As I sat today on the balcony outside of our building located in the vicinity of three helicopter landing pads, one particular helicopter came zooming toward me - very, very fast and quite low.  And I thought to myself, “Man, that helicopter is really flying!”

I’d just like to know why everything at work has to happen at the end of the day - the server goes down so you can’t do any more work, so you get ready to go home since it’s close to the end of the day anyway, only to get a call at the last second saying you can’t leave until you get something done that you can’t get done without access to email.

I’d just like to know how my toilet seat gave Anja a horrible rash on her butt, but no one else in the family is affected.

I’d just like to know how people can drink out of coffee cups that have probably never ever been washed. Gross.

I’d just like to know how Harry Potter will end.

I’d just like to know what ended up happening with jackson.matt@att.net.

1. When people whom I don’t know tell me to SMILE!!! SMILE!!! IT CAN’T BE SO BAD!!! This has always grated on my nerves and still does.

2. When I say something is wrong and someone badgers me to tell them what’s wrong. I ALREADY SAID, NOTHING IS WRONG. IT WILL BE IF YOU DON’T SHUT UP.

I grew up with strong holiday traditions: Christmas Eve, we drove to my grandparents’ house around 7, ate a buffet-style dinner, and opened presents until the wee hours. Drove home, woke up and groggily dragged in black bags filled with presents. Christmas morning, woke up to delight in our new goodies, and then prepared for Christmas Day with the other side of the family.

B had the a similar upbringing, a little bit different traditions but always the same thing. Presents on Christmas Eve while listening to the radio broadcast from the church, a huge, fantastic dinner on Christmas Day with rice pudding with a hidden almond for dessert, and Boxing Day the day after with yet another wonderful dinner.

Now we have our kids. Isak is 6 and got to have B’s traditional Christmas for 3 years (’99 - ‘01)…Anja is 4 and only got 1 year, 2001, and she was only 9 months old.

We pack up our apartment Dec. 5-7 with a final small shipment on the 16th. We’ll leave here the week before Christmas to be at my parents’ house, and then leave there Dec. 30/31 to move to Spain.

Last year, I was deployed on the Lincoln over the holidays. B took the kids to my parents’ house, which was the first time they’ve been there for the holidays.

The year before, we were packing over Christmas for our move to Mukilteo on Jan. 1.

The year before that, we moved into our house on Whidbey Island on Dec. 23 and didn’t have anything (we bought tinsel and tape and made an outline of a tree on the wall with a star cut out of a paper bag).

I miss driving around on the crunchy snow-covered streets admiring “Candy Cane Lane” (where almost ALL the houses were gaudily decked out for the occasion) when I was a kid.

I miss the excitement of spending time with B’s family for the 4 years I got to have Christmas with him. We met on Dec. 11th and only talked on the phone after that until Christmas…he lived about an hour and a half from me….I remember him calling as I was sitting on the floor in my barracks room in a puddle of tears, my first Christmas away from my family, no friends or family to spend it with, and invited me to his family’s Christmas celebration. I remember going there and feeling completely and totally welcomed despite the cultural differences and the language barrier. After that, Christmas brought such a nice memory of that first Christmas we spent together.

And now I have no solid traditions to give to my kids, and it makes me so sad. I don’t want our holiday tradition to be sitting in an airport, living out of suitcases, no tree to decorate…I want it to be relaxing, quiet, at home enjoying the time off school and work together.

Fortunately, we’ll be in Spain for 3 years and shouldn’t have any disruptions over those years, but we’ll still have to decide: Do we fly to Wisconsin? Do we fly to Iceland? Do we stay in Spain and maybe everyone will fly to us? Wishful thinking…

Anyone who knows me well and/or who reads this blog religiously will know about my disdain for exercise. It is just yuck. I am an instant gratification kind of gal, and exercise does NOT provide instant gratification. AT ALL. I’m all about instant pudding, quick-cook oats, 5-minute rice, microwave popcorn, digital photography. I have a hard time waiting 17 minutes for a frozen pizza to cook. I don’t even let cookie dough bake because that just takes WAY too much time.

You exercise, and you huff and puff and hurt and have a headache and your face gets all bright red and blotchy and you’re sweaty and achy and STILL FAT.

It doesn’t help that I’m a grumpy exerciser. I do not like “motivational people” working out with me. I do not like hearing “just 10 more!” 5 more times. How cruel is that, anyway? “OK, I only have 10 more, than I can run to the store and buy a pint of Ben and Jerry’s and eat it while laying on a down blanket in my bed, watching the Food Network. What? 10 more? 10 MORE? Jesus. OK, 10 more. Then I won’t have to work out for another month. I can do 10 more. WHAT?? 10 MORE?!?!”

I equally hate running with people. I can’t talk when I’m running. I have only enough breath in me to live from one second to the next. Expending any of that precious breath means I will be laying on the side of the road with a corpsman jolting me with portable heart paddles. I don’t even want people to run next to me in silence, because that means they will certainly feel the road bowing beneath me every time my feet hit the pavement, and they will be like, “Ew, that girl is sweaty.”

But for the last few weeks, I have been faithfully (but grudgingly) hitting the gym at least 3 times a week, with the exception of last week with my LEEP. I’ve been going to this class called Ab Lab, which should be unconstitutional because it could easily be identified as cruel and unusual punishment, not to mention I have the healthiest and most peppy instructor imaginable which I am sure you can by now imagine would only fuel my deep, intense hatred for exercise.

I follow up that half hour of torture with another half hour of racquetball. Now, this is something that has surprised me.

See, I lack a vital quality of a good athlete, especially a good athlete who plays with spherical or semi-spherical objects. That quality would be hand-eye coordination. Oh yeah, and balls too. When I see something coming toward my head, every neuron in my brain is screaming “HIT THE DECK! HIT THE DECK!”, so I usually do. Case in point, today when the racquetball scalped me as I was already halfway to the floor in a supine position, quivering in fear.

But somehow, by some crazy change of luck, I have won 5 games in a row (of 5 games played, no less) against a very athletic person who enjoys such things as volleyball, hockey, rowing a boat, or generally just getting up and walking to the printer. I, on the other hand, prefer laying on my bed. All the time. The printer can be dealt with later, like maybe by her since she likes getting up and walking to it anyway. Maybe she can just deliver it to my bed tomorrow.

So yeah, it’s been a few weeks. I haven’t lost any weight and I am still hating it. Except the racquetball part, because although I may be laying flat on my back, I WON.

I have a whole long post that was nearly completed about Isak and Anja’s well child checks yesterday. With only a few more minutes of typing to go, I had to save it and close it so I could attend mandatory training.

Anyone who has been in or is currently in the military recently knows all about mandatory training. One word: Yawn. The same safety briefs over and over again. The content is usually good and to be valued, but the presentation usually leaves something to be desired…and it’s usually repeated annually.

Today’s training was on family violence. It was mandatory, in a way that mandatory usually isn’t pushed (this was for all commands on base, not just the Naval Station, and was videotaped for anyone who was on duty and unable to attend.) I wasn’t entirely too enthusiastic about it because I had other things to do (you know, like finish my blog post about Isak and Anja ;)), and we had to stand around and wait in a humongous crowd in a small area and it just put me in a bad mood.

We sat and the speaker was introduced. He was the first man at the University of Massachusetts - Amherst to earn a minor in women’s studies and he travels the country lecturing on men’s violence, most often in colleges and universities. Of course, when they said he has appeared on Oprah, my ears were peeled. His name is Jackson Katz, and he founded a program called “MVP Strategies”, which is the acronym for Mentors in Violence Prevention.

His lecture was one of the best I’ve ever attended. He made it clear that not all men are abusive, and that not all abusers are men. He also said that while not all men are abusive, the vast majority of physical and sexual perpetrators are men, and that is what his lecture was going to discuss.

He talked about how we, as a society, tend to turn a blind eye to men who commit sexual and physical abuse. And, as he pointed out, if we do not do something to STOP a behavior, we are thus enabling it. The example he pointed out was racism: If you see a person treating someone of a different color differently based on their skin, but you choose not to speak up about it, you are basically an accomplice.

We were given a believable, hypothetical situation: You’re at a party and see a man putting the moves on a very obviously drunk woman. It’s clear that she does not appreciate his advances - what do you do?

So many people believe in “it’s none of my business”. But is that the right way to think? What obligation do we have to the intoxicated woman? What obligation do we have to the man? My thought after sitting through his lecture is that we have an obligation not to the individual man and woman, but to society as a whole: If we turn a blind eye to a situation that we know has the tendency to turn ugly (perhaps behind closed doors), what message are we sending? Similarly, if we have the courage to stand up in the situation and let it be known that it is unacceptable to take advantage of someone, no matter what their situation, what kind of message does that send?

Another really powerful point he made was that we refer to domestic violence as “women’s issues”. We teach women and girls how to defend themselves. We teach women and girls what they should do to prevent these sorts of things from happening to them. But what are we doing to prevent these behaviors from men and boys?! Why are these women’s issues? It made me think - I can recall plenty of times being taught in school and in the military how to defend myself, but I have never in my life seen anything teaching men not only not to hurt women but also to not accept other men hurting women. And yes, it is a family’s responsibility to teach a child their morals and to teach them that this type of behavior is unacceptable, but if a family fails to teach their children, should we merely accept that “that’s just the way it is”??

The final part of his presentation was from a brief clip from a production he’s involved in that discusses how the idea of what is manly and what is womanly has changed since the last generation or two. I’ve tried to find as similar pictures as I could to show his point.

Intimidating
ca. 1941 : ca. 2003

“Tough”
ca. 1960s/70s
ca. 2000s

“Sexy” women
ca. 1955

ca. 2000s

Action figures (the caption and picture explains it all)

With a comparison of how the toy sizes compare to the sizes of a real man:

**ETA: It is important to add the significance in this observation. The size of the “ideal man” based on media portrayal of what is “masculine” with the increasing stature of these toy man-figures and celebrity figures has become proportionate to the decreasing stature of the woman by the portrayal of what is “feminine” by the media’s standards.

So men get bigger and women get smaller. Men’s appearances become more threatening and powerful and women’s appearances become more vulnerable and waif-like.

Interesting observation.

All in all, an extremely fascinating and very, very much-needed lecture on “women’s” issues, from a man’s perspective.