DAY 63 / JAN 30

DAY 63 / JAN 30

It started out in the usual way, well, usual in that I overslept through my alarm and rushed to get to my meeting on time.   At the meeting, I got bad news.  The guy we meet with to brief our convoys is going to be moving on to something else, and his replacement is none other than that damned officer who I had issues with at NTC and then again here.   Lovely, it's shaping up to be a great time in the near future.  I wonder how much it'll change, or if he'll just continue to be his usual fucked up self and not get anything done?   I know he's pretty useless so far, but I hope he doesn't try to useful and just screw everything up.  The unit has also recently changed the format for the paperwork we fill out to send people outside the wire.   Now, instead of one page with all the pertinent information we have THREE.  They try to pass it off as only TWO but they have only put X number of vehicle slots on the second page and we are required to put X+1 vehicles into any convoy.   So, by default we have to use another page for a new total of three.  So much for a paperless office.

 

A family friend apparently committed suicide recently.  I knew that he was down on his luck, but he was always a chipper fellow.   My mom sent me a note saying what happened (but not that it was a suicide) and a link to a guest book.  I even posted a comment on the guest book.   Strange, that even though I didn't know he committed suicide, my comment is still appropriate - even more so, I suppose.  I was really just lamenting the fact that I didn't make time to talk to him more, or email him.   You never know when you won't get another chance.  The thing I remember most about him is when he used to live with us and we played some game on the computers, a tank game actually.   The funny thing was that we didn't have the book and so couldn't get into the game right away.  The game used the book to ensure that you didn't have an illegal copy, which we did, and it asked us for random questions from the book, (ie. What is the third word in the first paragraph on page 56?), and we'd GUESS at the answers.   We knew that some of them were one thing or another so we'd just guess those over and over 'til we got it.  Getting in was half the fun!

Anyway, that's my memory.  And the funny thing is, I just recently picked up a game very similar to the one he and I played back then because I was reminiscent of it.

Suicide is bad.   Just for the record.  And, in the end, it's no one's fault except the person who did it.  Whether they were weak, or depressed, or whatever – it was their choice and no one else should be guilty or feel responsible for it.   Could someone have done something?  Maybe, maybe not.  Hindsight is 20/20 and people like to think that maybe somehow they are responsible or should have done something differently, but the bottom line is – they did it to themselves.   Just make sure it doesn't happen to you.