (Leading Petty Officer, or the person in charge of my office on the administration level) has her own way of making me more ready for my advancement and for continuing to advance quickly. I'm really quite certain that I am fortunate to be working under her, and in the office I am working in, with most of my fellow staff members. Fabulous group of people.

3) I never could have imagined, when I was filling out my dream sheet at "A" school, that the one place I would want to end up would be the one place I asked them to keep me away from back then. Even with living on the base (although these days of having this big house to myself far away from base and not having to go anywhere near it help), and even with that nasty bought of extreme loneliness I was feeling (which I think is mostly getting as gone as it ever does), I think that this particular command and these particular orders I'm filling are really the best I could've gotten. When I was at home on leave, I was feeling like God was calling me home to Jacksonville.. not that Jacksonville would be my home for long, but that God was going to make me at home here, was going to draw me into Himself and my real Home more while stationed here.

The Burg was a great place to get out of FL to, and "safe", as it were, to learn to be the adult in age that I mostly always had been in mind. To learn for it to be OK for me to be an old soul now that less people would be looking at the kid body housing it. To be an adult in responsibility and all practical ways as I had had to be in emotional ways growing up. But the Burg's time for me was certainly drawing to a close. Spiritually, it's a pretty extreme town. There are so many groups of people there who are very different from eachother, but all fitting into these molds, these stereotypes. I mean, not the individuals' personality, but mostly the spiritual backgrounds and present thoughts of most people there. I'd say that just about every major school of spiritual thought was represented there in some form or other, but even within them there were the stereotypes, the rebellions or the obedience, the journey and the stagnant. I don't know that Spiritually, Jax is really all that different. I'm not sure any place is. But I think the Burg exists in such a way that this spiritual level influences the surface more. Not that it is a more Spiritual town, as it were.. simply that the Spiritual is a bigger issue there, it is more part of life, whether directly or indirectly.

It is said that there are two things not to be talked about in bars: religion and politics. And during election years, the politics side is fuzzed into it not so much being discussed in bars as often, but certainly it is mentioned. I couldn't walk into a bar in the months leading up to the election without hearing somebody make a sarcastic comment about the current presidency or about the Ugly Man trying to take it over. But in the Burg, religion was never a topic to avoid. People MENTIONED the Great Law of Topic Avoidance all the time, of course. But it was rare to be in a bar for more than a couple of hours without hearing some subject irrefutably having to do with religion. Whether it was about certain town notables or about the person's own beliefs.. but what am I saying, every such conversation was about the person's own beliefs, just sometimes more obviously than others. At any rate, Religion is in every aspect of that town, and little else is.

It was a great place to get away from the Spiritual dryness and cloneness that is South Florida, the same dryness and cloneness that took all of what I loved about my middle school and high school youth groups, friends, and leaders and destroyed them into either smurfy little groups that cannot accept reality, bitter clumps of people who spit at all things blatantly Christian, or apathetic-seeming people who figure if they just don't pay attention to the problem of Spirituality, it will not really be a problem at all. This happens everywhere of course, but moreso in South FL than anywhere else I've personally seen. In Boston, there is great tradition to root people into their familie's religious practices. There is cultural exploration of conceptual spirituality so that people understand why they would want to believe anything. Of course, I just remember Boston from my very young childhood and from other people's accounts, but that is how it feels to me inside my bones. The feeling of Boston is the feeling of home, the feeling of something deep and mysterious and older than my own old soul, where South Florida was nothing to it. And the Burg was a great place to remove that dryness and cloneness.. I mean, in many areas the cloneness was much more insidious than ever in South Florida, but then anything that makes a subtle problem more obvious also makes it easier to remove or resist. So, the Burg was this set of obviously-s and obviously-nots. Obviously this is where I want to go, and obviously that is not who I want to be.

But the Burg, then, in its obviousness became more difficult for me. After five years there, it was not what I needed anymore. And I did not entirely feel that when I enlisted in the Navy, but when I was home on leave the feeling was there. The Navy was sending me to the one place I had asked not to go to, but everyone I talked to at home had a family member there or a friend there or had lived there previously. And I had already come to terms with the fact that yes, I would be back in Florida, but I would be as close to not-FL as one can get in the state (with GA a mere twenty to forty minutes north, and the culture here representing that of GA much more than South Florida) and I would be close enough to watch my niece grow up and see my Grandfather more often and yet far enough away to not go south every weekend or even, necessarily, every month. To have my own life with a more accessible connection to my relatives'. So having already come to terms with that fact, and hearing so much about who I could meet or where I could go once I got here (and for the record, I have met only one of these connections and been to none of the locations (other than the base, of course) that I was told about beforehand), I knew that this place was going to be important and fundamental in my life. That it was not just a place God would work His glory in, but that He was calling me to. A specific location at which He wanted me (for my own good and maybe others') that in and of itself was necessary for my growth and well-being.

It is that feeling, or rather the memory of that feeling, that got me through the loneliness. (Along with friends who stuck in there, of course, and offered what they could from a distance.. friendship and communication, less of a feeling of isolation.) And so Jacksonville is home. For now, but any place that is really home at all is always home. Boston will always be the homiest for me, and VA will be right up there with it. South FL will always have certain aspects of home, certain things that feel familiar.. but will never really be home. California, Sacramento at least, certainly isn't home. But Jacksonville is, already I think.