I want your addresses!

That way I can send you mail while I'm gone at Basic Training for 13 weeks.

ESPECIALLY if you want to make plans or arrangements for when I'm down from Dec. 20th to Jan. 2nd.

If you're reading this, saying, "Oh, I'm sure he doesn't want to hear from me/Oh, he already has my address/Oh, he won't have time to send ME mail... etc. etc." DO IT ANYWAY!

I would love to hear from all of you.

Love you all, wish me luck.
 

I go back tomorrow, do the whole process over again, sit in a bus, a rickety, scary bus that an angry old man drives for four hours or so because we have to stop at every recruiting station on the way to Tampa to pick up other recruits, and then stay in the hotel for the night. After we sleep they wake us up at four in the morning, get us on a bus, and shuttle us to the actual MEPS (military entrant processing station). Hopefully this time we won't run into any problems. Maybe we will run into some animals or something. That would be sweet.

After that, I'm basically working out like MAD until I ship out. I ship out from that same processing station on the 18th. I catch a bus from there that goes up to Fort Jackson, SC. That's where I have basic training.

Basic lasts roughly eight weeks, most of the time. For me, because I get two weeks off for Christmas, it's a little longer. More like 13. After boot camp is over, I go to AIT, essentially training for the job that I'll eventually have. The job I will eventually have is working on TV style broadcasts using a studio camera, learning all of the systems involved with it, all that jazz. Like I said in the last entry, I'll be a glorified cameraman. I study how to do that for 27 weeks. AIT is in Fort Meade, just south of Baltimore. This is unbelievably good news as I have a friend that I love very much going to school at Georgetown University in Washington, DC. This was a remarkably lucky turn of events, for us, as we've always lived a country's length away and it's always been really hard to get together.

Anyway, after AIT, who knows. I get deployed, maybe, I get to choose where I want to be stationed, maybe, a number of things can happen.

The reason I picked the job I did is because it was the most enjoyable, least combat-oriented, and shortest commitment time job I could get. The reason I wanted a shorter term is because there are more rewarding jobs for people who can get TOP SECRET security clearance or SECRET security clearance, whereas I can only get basic security clearance, because I have a felony charge on my record.

There's a bunch of bullshit going on there I won't even get into.

But they come to me 24 months prior to the end of my commitment and ask what I want to do in the future, they write up a new contract, and I then fufill the terms of that, nullifying the old one. So that means that I'll only have to serve for one year doing something trivial, I will have proven myself an asset and when I re-enlist I can get those jobs that require a security clearance.

This party was, as they say, off the heezy. It was awesome, and I bumped into some people there that I hadn't talked with in a long time, who were remarkably cooler than I remember. Alex Peak was one of these guys. I met a traveling custom jewler/stand up comedian named Davis with a huge fucking shark tattooed on his back. Cool guy. Also, I got to hang out with Kaleigh all day today, which was a much needed thing. I have missed her dearly.

Anyway, I ended up not sleeping that night, even after having gotten pretty drunk, so I'm going to go ahead and rest, as I have to be up pretty early tomorrow morning to do the thing with the angry people who make me do things I don't wanna do.
 

Then I woke up.