I love pink, lavendar, and coral colors. My eyes light up when I go to the mall. I can watch Sex and the City reruns until kingdom come. Etc.
But sometimes I'm forced to watch "guy" stuff because I live with a guy and we only have one tv set. Lately, Michael has co-opted the tv with episodes of PBS's Carrier, a documentary about life aboard the USS Nimitz, a Navy supercarrier that is apparently 4 acres in surface area! (Or we watch Battlestar Galactica on Netflix or political news--yup, Michael has an iron fist grasp on the boobtube).
Alyssa Milano aboard the USS Nimitz.
And unfortunately for me, the show is a 10 part series. Each part is 2 hours long. Yeah...20 hours of military footage. Enough said.
But I love tv, even more than I love to be entertained, so I've been dutifully watching my share of Navy and Marine personnel talking about their lives and duties on board the ship. I've learned about ranks, jets, weaponry, etc. But mostly about the horrible mundaneness of their every day lives.
It's basically a floating bureacracy...like a seaworthy DMV. If there is any excitement at all, it belongs to the hotshot pilots who are treated like rockstars because in that neck of the woods, I suppose they are. But even the pilots get bored and antsy when they're not called on to drop some bombs for months.
Watching all this reminds me of how close I was to becoming recruited into the military myself. I remember during my senior year of highschool, some military recruiters made an announcement at school about how great joining the armed forces would be. On a whim of naivete, I signed up.
Two recruiters showed up at my house the next day and told me about how great military life is, etc...and gave me an application. I thought, what the heck. I didn't know what I wanted to do with my life, I like following orders, and it couldn't hurt to get some military experience. I remembered taking a Myers Briggs test the year before and it said I could have a promising career as a commanding officer. Of course my parents never signed off on it and the rest is history.
But I was that close.
1 comment:
Wow, I did not know that about you! I think you made a narrow escape. One of my close law school friends was in the army for four years and the one thing he always says is that it's so boring and a huge waste of time. The parts that aren't boring just sound crappy. He showed me a video of his platoon getting tear gassed in basic training. Didn't look fun.
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