“And so it goes…”

<>December 10^th 2005, 0500B

I’ve been awake since around 0300, so I’m more than a little grotty and not exactly feeling full of light & joy right now, but I’m not going to complain too much about having woken up so early. In fact, if it wasn’t for the fact that I’m seriously buggered for the rest of the day I’d be quite happy to wake up so early every day, during the week at least. You see being awake at 0345, Tuesday to Saturday, has the upside to it that I get to watch the early morning repeat of Mythbusters on the Discovery Channel. It’s on in the evenings at the far more civilised hour of 2030 or so, but I never get to watch it then because everyone else wants to watch the news, or some sport or other – I imagine that you’ve all had experience of what it’s like to try watch what you want to when there’s one tv between a family of four, so imagine what it’s like when there’s one tv between 20…..

Anyway, I only started watching the program when I got here, despite having had DSTV at home for quite awhile, & I’m really sorry I’ve missed it till now as it really is a hoot. In case you don’t know what it’s about, it’s these two guys who examine urban legends & try see if they can prove or disprove them. You know, the story of the guy who blows himself to shit when he drops a cigarette into the toilet bowl after his wife has dumped all sorts of interesting chemicals into it in an attempt to kill some bug, or the guy who strapped a JATO rocket to his car to see how fast it would go, only to end up embedding the car 100ft up a cliff face. They’re really thorough in how they go about looking at these stories, & the results the produce are certainly very credible, but these guys have so much fun while they’re at it. The unholy amount of glee evident when they get to blow shit up in particular is readily apparent, & I can easily believe that these guys think they have the best job on the planet. I’m not going to suggest you get up at some un-Christian hour of the morning, but if you can catch the evening show, or tape it, then I heartily recommend that you do – it’s a barrel of laughs & one of the best programs on tv that I’ve seen in a long time. Almost makes me want to renew my DSTV subscription when I get home…..

Otherwise it’s been a quiet few days since I last updated this. One thing I’m happy about is that I was out on another escort on Thursday, & this time I made sure to take the bloody camera with me. I was in luck too, as it was pretty much a repeat of the scene I described in the previous post where I’d been so pissed that I’d not had the camera with me, so this time I got some good shots. A lot of them didn’t come out well at all, and I think I may have damaged the lens after all – either that, or I’m seriously out of practice lol – but it’s still went a long way towards restoring my enthusiasm for photography. I probably just needed a break from it for awhile, or a day when I got a reasonable number of good shots rather than the recent pattern of throwing 90% of them away because they sucked. I’ve still got a way to go to really get back into the swing of things, but the last few steps have been positive ones that I’m happy with, & I’m starting to carry the camera around with me again, rather than leaving it locked away in my footlocker. It’d be criminal to have spent so much time & money of the hobby till now to just laugh it off in the space of a month or so, so I’m really very happy that I’m regaining some of my enthusiasm for it.

Something I found a little disconcerting about the last few days was a comment made to me by one of the guys here, something that made me realise just how much of an impact these long duration deployments have on the family lives of the people who come on them. Actually, that’s not quite accurate, because it’s not so much the deployments but rather the people themselves, & the fucked up decisions & choices they make while they’re here. To be honest for the most part I’m blissfully ignorant of what most of the people I work with here get up to outside of the office, as I deliberately keep as much distance around me as possible from most other people here. Yet even with my determinedly limited involvement in other peoples lives, I have noticed that infidelity seems to be an acceptable pastime here, either within the contingent, or with the locals. And it’s not just the men either – all three married women I know here have been involved in affairs in the time they’ve been here, and one of them very enthusiastically so. Another has gone home with the express intention of divorcing her husband of 5 years so she can hook up with a guy she got involved with here – bug fucking mistake if you ask me, ‘cause this asshole is hardly what I would describe as the faithful sort himself. But you reap what you sow I guess, & the wheel has this nasty habit of turning….

Now I don’t know any of these people well, nor do I really want to get to know any of them, so for all I know maybe they all made really shitty decisions when they got married & have good reason to be looking elsewhere, but somehow I have my doubts about that – the number of people involved stretches the laws of probability beyond breaking point for that. It’s not that there’s much discretion involved either – like I say, I keep my distance for the most part, but even so it’s glaringly obvious to me – and it seems that the prevalent attitude is one of “everybody’s doing it, so it must be ok”. Either that or the thought of mutually incriminating stories is enough to keep people quiet when they get home – “sure you can burn me to my wife / husband when we get home, but you’ll go down with me.” Perhaps there’s some truth to the saying that everything is legal so long as you don’t get caught after all.

I don’t know, but the basic dishonesty inherent in so much of the behaviour going on here really bothers me. The other day I was lying in my tent, reading a book on the laptop, when I heard the guy in the tent next to me make a call home to his wife. It was fairly standard stuff, the usual “I miss you sooo much! You’re my world & I love you more than anything else” & I didn’t think anything of it. This is a guy who often speaks of his wife & kids at home, & genuinely seems to miss them. But not 5 minutes later he makes another call. Now I don’t know if he thought I was asleep, or fucking deaf or something, but he puts the call on the bloody speaker phone! I heard every word he and the woman he called said to each other, and not a fuck was it his wife. Nor would his wife have considered the conversation they had…. appropriate.

And yet this is a man who claims to love his wife, the woman he married & made significant promises of fidelity to. A man who stood in the front of a church & swore an oath in front of God that he would “love, honour, & obey”. Now I’m not a religious person, despite my upbringing & much to my mothers dismay, but the idea of deliberately breaking a promise you make in front of God strikes me as being seriously dumb – in the event that He does exist, you are in for one huge fucking smack when accounts come due.

What the fuck is wrong with these people that they can’t even seem to spell the word “integrity”, or have an idea of the meaning of self-respect? I mean, they’ve made promises to other people, either implied or explicit, and that to me makes things very simple – either keep your promises and remain faithful, or have the honesty & decency to break off the relationship.

You know what, I’m going to stop here, because all I’m doing is pissing myself off with this, & battering my already diminished faith in humanity. I swear, sometimes I think most people should be euthanized at birth, and the behaviour I see around me here serves only to vindicate that opinion.

But don’t mind me, I’m just grumpy ‘cause I’ve been up since far too early and I’m pissed off & jealous because all these other bastards are getting laid left & right, and to hell with marriage vows, but I’ve not had any nookie in a good few months now. Just doesn’t seem fair, does it? lol

I’ll be going into town this morning, so I’ll upload this then, & also hopefully get to download Skype so that I can try out the World Call service of theirs – I’ve been trying for three days now, but the bloody download keeps crashing. If I get it right, I’ll be calling as many people as I can, so hold thumbs for me.

But for now, ¡Hasta luego! everyone ;)