At the beach. I find it telling that I have better internet access here, on reasonably remote Hatteras Island, than I do at home--because the cable company is so bad and Mom was cheap and didn't want it anyway we gave up on trying to get access and just steal our neighbor's wireless, which is always going in and out.  (The computer is stacked on a barstool on the sunporch.) The sisters and I had a great time in the surf today until it started raining, at which point Julia demanded outlet shopping after a few minutes listening to Mom and Grandmother do their usual rambling inside the house. And so I bought more clothes I don't really need. Yay Eddie Bauer and their perpetual (and unadvertised) 10% military discount.

This is hilarious.

I need to be at Benning by the morning of 22 July. Hopefully this week will be good.

So I am home and graduated, which is nice. There will be pictures and such later.

The annoying part is that I am back with nutcases for right now. The family is all in a hubub about Obama's Supreme Court pick. Mom is buying everything talk radio is putting out about this and thinks Sotomayor is a "diaster." She gets the Wall Street Journal, and I shit you not, in some "reactions" box this morning, there was a quote from John Yoo saying that with Sotomayor's pick,"empathy has won out over excellence." Really. This from the guy who tried to rewrite the most important and ratified treaties ever into not applying to what was clearly an international armed conflict and who sought to define torture as only anything that caused organ failure, against years of customary law and our own prosecutions of foreign war criminals, and who may be disbarred for sucking so much. My. God. Who asked him? I made the mistake of venturing over to Drudge to see what the nutcases were saying, and there was some headline there that she's been reversed by the Supreme Court 60% of the time. Well, yes, the three or four times out of hundreds that the Supreme Court decides to take a case, that generally means that they're thinking about reversing it. Also, my Environmental Law teacher is involved in that Riverkeeper case being talked about now, and I don't see how the Supreme Court could have ruled like it did (reversing Sotomayor), as the "best available technology" statute clearly aims to force innovation.

It's refreshing to see someone who is proud of being a minority, admits that such a status is important and matters, and doesn't try and say "me getting this job doesn't matter because I am just like everyone else." (You see different approaches to "firsts" by women in the military, many of them like that.) And it's not like I have a fondness for brassy, wisecracking women lawyers of Hispanic descent who grew up in difficult situations in New York City and are Bad Catholics and feminists. (Oh wait, that would be COL R exactly...)

And now some cleaning...

My friend Anthony and I edited the literary magazine together for the past three years. He is pretty into cadet life. Most of you probably won't get half of what's in the video below, but it's hilarious. He's the first guy introduced.

I really, really tried (multiple times) to actually read this book for a review for Armed Forces & Society, due tomorrow. See if the first chapter, available here, puts you to sleep, too.

*Cue frantic strategic skimming*

Another instance of PR!Fail here. This lady is quite nice and is in Michelle's book club. As for her husband, he works on the Supe's planning staff and has absolutely no contact with cadets. I don't even know his last name, but it isn't hers. Colonel Flowers is shooting himself in the foot, unsurprisingly. He always enjoyed cutting edgy things from the lit magazine.

So my computer is down, and making thesis writing really hard. Sitting here in the library, I checked on the website. They have a list of all of my repairs. Damn, I think I'm counting three hard drives!!

Tue Apr 18, 2006	Wed Apr 19, 2006	Repaired	Screen will not display properly--images are blurred, screen is white, flickers, goes other colors. Also, cd drive has recently stopped reading discs, and the left speaker is cracked from where I accidentially dropped it--sound is crackly.
Wed Oct 18, 2006	Wed Oct 18, 2006	Repaired	Screen is broken, too dark to read anything. Also, missing G key.
Mon Mar 05, 2007	Tue Mar 06, 2007	Repaired	Spilled water on keyboard. Computer will not recognize hard drive.
Mon Sep 24, 2007	Mon Sep 24, 2007	Repaired	Disk drive reads cds but not dvds. Replacing with a friends drive works for reading dvds. Also have loose keys on the keyboard.
Thu Jan 31, 2008	Thu Jan 31, 2008	Repaired	I was notified via email that I have a worm and must bring my computer in to be reimaged.
Thu Aug 28, 2008	Thu Aug 28, 2008	Repaired	Told to get my computer reimaged.
Tue Jan 06, 2009	Wed Jan 21, 2009	Repaired	Printer doesnt draw paper--paper always goes sideways, also ink catridge holder may get stuck underneath the casing and not move on the rail properly.
Mon Apr 20, 2009	N/A	Not Started	Both mouse and touchpad get out of my control and disappear to the right top corner of the screen or right by the start button frequently. I lose all control of the computer. This happens frequently, sometimes for several hours. Restarting sometimes helps, as does plugging the mouse back in and quickly opening what I need before I lose control again. But the problem always comes back and it is hard to get work done.

My department is currently putting on the most bad-ass conference ever. (And as a consequence I have a very nice Coast Guard person camped out in my room, who has been doing homework for two hours straight. That is a strange amount of dedication for a senior anywhere!) The attorney general and Mary Robinson today, Dan Rather and Queen Noor tomorrow with a focus on law and gender and children and war. I didn't get to go today because I can only miss so much class (especially after the trip to France, with said awesome department), but tomorrow I am free to go.

Shit like this pisses me off.

If anybody has earned the "right" to be photographed on post and not treated like garbage by handlers, it's an '80 grad woman and a spec ops commander.

I hope PAO gets reamed out by higher.

This is my last-ditch procrastination attempt before settling in to fix/produce 25 pages of my thesis tonight. The good news is that I already have 18 pages written, they just kind of suck.

Two days of spring leave were spent trolling around the Library of Congress (Law Library, Main Reading Room) getting information about my god-forsaken topic. They do not make that place easy to navigate, which is, I'm certain, not accidental. A few more were spent trying to write this crap.

I was forced to go to church both Sundays I was home, and the six days I was at home produced some classic Mom Is A Wingnut moments about how I need to read the Wall Street Journal, if McCain made a gaffe about the disabled we'd never hear the end of it, why am I reading feminist legal theory, why I should never drink hard liquor, "Bill Moyers is a commie", unmarried people living together is "tragic", etc.

Thursday afternoon I leave for Evian-les-Bains and this weeklong International Humanitarian Law (that's the more correct, modern term for Law of War or Law of Armed Conflict) competition a team of three of us are taking part in. Competing against LAW STUDENTS from EUROPE. We're going to get our shit rocked. Pretty much every other team (except the Air Force Academy) is civilian, so for everyone else there we represent the evil fascist contingents of two really effed up wars. That's going to be a ton of fun...

I'm supposed to be our group's refugee law expert. Naturally, there are like two treaties on this, the rest is customary and extremely hard to categorize, and I haven't learned any of it previously.

I have to make ahead three large tests before I leave...

Will. Be. Fine.

This place really shouldn't be able to surprise me anymore with its capacity for stupid ideas, but it still does. Recently, two suicides and a bunch of attempts have made everyone even more edgy and miserable than they usually are in the winter.

There was this fabulous rumor going around that the Friday of President's Day weekend would be a mental health day and we would get a four day weekend. That was completely untrue...Instead we got these ACE cards with little playing card aces on them that spell out some kind of acronym about assisting your buddy...I don't know where mine is. Some people have taped them on their doors and others have taken to sardonically asking "where's your ACE card?"

And so the word from on high is that the "stand-down" on Monday will consist of having breakfast formation at 0545, an hour earlier than usual, compressing classes, and having company Respect officers--those highly-trained and sincere cadets everyone adores, who do so well mediating gender and race issues--give a bunch of separate briefings (probably in powerpoint format) to each class. This will take an hour per class. And this will probably be followed by further, larger briefings given by key leaders later in the day.

And by compressing the schedule, reducing study time, adding things to do, and giving slide shows, we're improving mental health?  

For the first time in a very long time, I've actually finished a book for a class. For military sociology we read Invisible Women, which is actually a RAND report (in short book format) about junior enlisted spouses researched in the late 90s and published in 2000. Although a lot of the bureaucratic issues have been addressed in the past decade, and the lower enlisted base pay has increased a lot, and these are fairly extreme stories, a lot of it rings true from things I've heard. (Plus, this was before deployments got crazy and constant.)

You can read it free in PDF format here, on RAND's website.

And so I'll be living here for two years starting in February of next year, where according to Yahoo Widgets it's currently 63 degrees--in the early morning.

What really sold me on Japan was a) Living on a U.S. airbase where the life is good b) Hearing about the amazing weather, beaches, and scuba diving c) Learning that ADA peeps think Japan's operational mission is just as important as a deployment to the Middle East.

I made this mix a few months ago for long car rides and never got around to posting it. It's designed to have some ultimate pop songs and some other songs that are a little more reflective. And given that I could really use some cheering up right now, it's good that I finally unearthed the cd as my external is being a pain.

download a zip here: http://www.sendspace.com/file/2cwd8m

1. I Won't Disagree-Kate Voegele 
2. Summer of '69-Bryan Adams 
3. Desperately Wanting-Better Than Ezra 
4. In The Night-Basia Bulat 
5. Heartbeat -Annie 
6. The Sign-Ace Of Base 
7. I Kissed A Girl-Katy Perry 
8. Cant Get You Out Of My Head (Greg Kurstin Remix)-Kylie Minogue
9. Tu Es Comme Ça-Marilou et Garou
10. Open Wider-Bird York 
11. One Monkey Don't Stop No Show -The Honey Cone 
12. Black Horse and the Cherry Tree-KT Tunstall 
13. 100 Round The Bends-Missy Higgins 
14. Maneater-Nelly Furtado 
15. Because It's Not Love (But It's Still A Feeling)-The Pipettes
16. Cars And Guitars-Tori Amos
17. Every Story is a Love Story, Fortune Favors the Brave-Aida
18. The Cheap and Evil Girl-Bree Sharp 
19. Better Days-Bruce Springsteen 
20. He Thinks He'll Keep Her-Mary Chapin Carpenter 

This article is one of the first I've seen in a mainstream publication that actively talks about how military women negotiate uniforms and femininity. It also has amazing pictures of different soldiers and others at the ball--the one of the lieutenant colonel in the wheelchair is particularly moving. Definitely good stuff. Also more here.

I haven't updated in forever, mostly because whenever I start a post I can't think of anything anybody would actually care about.

This whole graduating thing is finally starting to sink in. Damn, it's going to happen. My new year's resolution is to be more social and spend more time with my friends, and I've already done better in that department. Spent three hours last night playing guitar hero with my buddy across the hall, and will probably go out with him and some other friends today once they let me out of here...Classes look good--I'm taking one less than I did last semester and won't have final exams in two of them (although those papers may be more painful, we'll see). I wound up with a 3.6 which is down from the 3.8 I had in the spring, but I had more classes to deal with it so I'm not going to beat myself up about it.

So I'm edging towards posting to Germany now, which should be fun. I mean seriously what was I thinking, giving that up for Bragg just because I don't know what it'll be like?

Come September I'll be in El Paso until early February of next year, but with a lot of good friends--we'll probably wind up splitting a house off-post and making a profit off our BAH. Then Germany if I'm lucky.

The best music discovery I've made lately is the Noisettes . The library back home was having a sale on withdrawn cds, and it looked interesting. Ridiculously good stuff.

I'm slowly making my way through season three of the X-Files. It's entertaining, but I have absolutely no desire to write anything related to it.

I downloaded cooliris  the other day, and it is interesting and links to a lot of video without all the hassle of looking it up. Open Source Food also looks amazing and now that my buddy across the hall wants to cook with me we should be able to have a lot of fun.

OMG, my roommate is watching back-to-back episodes of some reality show about who can be shallow and stupid enough to be "Paris Hilton's BFF."

Can.Not.Take.This.

Wow, the new Star Trek movie looks horrifically bad. When are the execs going to figure out that their main audience isn't 19 year old boys but liberal to moderate grown-ups who like to think about things?

I'm not watching it in theaters and won't buy the dvd. Maybe I'll watch it online somewhere only if I hear something good about it.

You should watch video of GEN Dunwoody's promotion, here (youtube). Great stuff.

This weekend I drove to Geneva to visit LTC W and family. Good times. There was eating and drinking microbrews and church game night and such. I have to say, Protestant churches have something going for them in the "people actually talk to each other" department. More on this sometime later...

These next three days are going to be painful as I'm cramming five days of school I'll be missing first for a funeral detail and then for a recruiting trip into them. And then Thanksgiving hits. So only three days of school left for me--but eeek--I have like two papers due and two exams to make ahead.

Oh yeah! (Not like there was ever any doubt about getting it, though.)



My old roommate got it, which she didn't plan on, but she's happy now, and five other people in my company did. We are going to have the most fun at OBC...

Randomish Thoughts:

*The barracks are getting very cold and I want the heat turned on. Because the military lifestyle is socialism at its finest (completely serious), we'll have to wait for the main power people on post to get the steam running...
*Drinking wine at the thesis advisor's house is reeeeallly fun.
*You need to watch Taxi to the Dark Side if you haven't already. My International Law teacher prosecuted the soldiers who carried out the assaults and made us watch segments of it in class. It's fairly accurate, and he agrees with the movie's position that the policy was systemic and came from the top.
*Lioness is a very artfully made, serious and respectful movie about Army women who fought door-to-door in Ramadi with the Army and Marines. It looks at the costs of war in these women, and universally. My only worry is that people will take these womens' normal and justifiable pain for weakness--even though men experience the same thing. 
*How cool is it that Sandra Day O'Connor organized a conference on the state of the judiciary and is running some kind of public service project about Law?