A Couple More Bad Boyfriends...And Scott

I went through a couple more crappy boyfriends...though none quite compared to the gem that was Tim. Jeremy cheated on me the entire time we were together...with a girl named Heidi - pure laziness, I think. Frankie was great, except that he'd break up with me every couple of months (in a ridiculously dramatic fashion) and then came crawling back a few days after I was done eating mountains of chocolate, filling army-issued notepads with sad love poems...oh - and torturing my poor roommate with country music and Celine Dion. And I was self-destructive enough to keep taking him back until he finally left the island.

Then I met Scott. I was at a bar in Waikiki with my girlfriend Karman (who slept with Tim while I was dating him. I forgave her because A: he was married and I was already the proud owner of a first-class ticket to hell, so who was I to judge? and B: She was literally my only female friend on the island of Oahu - so I had to exercise a certain amount of tolerance). Anyway - we were at this bar where Scott and his buddies were hanging out. Scott was sitting at the bar and his friends were playing darts. He was so handsome. The moment I laid eyes on him (cliche', cliche', cliche'...I know...) I knew I was going to marry him and spend the rest of my life with him.

The only problem? He was an officer; I was enlisted, and there was a new law making such relationships illegal. So our dating could get us both court-marshalled...as could have my relationship with jerk-face Tim. What can I say. I laugh in the face of danger. Not really. We had a couple of close calls when he was dropping me off at my barracks in the morning and we got pulled over by the MPs - or had to go through a guard shack. But luckily neither of us got thrown in jail.

As I predicted, we fell madly in love and had the most amazing few months before I left Hawaii. (By now I'd been there for two and a half years. Jeesh - did you think I had four boyfriends in six months?!) Leaving was tough. Scott had 18 more months in Hawaii and I was medically discharged and on my way back to Boston. We were going to have to do the dreaded long-distance thing. And that wasn't all. I was going to have to get a job and find a place to live!

As an Aside...

I know I'm jumping ahead - but just in case any of you are trying to figure out where to get married on a relatively low budget... Check out http://www.hawaiiweddings.com/. Captain Howie does a great job - and the pictures are amazing...to be revealed in a later blog.

Don't Ask...Don't Tell

Ever been picked last? Ever been fully aware that your team just had the bad luck of getting ‘stuck with you’? Not something I recommend.

When I got to my permanent duty station, I was optimistic. I was way smarter than the other new guys who were to be divided among the signal teams. Surely a team would want me before the guy who literally couldn’t stop himself from chewing on paper. Surely they’d pick me before the only other new female who weighed less than 100 pounds and looked perpetually ill. But guess what? I learned very quickly that intelligence doesn’t change HUM-V tires or service a generator. Smart doesn’t pound six-foot grounding rods into hard clay in an expedient manner…without whining.

The least appealing thing about me (in addition to my snotty intelligence) was my gender. No all-male team wanted to work with a girl. Girls messed up the whole dynamic – cute or not. Now all those sexual harassment classes the guys snored their way through had to be considered. No more girly calendars in the switch, no more openly scratching or adjusting one’s self. No more gas-passing contests, and perhaps worse – no more playing cards with naked women on them.

I now get the resentment. I wouldn’t have wanted me on my team either. I brought scented candles to the field and played my ‘Jewel’ CD in the switch. If they thought I was girly, I was going to give them girly. Fortunately – the situation eventually equalized. I got less sensitive and stopped bringing my own toilet paper on field problems, and they actually started to appreciate me.

But in all honesty, the first couple of months in Hawaii were pretty miserable. No one would eat lunch at my table. I came to my room at the end of a long, sweaty day in the motor-pool to find condoms and/or crude notes pushed under my door. Complaints went ignored…just boys being boys. I was terrified of my team chief; he gave off a threatening vibe and said some pretty terrible things to me…which made sleeping in a tent four feet away from him miserable.

Fortunately I managed to get a wonderful, supportive, super-cute boyfriend who was my only bright spot during that time. Seeing him at the end of the day made everything seem OK. Except that six months into our relationship, I found out he had a wife and two kids on the mainland. I never thought to ask – and he never bothered to tell.

Never made that mistake again. But things could only get better, right?

My Army Recruiter - The Big Fat Liar

The first significant thing I learned when I got to AIT was that I could wear makeup again. Oh happy day! The second thing I learned was that my new roommate was a witch…Wiccan. I’d never heard of such a religion, but this very sweet girl, who I still keep in touch with, would get up at all hours of the night to do naked, moonlight ritual dances. The drill sergeants (yes, they were there too) absolutely hated her because they were forced to respect her religious views and they were sure she was behaving this way to torment them. This shifted the attention away from me. I had learned my lesson. Low profile.

Unfortunately for me, my class drew the ‘mid shift.’ My schedule went like this: Wake up at 10 p.m.; get dressed and go to the dining facility for breakfast. Classes started at midnight and went until 6:30 a.m. Then we raced back to the base to eat ‘lunch’ and then haul ass back to the barracks to change clothes so that we could do PT with everyone else…most of whom hadn’t been awake and eaten twice in the last nine hours. After exercise, we had random duties which included cleaning bathrooms, buffing floors, mowing the lawn, etc. I broke one measly lawn mower and never got that detail again. Then free time, where a group of us would sneak off and smoke cigarettes. Yes – I started smoking again – peer pressure and all. On the left is one of our super secret spots. 3 p.m. was lights out. I grew quite addicted to Nyquil during this time. It was the only way I could fall asleep.

The classes I took were computer networking and telephone switching-related. My recruiter was a big fat liar. He told me over ice cream sundaes at Friendly’s that a ‘Network Switching Systems Operator/Maintainer’s job consisted of sitting in an air conditioned room and working on a computer. I quickly learned that this was not the case. The position I was legally contracted to perform was one where I was to drive a Hum-V with a million dollar mobile switching center on the back to wherever the infantry unit we supported was set up…usually in the middle of the woods. When we got there, we had to pull and bury cables, put up huge antennas and sometimes satellite dishes, put camouflage netting over our whole site, hook up a big smelly generator, pound grounding rods into the ground with a sledge hammer, carry huge jugs to the potable water source (usually ¼ mile away) and carry them back full, do the same with the giant fuel jugs, and only after that was there any sitting in air conditioning and pushing buttons. But I digress.

School was meant to teach us the button pushing button parts. We learned about soldering, how telephones work and top secret security codes. That lasted four months. During that time I learned I was going to be stationed in Hawaii, thanks to an officer friend I managed to make in the station-assigning administrative office. This was amazing – not just for the whole tropical paradise part, but my brother, from whom I’d been separated for 11 years, was stationed at the naval base there. But first, I got to go home and hang out with my friends for a month. What a strange feeling…to feel like I was changing profoundly and to find life going on at home as though I’d never left.

Eight Laps

The first few weeks of Basic Training were hell – as they were meant to be. I don’t know who thought South Carolina in June was a good time for lots of runs and road marches…in wool socks, but they were very wrong. I lost 10 more pounds.

Some genius thought putting 50 women in a room sharing six shower stalls and eight bathroom stalls made sense, but it didn’t. There were literally three at a time crammed in the shower fighting over a lukewarm stream of water; and no, it was not even the slightest bit sexy. To get that idea right out of your head, I’ll tell you that not a one of us shaved our legs for the entire eight weeks. It was kind of like ‘Survivor’ – only with 50 cranky women. And if you dared to take the time to button up your pants and tuck in your shirt before exiting the bathroom stall, you would more than likely be beat up by the gang of desperate girls waiting impatiently in line.

So that kind of sucked…a lot, but what was worse was that the drill sergeants hated me. I know – hard to imagine! I just had a problem keeping my mouth shut and may or may not have corrected them more than once in front of the entire platoon. But yeah, they hated me and life was pretty awful.

I also learned that push ups weren’t my only weakness, though by halfway through the eight weeks I could do 20 with no problem. When they don’t like you, they make you do LOTS of pushups – so I was really quite adept. But I was even worse with running. I ran so slow and stopped so often that I once lost my own platoon and tried to blend in with another formation running far behind them. I was discovered when we got back to their barracks. My drill sergeant had to get a Jeep and pick me up. More pushups. Lots more pushups.

So it went on like that. The only other major development in South Carolina was that I injured my knee on an obstacle course toward the end of my time there. My female drill sergeant took me aside and told me that it would behoove (that was one of their favorite words) me to ‘suck it up’ (also a favorite) and just get through the rest of the training. No doctors…just drink water. I’ll bet you didn’t know that drinking water cures everything from athletes foot (which all of us had at one time or another) to swollen, painful joints!

Anyway, to go on to the next phase of training, I had to pass a physical fitness test. For me, it was 11 pushups in two minutes (I got this!), 60 sit ups in two minutes (my ‘core area’ was never a problem; ‘half’ shirts were the style back then, so I was always doing sit ups) and a two-mile run in 19 minutes…on a broken knee, with former pack-a-day smoker’s lungs.

Twice I failed. I cannot tell you how I dreaded that quarter-mile track. I hated it. But on my third and final chance, high on Motrin, belly full of bananas, slathered in ‘Ben-Gay’, I did it. I think at that point, my drill sergeants were terrified that I’d be ‘recycled’ and land in their platoon again. Because all three of them got up when it was still dark out and ran next to me the whole way, making threats and screaming obscenities the entire time. It worked. I was on my way to Advanced Individual Training.

Look out, Georgia…Private Princess was on her way. Yes. That’s what they called me. Whatever.

A Single Pushup

When you first get to Basic Training, you're thrown into huge, same-gendered groups and herded around from station to station to fill out paperwork, give DNA samples and to be tested for fun things like pregnancy (two girls in my herd were), HIV and Hepatitis, among others. I'll admit - I was sweating a little while waiting. I'd never been tested for such things, and let's be honest...when the boy you think is your boyfriend has you and several other girlfriends...you just never know. But despite the odds, I was in the clear. Big sigh of relief.

After they weed out the pregnant and diseased...and a random person who discovered he was allergic to grass, the drill sergeant 'escorts' scream at you the whole way to the next phase. To make it out of this particular test, you have to perform one simple task. For the girls - a single push up, for the boys - six. Seems easy, doesn't it?

I could tell you that I was intimidated by the scary drill sergeants who were spraying spit all over the room as they yelled. I could tell you that I was still traumatized by the communal shower I had to take earlier that day with a dozen other girls. But the truth is, I had just never lifted a single weight and doing a push up had never occurred to me. When my recruiter told me I should start exercising before leaving for Basic, I bought some cute sneakers and a track suit and walked to Dunkin' Donuts in the morning for a large iced coffee...but that was it. So naturally I failed.

Dejected, I was directed to the group of the plump, of the frail, of...the couch potatos. While the strong went on their way to get fitted for uniforms and boots, those of us who failed were shuffled go our new barracks in...the 'fitness platoon.' For the next three weeks we were tortured with exercise for 10 hours a day. They didn't care if we cried or threw up or if our arms were shaking to the point of muscle failure. They ran us, aerobicized us, marched us and forced us to do thousands upon thousands of pushups.

It was humiliating watching the other groups of soldiers marching smartly in their uniforms while we filed around in ugly grey sweat shorts. My track suit was WAY cuter. I lost 20 pounds in those three weeks, and by the time I got out of there, I could do six push ups. All that work for six measly push ups. Hardly seemed worth it. But I did eventually get out and make it to Basic Training...where another round of torture started.

More in a few days!

It All Started...

...when my mother spent my college fund on a slightly-used Jaguar. Well...that's not entirely true - and certainly isn't the whole story, but it's what I go with. The fact is, two weeks before I was to start my freshman year at Bridgewater State College in Massachusetts with the majority of the rest of my graduating class (local and cheap), my mother told me she wasn't going to help with the cost. No explanation. Not a penny.

Three days later, she upgraded her black Honda del Sol (great gas mileage, not so great for carting around me and my friends) for a forest green Jaguar with keyless entry and seats that automatically adjusted to the driver. Hey - it was 1994. Impressive, but more importantly - expensive.

Well - as you can imagine, I reacted as any rational 18-year-old adult would and immediately moved out of the comfortable two-bedroom condo I shared with my mother and her crappy boyfriend (who she's currently in the process of wisely divorcing), into a tiny one-bedroom attic apartment with slanted ceilings and only a claw foot bathtub with my best friend (right)...her 2-year-old daughter...and her crappy boyfriend. It was going to be great

I slept on the living room floor in the two feet of space between the couch and the entertainment center. The little girl literally sat on my sleeping self with her sippy cup and turned on Barney at 6:00 every morning. My closet was in the bathroom, which sadly, was the biggest room in the place. It went on like that for about two years, during which time you would think the little girl would grow out of 'Barney.' She didn't. Nor did she grow out of her early wake ups.

I blame this situation for the varying bouts of insanity I experienced throughout the ages of 19 and 20. During one such maniacal episode I joined the Army. Anything had to be better than being the footrest for my 'so-called' best friend (an oil bill and an uninsured car nearly did us in; we later reunited) and her no-job-having, non-rent-paying, and unforgivably long-bath-taking boyfriend.

There was just one minor problem with my impending military career. I was not athletic...or tough...at all. Exercise just wasn't something I was interested in. I was the girl that cut across the middle of the track when we were supposed to be running around it. I was the tall girl all the coaches had high hopes for, who ducked when a volleyball headed her way - and ran from any approaching softball.

Nope, I was a writer, a reader, and if I'm being honest, a cigarette-smoking beer drinker who had a desk job during that day that I performed quite efficiently between cigarette breaks. (This was back when you could actually smoke at the mall!) But I overlooked these seemingly irrelevant characteristics and figured I would just deal with it when the time came. What was the worst that could happen? They couldn't 'kill me.'

So you can probably imagine how this Boston girl who never left the house without makeup was received in good ole' South Carolina for Basic Training. And for now, you'll have to do just that. There's laundry to be done, children to be put to bed and lots of reading. So maybe next time.

But now it's time for the:

Random Development of the Week

Nathan, my older son (right), learned to pee standing up. Seemingly a positive masculine trait for a four-year-old boy - but this training period has been very messy in spite of 'sink the Cheerio' or 'aim for the square of toilet paper.' There's lots of bath mat laundering and shirt changing. How in the world is he peeing on his shirt?

Gentlemen?