Meandering

May 1st and it’s snowing.

I swear, only in Colorado. I’m glad we didn’t go up to Denver for the Rockies game. The tickets were free, but the seats were terrible and I don’t follow baseball closely enough be willing to drive an hour just to shiver in the snow at a Rockies/Mariners game. For all I know it may have been snowed out, which would have made the drive to Denver even more pointless. Instead, we slept late, went grocery shopping, and got crepes for lunch.

Oddly enough, for a town that has so many crepe restaurants, it seems like bakers here wouldn’t know French bread if you hit them over the head with a baguette. In Connecticut, I could get virtually any kind of bread I wanted at the grocery store bakery. Here all you can get in "French" and "Italian" and there isn’t actually any difference between the two. There is a French bakery in Old Colorado City (which is about three blocks from us) so I will have to see if they at least know how French bread is supposed to be.  Oh! how I miss Connecticut!

I know it’s unjust to judge Colorado by Connecticut standards. I went through some serious culture shock when I got out here. But I think I’m feeling particularly prickly about it after a comment made to me on Friday by the director of the USAA Child Development Center. She called to set up an interview after the regional recruiting coordinator passed her my name. She asked if I was Group Lead qualified, which I am, then suggested I make sure that my credits from UConn would apply here because Colorado’s requirements are very stringent. Seriously? The option under which I qualify states that I have a Bachelor’s Degree in an unrelated field with at least 2 ECE classes and 910 hours working with children under the age of 6. Connecticut’s requirements for a Head Teacher (which I am)  state that I have to have 18 credit hours in ECE and double the classroom time. Connecticut’s student to teacher ratios are half what Colorado’s are, and yet Colorado’s requirements are "very stringent?"

I just didn’t get the feeling that she would be someone I wanted to work for. On the other hand, she may be like Joy, who can be very difficult to get to know because she’s so serious about her job. She came off quite unpleasant at first, but we worked together pretty well, especially as I didn’t have to be with her all day.

Now, I realize that the internet is full of crazy people and people who say things just to get a reaction, but I have to react to this. This morning Alan told me about this site that features 38 Reasons You Shouldn’t Marry a Soldier. I don’t know who exactly this guy is, but he could give Charlie Sheen a run for his money in the crazy department. The worst part is that some of his points are legitimate, but made in such a way that he comes off as completely batshit. It’s long and rambling, so I will condense it. You’ll see that many of these "reasons" are just repeated ad nauseam. I’ll include the link after the list.

Don’t Marry a Soldier

1. Soldiers commit atrocities so terrible that they are eaten away by guilt and feel that their only way our is suicide. The second part of this reason is that while psychopaths may be charming, they will eventually attack you and your children. (Somehow psychopaths are suddenly capable of empathy, which is news to me.)

2. He will be gone for long periods of time. When he does come home, he’ll leave again after a few days, so you will be a single parent and have messed up kids.

3. Your hormones have taken over your brain and the only reason you want to marry him is his good physical conditioning.

4. Simply by being a soldier in either Iraq or Afghanistan, he is guilty of war crimes.

5. He cannot support you financially. (I suspect when he talks about money, he is not including housing allowance, which can more than double a soldier’s pay in some areas)

6. You will have to move over and over again at a moment’s notice, so you can’t have a career and your children will never see their grandparents, which is selfish.

7. You will live in fear that your husband will be killed or injured, and if he is injured, you will become a nursemaid for the rest of your life. (I’m not sure how this is different from any marriage if your spouse is injured in a car accident or similar)

8. He could be killed at any time. (Wasn’t that the point of #7?)

9. Most soldiers suffer from PTSD and he could attack you. (Somehow 1 in 8 is "most" now.)

10. He’s killed people. You wouldn’t marry a mass murderer, would you?

11. He’ll kill, torture, rape, and do drugs while overseas and once he comes home, domestic life can’t satisfy him anymore.

12. A Canadian soldier with PTSD hurt his children. You don’t want someone with PTSD near you or your kids, right? (Told you it got repetitive.)

13. He could be paralyzed or suffer a brain injury, in which case you’ll be a nursemaid for the rest of your life.

14. The military is all about killing, raping, and torturing people, especially children. He must be drawn to that.

15. He’s chosen a life that keeps him away from his wife with other fit young men, so he must be a fag.

16. Soldiers are exposed to biological and chemical weapons which will cause your kids and grandkids to be deformed.

17. If you love your husband and support his choice to be a soldier, you are complicit in war crimes. He gets off on killing and so do you.

18. He’s just using you for sex.

19. He’ll become a pariah and so will you, hated and spit on wherever you go. (Only if we all act like him. He encourages people to spit on soldiers)

20. He likes killing children.

21. He will become addicted to killing and abandon you for more exciting things.

22. Military life is all about Dominance and Submission, S&M.

23. You’re involved with a serial killer. The shame will stay with you the rest of your life.

24. People will feel about you the way they would feel about Eva Braun and will spit on you and try to run you down with their cars for supporting someone so evil.

25. He will become a drug addict.

26. The people of Afghanistan and Iraq will hunt him and down and kill him and his entire family.

27. Since the wars are illegal, he will be a war criminal.

28. He will be "a mental basket case" and beat you and your children.

29. People will hate you both and spit at you and curse you with their dying breaths.

30. A link to why you shouldn’t enlist.

31. He’s fooled you into believing he’s a hero, but he really just wants an excuse to kill, rape, and torture.

32. All he knows how to do is follow orders.

33. Soldiers are really really stupid and just Nazis who like killing.

34. You will always come second to the Army. And this is a direct quote: You are marrying a Momma’s boy who likes being told what to do, and by someone who is not you. (So it’s okay if I marry a Momma’s boy if I’m the one telling him what to do?)

35. If you’re marrying him just to get to the US, good idea, because you’ll never see him and he’ll probably die anyway.

36. He’s escaping his responsibilities for his kids.

37. It will ruin your life.

38. Women whoare attracted to men who kill children shouldn’t be allowed near children either.

Like I said, he’s a nuttier than squirrel shit. And it’s not that he doesn’t have valid points. Yes, soldiers have to kill people and sometimes those people are not traditional combatants and that really fucking sucks. But since the majority of the population of Iraq is not, in fact, under 15 (just one of his claims), they are not killing children if they can help it. And you cannot be both a psychopath and riddled with guilt. They are mutually exclusive states. And while suicide and PTSD are both problems, they do not occur in anything like the numbers he’s given. He also claims elsewhere that because the pay for low-ranking soldiers is so low, they must enlist because they like killing. He clearly does not know about BAH, which pays for all of our housing costs, or the fact that soldiers and their families have free healthcare, job placement, college education, etc.

The thing that really gets me about this person is that he’s very critical of the "hawks" and war-mongering and claims to be part of Cosmic Consciousness, he actively promotes aggression towards soldiers. He’s gone so far around the bend from "hawk" that he’s completely bypassed "dove" and is more hawk than ever. I’m not saying he should respect them when he clearly has so much against them, but wouldn’t his own "religious" beliefs tell him that hurting another human being is wrong, no matter how loathsome that person may be to him? He contradicts himself at every turn!

But I suppose that I’m breaking the first rule of the internet in even mentioning this, since we should all know better than to feed the trolls. I just hate to see good ideas warped by complete lunacy.

Anyway.

Moving on.

In less than a week, I’ll be on a plane and Connecticut bound. Then a week on the cruise and some time for visiting my friends and back here. I have an interview on Tuesday at USAA, including an hour and a half in the classroom. I hope it goes well, simply because the money would be nice and I’d like to be a part of Bright Horizons again. The reason I didn’t know there were centers here in town is because they’re both corporate, so they don’t always show up on the website. Still, it’s been a nice year off.

I’m working on a new watercolor. I’m still unhappy with the current state of my country and I’m expressing it through art. I’ll share it when I’m done and post it on deviantart.com (username remybelle if you want to check out my gallery… I’ve had good responses so far).

For now, I’m busy making my famous veggie lasagna, unparalleled in the world of lasagna and seriously tasty.

~Liz

EDIT: I realized that I forgot to include the link, should anyone wish to read the original "Don’t Marry a Soldier." I also learned something about the person who wrote it. I assumed at first that it was a woman, but have since learned that the author is a man. There are points he makes spread over a number of the "articles" that made me think he must be a Westboro Baptist Church sympathizer, despite his claims for gay and atheist rights. When I first saw the home page, I was actually taken aback because he lists gays and atheists as somehow separate from "human" rights. And he tends to insult soldiers by insisting they must be gay and that women who enlist as lesbians. As a matter of fact, he’s openly gay. He’s also a computer programmer, so naturally his website looks like complete crap. I can only guess that this guy has some serious psychological issues going on, because as far as I can tell, he hates every minor annoyance with a burning a passion, including himself.