About Change.

I'm going on R&R soon, and I can't help but have this feeling in my tummy that change is coming. It is both exciting and terrifying at the same time, but this change is good. There are times when change is bad, say when you find out that there is a baby coming that you hadn't planned for. That can be very life altering change in certain circumstances. Should that ever happen to me, I would react stereotypically as many men would: a look of sheer terror coupled with quick financial accountings about whether the arrival of something completely dependent on you ensures a life of utter and complete poverty.

Most of the potency of this feeling can be attributed to a completely predictable schedule and series of events for the last eight months. Wake up, exercise, breakfast, work, lunch, work, dinner, homework, sleep. Repeat process. If anything is positive about Iraq, it's that you are always entitled to adhere to a strict system of routine. Acclimate to this reality or get kicked out of the military and find yourself jobless and financially destitute.

The concept of a personal life is literally AWOL in the deployed lifecycle. You wear a military uniform 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, for just short of 365 days, if not longer. The sheer prospect of having to decide what combinations of clothing you're going to wear for 14 days while your on leave can be daunting to say the least. And this is just clothing we're talking about. Wherin lies the prospects of making any rational determination about anything more complicated than that? It's like you're 18, evicted from your home abruptly, forced to accomodate to the big-bad-scary-world, in all of its glory.

Arizona, here I come.