Today is the Day

So, today is the day I have been waiting for a whole year for. News of my hubby coming home to be with is two best girls. I am totally in love and happy. I feel like a schoolgirl and I am filled with a quiet energy. There is so much to do between now and then, but none of it matters. The truth is nothing matters but having the man home safe and sound. That is all that will matter to him too. I am sure that anything is better than how he has been living. It is moderately clean, smells good, warm bed that doesn't poke him at night while he sleeps, no mortars, a fridge filled with the foods HE likes and wants, Taco Bell not too far down the street, a car to drive without worry of an IED, board shorts, flip flops, surf boards, and the ocean air ALL have to be better than how he has been living. I care about having some things ready for him, but I am not perfect now, nor will I ever be perfect, so why pretend by scrubbing floors and vacuuming corners? I will make the bed, with clean sheets, I will clean the bathrooms, and I will sweep the floors, but beyond that, I am opening my life and heart up again for the man of my dreams to walk through that door again. That is what I am most interested in preparing for...him...me...us. I love you, bebe. Come home alive and in one piece.

Blow the joint 'cause the joint just blows...

POPPING SMOKE, BABY!

Ataraxia

Funny the way that when existence starts, you really do think you’re the center of the universe and you aren’t even aware of your own beginning; you’re just always moving forward. Every day you wake up, you are one day closer to waking up no more. You are born; first there is darkness and then there is light, fiercely penetrating you. Warmth becomes cold but fresh air and you take your first breath. Taking your first breath is not much different than the first time you ever smoke a cigarette. You like it, you want more, and then this substance becomes your addiction. You can't stop and eventually it kills you. No one ever really quits. Every breath you take brings you closer to your last. The noises that were muffled in the womb remain muted no more. They are loud and your very first act as a free-thinking and potentially productive member of society is an act of protest against the world around you: you scream like hell. They cut your cord between you and your mother, an act that may take years to come to fruition. Eventually you will feed, possibly by natural methods or possibly by formula, society's way of introducing preservatives, genetically enhanced nutrients, and possibly red 7, yellow 13, or some form of artificial coloring into your life. The former supposedly makes one more intelligent but the latter has the advantage of one growing up without thinking too hard about their first meal, a thought that plagued every teenage boy I knew. Contrary to Freud's thinking, most adolescents shiver at the idea of even having once been somewhere inside another human being, especially their mother.

After the lights and screams and blood and placenta and the curiosity that settles in once you calm down, the lines start to blur. You find yourself on playgrounds, learning politics, warfare, and of course lust. You may eventually find your face bound to another's, find the true meaning of love, blind yourself with a collage of pleasure and pain, define your life by generally worthless experiences, etc. As you go you may find yourself more and more confused but please keep your hands and arms inside the vehicle at all times. You may find your hand fused to the gun, the bullet representing a single point traveling in a straight line through empty space, the extension of your far reaching power. Or at least your government's. The hand may become fused to a variety of instruments. The gun, the scalpel, the syringe, the pen, the book, the bottle, the cigarette, etc. Barring fire, water, the ever present cancer, gravity, action and reaction, and of course your spouse chasing after your life insurance policy, you will become old. You will become ugly. And then you will become dead. You could very well die today. Consider it every day that you are gifted to wake up and breathe, consider it in all its forms so that when your time ceases, it will not have been for nothing. You are born and there is morning. You live and there is daylight. And then before you wanted it to come twilight falls and evening is upon you. And then night is burning but now you can see the stars so clearly and in the 24th hour, your eyes become too heavy and you fall asleep. Every day you wake up, you are one day closer to waking up no more.

We expect to wake up though, expect to go to sleep, expect to continue our existence for as long as the sun rises. I would venture that only God is as faithful as the morning sun, and that seems like shaky ground but then again, sometimes the morning may prove to be cloudy. I’m just tired. And it’s never the job that wears me out; it’s me. I wear myself out, growing so very tired of me. I remember several years ago when I first moved from the left coast, I thought I missed the desert but the truth is, I just missed the open road. It was freedom, freedom to escape wherever I came from and whatever I was. I guess I was tired of me back then and it was watching the sun rise and set over the desert that helped. The sun rises and you get the chance to be reborn. The sun sets and you get your own quiet death of sorts, the chance to untangle your psycho screwed mind, drown your worries, blow your thoughts away. It goes just beyond time and our ability to measure it and the thought of it I suppose taps into something buried deep in our collective subconscious. Like a man that looks in the mirror and turns away only to forget what he really looks like, we don’t remember any particular one thought but rather the general nature of the thing. Maybe that’s how we understand God, just the general nature of the phenomenon. It’s better that we don’t remember so well, else we’d drown ourselves in memory. If you have children, kiss them gently before they fall asleep tonight and if you have someone you truly love, tell them to rest their feet and grow old with you. I can't and I'm tired now so I'm going to sleep. If all goes well I'll wake up in the morning. If not, deuces.

Autobiography for Learning and Memory Psychology Class

            Let me begin by stating I do not like much writing about myself when given as a task, especially for a letter grade. It puts a great demand on my abilities to discuss myself to complete strangers without the constant wonder if I will be judged or looked over. It is not in my desire to neither stand out in the crowd, nor is it my desire to not make even the smallest impact on those who may read my story. With that said, please allow me to introduce myself. My name is Rachael. I am married to a wonderful man, Christopher, who currently serves our nation in the United States Army as a First Lieutenant. He is less than two months away from coming home from a yearlong deployment to Iraq. We currently live in Hawaii and have a 23-week-old daughter, Aurelia Keala.          

            My husband and I met in the Army ROTC program at the University of Memphis where I was working on a degree in nursing and had planned on going into the Army. We started dating just before Cinco de Mayo of 2007 and were married by November that same year! The day after we said our “I dos” he left to join his unit in Hawaii while I stayed in Memphis to finish out the fall semester at the Loewenberg School of Nursing and ROTC. I had every intention to transfer both nursing schools and ROTC programs in Hawaii in the spring, and did just about everything I could to do so. I joined my husband here at the end of December to embark on our new life together as husband and wife.

            Hawaii is beautiful. It is lush, tropical, colorful, and full of clean air and stunning views. I began a semester at Hawaii Pacific University in the spring, but could not transfer directly into the nursing program, as I had originally hoped and planned. Upon discussion with the advisers there, it would be another 40 credit hours before I could. I was terribly disappointed, because I had worked so hard to get into the nursing program at the University of Memphis, and I felt I had just thrown all that hard work away. I could have stuck it through; however, it would have cost me approximately $60,000 to complete a degree at HPU, without assistance from ROTC, because that completely fell through the cracks as well. Add that onto what I have already spent on school would put me in the hole close to $100,000 for a bachelor’s degree. I could not justify the cost for a newly married couple, but I also knew I could not leave him here in Hawaii alone while I went back to Tennessee to finish the nursing degree there and ROTC program. There was also an issue in the time it would take to complete the degree and the time we would have to leave Hawaii. It was quite a blow to our plans. It took me a while to get over it and figure out what it was I was going to do. Christopher, bless his heart, was very supportive and took a lot of the wrath that ensued. It finally came to pass that I would just change directions, and I am so glad I did so.

            My husband suggested I finish out a degree at the University of Memphis through RODP. This is where I am now. I am six more away from a Bachelor’s of Liberal Studies, majoring in interdisciplinary studies with concentrations in Psychology and Health Studies. I am taking three of those classes this semester, two in the spring and one next summer. With this decision, we also decided to start our family. We are now proud parents of a bright, beautiful and happy baby girl.

            It has been a struggle being a single parent for the past five months, but unbelievably worth it. I have the privilege of being a stay-at-home mother and love that I get to see her develop, grow and learn every day. I have friends whose babies were born around the same time, and yet they have had to go back to work. I just cannot imagine having to leave my baby with another person day after day. I count my blessings that I get this rare opportunity to spend quality time with my little girl. Both of my parents were in the Air Force when I was born, and I was in daycare from very early on in my life until I was in my tween years.

Aurelia Keala is pretty much my life right now. Aurelia is her first name, and was named so after my grandmother. It is a Latin name meaning “golden.” Keala is her middle name, and is a Hawaiian name meaning “the path.” Christopher was fortunate enough to make home for her birth. We had planned on his R&R during the two weeks we were expecting her. I chuckle now, but at the time it was nerve-racking waiting for her to come while he was home. She was a week late, we almost had to get induced, and Christopher had to get emergency leave so that he could be here for the first week after she was born, as I needed the help and he needed the time with his daughter before returning to the hot, arid, war territory of Iraq. Being alone with a newborn has proven to be both trying and rewarding. The first month was the hardest with each succeeding month getting easier. I think in part because I have grown more confident as a mother and have discovered ways to cope and handle the stress. I believe I am blessed with a relatively easy baby, who at four months was sleeping through the night and at five months is quite independent. I must reiterate just how amazed I am at her development! She is already rolling over with ease and has begun to low-crawl and has for the past few days improved her crawling abilities.

Having a baby around will prove interesting as we progress through this semester. All the classes I am taking tie into learning and behavior. When I think of all the fields of psychology, I think of all the studies done with children and their capacity to learn at such an alarming rate. Of course, this is because it is so important for them to make sense of their world in order to not only surviving, but to thrive in it. Memory is such a physical component of their lives. It starts with simple muscle control, sights, smells, tastes and touches. Humans were designed with the innate ability to learn and retain information from the moment they were conceived. Take for example, an infant’s rooting reflex. It is there as a biological necessity to take in nourishment for survival and growth, but as a newborn is exposed to its mother or caregiver, whether breastfed or bottle-fed, they quickly learn the smells and face of the person feeding them. They quickly learn that the person feeding them is essential for their survival. From that moment on, a person is constantly exploring and learning about the world in which they live and how to survive in it.

I am excited for this semester; although, it will be a daunting task to keep up with a growing baby, housework, and all the requirements all these classes are demanding of me. I look forward to my husband coming home from Iraq sometime before Thanksgiving, and right now, I need to go play with my child, who has discovered her toy box and has emptied it all over the floor and is commencing to crawl inside of it. What an amazing day this is!

Boobs

For the past five and a half months, my boobs have been held hostage by the most adorable little baby girl that ever lived. I can't seem to say no. I use to...to my husband. Now, they just don't belong to me anymore, and no matter the circumstance or present company, I just can't refuse her quiet (sometimes loud) whimper for a fanciful milk feast.

Shed a little light...

We replace charity with empathy and somehow think the two are equal. Also, we discuss matters we consider important with people who agree with us and believe we're somehow making a difference. Or, we think that our belief alone makes a difference. We often see no bigger picture than our own instincts. We criticize others for their beliefs, often asking insensitively deep questions of them without bothering trying to answer them for ourselves. Most of us choose to deal only in absolutes where we want to and when we don't want to then we quantify. That is not the road to truth. The road to truth lies in the willingness to accept anything, even if you do not like it. In much the same way, the greatest love demonstrated is given to one who hates the lover in return. This love is greater because it's given freely while knowing nothing will be given in return. We are ridiculously predictable and boring. Which has got to be why Jane Goodall went to live with the chimpanzees for quite some time. Monkeys flinging poo at each other was somehow more civilized. Yes, I was wondering why someone would do that and the rest of this post was the answer I came up with. Sue me.

A paradox is normal if it doesn't happen often...

We've all got this idea of how we believe things should be, this dream perhaps of a better world than that which we live in. Maybe it's heaven foretold or maybe it's just the fading dreams of yesteryear, and there's nothing left but hell and oblivion. People seem torn between love and hate. Perhaps love makes the earth go around the sun in this dance and dervish of cosmic beauty, the pull that keeps us all just on the edge of living, that made the first human being look up at the stars and suddenly feel both overwhelmed and curious. Much as chaos exists, it exists because the universe is in flux; it is wild and untamed but beautiful nonetheless. Hate is us though. Ever since man first existed we have been sitting at the chess table, trying to figure out the best way to annihilate the other forever, though we loved each other once perhaps. George Washington Carver said to God "Mr. Creator, why did you make the peanut?" Then he made perfume, soap and a hundred other useful products. A scientist said "Chaos and Order, sacred laws of science, what of the atom?" Then he made the nuclear bomb. Contrary to all argument, true religion does not corrupt humanity but rather humanity has corrupted true religion. We were not made for hate but for love, if you believe we were made at all, and if so then it was love that pulled the first human being out of the earth and cooled all but the fire that burns still in the heart, love that made us free from our first breath. If you believe we were made. Nietzsche did not believe we were made and said that a living thing seeks above all to exert it's will. Life is the will to power, or something to that effect. So I suppose if you don't know what you believe then you've got options. Most don't know what they believe. I know this because the phrase "moral dilemma" is a common enough phrase to let me know that people can't make up their minds. So this mass idea of what should be isn't really a mass idea at all, just something nice for people to quote and preach on from time to time because we like nice things. I know I'm supposed to put the bottom line up front, but then it wouldn't be the bottom line, would it? So here's the bottom line, at the bottom where it very well should be: if I hear another song on the radio about changing the world sung by a pop icon who's songs normally float somewhere between pimping and killing, I'm going postal.