Tag: boot camp

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A Boy's Life Dad Blogs Life in these United States

Joining the Air Force – Part 2 ( MEPS, the night before)

continued from last post…

Now I would love to say that my final night as a free youth of America was spent in languid, steamy, sexual bliss with some nubile young Officer-to-be, but such was not the case. Oh, don’t get me wrong, I went downstairs to the “bar” of the hotel and cased the place out, but it was apparent that either all the ladies already had other plans, or I was just too early. Having grown up in a part of Alabama where everything shut down after 8 p.m., I didn’t yet know that the REAL fun doesn’t start till after 11p.m. Heck, by then I was sawing some logs up in my room and the last thing on my mind was a booty call.

The next morning, we all piled downstairs for a greasy meal and then it was onto the bus (again) to take us over to Maxwell Air Force base for our in-processing. That whole day was a big blur, but I will give you some highlights that stick in my mind:

  • Paperwork. LOTS of paperwork.
  • Standing in a large room—in my underwear—with a bunch of other guys, while some middle-aged, potbellied supposed doctor walked around issuing orders like, “Raise your arms;” “Touch your toes,” and “Stand on the balls of your feet.” I remember thinking, in addition to, “Hey, I’m not the only person here wearing white underwear,” also that, this was the worst physical I’d ever seen. Now granted, I’d never had a real physical in my life, but I’d seen them on TV and being a relatively intelligent person, I knew that you couldn’t tell if a person had a hernia, say, by  having them bend over necessarily.
  • Standing in a lot of lines and not talking to anyone.
  • Finally passing everything and giving my oath of service. It was a terribly anti-climactic ending to an uneventful day. We all stood in a room arm-length apart. Some officer from the base we were on strolled in like he was the hottest crap since Rocky Balboa; he swaggered around and gave us some “this is your duty” speech that involved lots of words like “honor” and “upholding” and then he finally got down to it and swore us in.

Let me take a brief diversion here and explain something about myself. I’ve previously mentioned that I’m broken on the inside—that I don’t feel things that I believe others feel. Well, the same goes for my sense of patriotism. In fact, I generally rankle inside when someone tries to prey on another person’s sense of pride in their country and it burns me to no end to see car dealers waving this big American flag on television thinking that those of us who have served can be so easily swayed. Don’t get me wrong—I lOVE THIS COUNTRY. It just so happens that it annoys the ever-loving crap outta me when someone assumes it’s a hot button of mine they can push in order to get me to do something. I mean come on! We’re smarter than that. Aren’t we?

Anyway, I wasn’t impressed. Some of the other recruits’ parents actually came and took pictures of the oath, but not mine (thankfully). After that, it was more standing around and waiting until it was time to head to the airport to catch our plane to boot camp at Lackland Air Force base, just outside of San Antonio, Texas.

In the middle of summer.

The group of us heading to Lackland was a diverse bunch, and relatively subdued. I think it had finally hit us all what we had just done and we were each contemplating the hell that we knew was going to be the next six weeks of our lives. Most of us were young, under 25, so we had active imaginations.

How wrong we all were. It was worse. Much worse.

Continue on to Part III…

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Dad Blogs Family Life in these United States

Everything works itself out in the wash

I’m woefully behind on both household chores and funtime activities thanks to my most recent back issue (which, as I was putting on my socks this morning, re-asserted itself). And nothing makes this more apparent than my getting totally psyched over something that most people dread…

My new iron came in the mail Saturday.

Yeah, as in, an iron to make my clothes all nice and neat. I told you it was banal and ridiculous, but that’s what I’m down to these days. If there’s anything that the military taught me, other than the fact that short hair looks way cooler on short people, it’s that nothing speaks as highly of a man, as does shiny shoes and properly pressed clothes. Oh, I know that “slacker-dude” exudes a sort of charm and carelessness that some women find attractive, but I figure it’s a bit like “good girls.” You might want to date unkempt slacker-dude, but would you take him home to meet the folks?

I started ironing when I was in the military. Ironing was a highly prized skill and yes, we did approach it with an iron in one hand and a pair of tweezers in the other. Those stories are true. And perhaps since ironing was the one activity in boot camp where you could get away with doing almost nothing and not get yelled at for it, I grew to like its mindlessness.

It’s like Tai-Chi for the hyperactive.

Seriously. Now, for optimal ironing enjoyment, you can’t just approach it in a lickety-split fashion; no, you come at it with a plan and a methodology. Only then can you truly enjoy its simplicity…grasshopper.

My Program:

Get everything set. Put water in the iron for maximum steam. Organize your clothes by material, starting with silks and polyesters first because they require a lower heat setting. Gradually work your way up to cotton and wool. Turn on something mindless on the TV; a sports game or a movie you’ve seen (this is the beauty of ironing see. You can do something respectable and necessary, while also doing something selfish and wasteful! It’s a win-win!).

When your spouse walks in, he/she will click their tongue at your foolishness because they take their clothes to the cleaners, thus saving them time. However, they will also admire your fortitude and thriftyness. It’s all good though, because you’re in the zone; you don’t care what they think.

So go ahead, listen to the Mr. Miyagi of ironing: “We make sacred pact. I promise teach karate ironing to you, you promise learn. I say, you do, no questions.”

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A Boy's Life Dad Blogs Family Life in these United States

We’re Rolling Back Prices on Shin Splints!

cart.jpg When you’re young–and I’m talking a teenager here–you don’t always think about what you’re doing in terms of how it reflects on you personally. No teen ever asked him or herself whether flipping burgers was a noble endeavor, or whether or not when, years from now and they’re running for office, if anyone will look back and go, “Him? Seriously? Man, that dude was THE WORST fry cook we ever had. I wouldn’t vote for him.”

No, most teenagers are just working to put gas in their car and date money in their pocket. Well, boys are anyway. I have no idea what teenage girls do with their money other than buy more makeup and too-tight jeans. But anyway…

When I was a teen, I held a number of jobs. At 15, I worked in a plant nursery. We did everything from putting the tiny little plants in pots, to rolling out football-field lengths of black plastic in the Alabama summer, and then later moving the plants in various stages of growth from one end of the field to another; an effort I never quite fathomed the reason for. It was tolerable if only because of the Black-Widow spider killing contests we had amongst ourselves (they LOVE tropical humidity in greenhouses!) and the hour-long lunch break we all took lying under the shade trees eating our crappy lunch while listening to Aerosmith on the little transistor radio.

That job, while probably the most honorable one I had as a teen, was thankfully only a summer job. I got a great tan from working shirtless, but it was backbreaking work. From there I moved on to a Catfish restaurant, where I started out as–what else–a dishwasher, and eventually informally ran the kitchen on the weekends. Finally tiring of smelling like fried seafood all the time, I got a job with the local Wal-Mart.

Now, let me explain that a job a Wal-Mart then, at least for a teen-age boy, was like manna from heaven. The hours were decent; you didn’t have to do any really dirty work, and you got to watch hot schoolgirls (then, MILFs weren’t on my radar) come shopping with mom on the weekends. Hoping to score a job working inside the store as an “Associate” (that’s what Wal-Mart called ALL employees then), I instead got probably the lowliest job in the whole place next to the guy who has to clean out the toilets. I became a “stockman.”

A sexist name to be sure, but there weren’t too many girls who could do that job. We did everything from keeping the floors clean using brooms and vacuums, to taking out the garbage, to running the layaway items up and down two flights of stairs to and from storage (this was a killer leading up to Christmas). Oh, and did I mention we also had to corral the buggies?

Buggy patrol was a blessing and a curse. The blessing part was that you were able to get out of the store—out from under the thumb of the bossman—and get some fresh air out in the parking lot. And if you saw a few good looking ladies driving around the parking lot with their skirts hiked up in the car where they thought nobody could see them, well, that was just extra. The bad side was, those daggum buggies are heavy. And if it’s cold outside, those buggies got cold. If it was raining, they were wet. It was also mind-numbingly boring and sometimes I’d see how many buggies I could safely push in an effort at getting at least some exercise out of the whole thing. For this, I developed shin splints which made my next job–boot camp–horribly painful. All that to say, that there was really nothing inherently good about buggies per-se, but the duty was something I viewed with mixed emotions.

But back to my original idea about doing things as a teen that you might later look back on with regret…

One of my local supermarkets here, employs “mentally challenged” individuals—whether out of some real desire to help them out, or because they think it will score points with the shoppers, I don’t know. I do know that they sometimes creep me out though and the whole time I’m sitting there waiting to pay for my groceries, I’m emotionally at war over whether or not to look at them and perhaps say something (the urge to give them a Jim Carrey-like thumbs up comes over me most times) or whether to just ignore them completely. Usually I take the easy way out and just pretend as if they aren’t there.

But what is perhaps the biggest slap in the face, is that one of their primary jobs is–Yep, you guessed it: Buggy Patrol!

Looking back, I’ll admit that I’m more than only mildly insulted that adults deemed me worthy of pretty much the same job that they now give to the mentally handicapped. I mean, what does that say about my interviewing skills as a teen? Did I even form a coherent sentence when I talked to the manager about the job? Was I so slovenly that they took one look at me and knew that there was no way I could possibly straighten an endcap?

I don’t know. But it does make me wonder what it’ll be like in another 20 years. Will some mental midget be sitting here at a computer banging out marketing concepts just as I’m doing now? Maybe computers will be so smart by then that they can subsidize any missing brain capacity of the user and corporations will employ that sector of our society, rather than us college folk, and pay them a pittance in return for catchy phrases like, “Where’s the Beef?”

May-be, but until then, I own this job, and right now, there’s a pot of coffee that isn’t gonna make itself. Take THAT Sam Walton!