Boat has Two Syllables

Unsurprisingly, this quiz has confirmed that I do in fact speak like a northerner, just like my sister. Unsettlingly to some, I've also picked up a few vocal habits typical of the South, particularly y'all, which I suppress pretty well at home, but tends to confuse southerners who hear me use it, since the rest of my speech is so thoroughly northern.

What American accent do you have? Your Result: The Inland North   You may think you speak "Standard English straight out of the dictionary" but when you step away from the Great Lakes you get asked annoying questions like "Are you from Wisconsin?" or "Are you from Chicago?" Chances are you call carbonated drinks "pop."
The Northeast
The Midland
Philadelphia
The South
North Central
The West
Boston
What American accent do you have? Quiz Created on GoToQuiz

Jumping the 250

The highlight of Tower Week, the second week of Airborne School, is jumping (well, being dropped) from the 250-foot parachute training tower, which I did today. You can see the historic towers in these pictures; they haven't changed much, though one of the four was blown down in a storm in 1988. I hadn't been particularly enthusiastic about the tower, since it struck me as kind of silly and just one more chance to get injured before Jump Week. I became less enthusiastic after seeing multiple malfunctions on the tower over the course of the day, though the safety precautions worked in all cases and there were no injuries. The tower isn't a requirement of the course, see, and often many soldiers don't get the chance to do it anyway, due to weather conditions or whatnot. But nonetheless my turn came up and I was hoisted aloft and dropped, and boy I wished I could have done it again. It was a lot more fun than I expected, and I was surprisingly at ease. I'm not really bothered by heights in any case, but I was expecting the hoisting and the long moments of waiting at the top to be rather nerve-wracking. Not the case, apparently, because I just sort of relaxed and enjoyed the view. And then I dropped, and I was more focused on manipulating my parachute for a soft(ish) landing. It takes less than 15 seconds to drop 250 feet, so it's really over before you know it. No lollygagging about in the sky like a civilian skydiver's parafoil, the Army's parachutes are designed to get you on the ground quickly, and for good reason. If you've seen Band of Brothers, you'll remember that in a real Airborne insertion, the sky isn't exactly a safe place to be. Not that any Normandy-style invasions are anywhere in my likely future, but that's the idea. Tomorrow we should have a short day with just a few classes, and then I'll be off for my one real weekend of Airborne school. I really have no idea what I'll do all weekend, since during the week I generally just hit the Internet for an hour and go to bed early. I'm sure I'll figure something out. And then next week is Jump Week! Five successful jumps (including two with combat gear and at least one at night), and I'll be fully Airborne qualified!

Christmas Hints List

As a favor to my dear mother and anyone else struggling with gift ideas, I've put together a list of hints in my sidebar. I'll try to add a few more things so it's not quite so specific; I really hate when Christmas lists are nothing more than "these are the things you will buy me".

The Day is Nigh

I used to joke that I wouldn't join the military until I could do so as the pilot of a GFRS (Giant Fighting Robot Suit). Granted, I slipped up on that promise and joined a bit too early, but I've remained excited by the prospect. Me and my buddies in CA even used to jokingly muse about the future Mech Corps and even invented a branch insignia (a sprocket Or on field Sable with crossed lightning bolt Argent and laser beam Crimson, if you can imagine). In any case, as this video shows, it's exciting times in the US military. Who knows, if I stick around long enough, I might just get a chance to reclass to mech pilot after all.

Loving the Midwest

I've been home for just a couple days for Thanksgiving, and I've been greatly enjoying being back in the upper Midwest. I particularly appreciated this helpful sign posted on the door of the local Fleet Farm (sort of an agricultural Wal-Mart).

I'm almost happy I don't have any of my close buddies with me at Airborne, so at least this time I won't have to take the usual commentary on how much my accent has regressed northwards.

Ground Week

Finished Ground Week of Jump School today. Well, yesterday, actually, since we didn't do any training today, just cleaned up and got released for the long Thanksgiving weekend. It was a lot of fun, overall. I'm certainly encouraged, since Ground Week is by all accounts the most difficult portion, and I didn't think it was particularly hard at all. Which isn't to say I'm not more sore than I have ever been in my life, because even though it's not exceptionally difficult, Airborne training is brutally punishing. This video gives a good idea what I've been up to, despite the rather frenetic editing:



Ground Week mainly consists of practicing proper exits on the 34-foot tower and proper PLFs (Parachute Landing Falls) on the LDA (Lateral Drift Apparatus). We spent one full day on the tower, and nearly two full days on the LDA, which you can see at work in the video when the narrator mentions practicing PLFs until you get them right. And it's kind of funny, PLFs are terrible and you dread each one you have to do. Until you start getting them right, that is, at which point you feel like could do them all day, because they don't hurt anymore. But then you're done, because you're doing them right. Boy, you really do pay for the ones you do wrong, though. Last night when I was laying in bed, I had to use my hands to lift my head off my pillow to get up, my neck muscles were so exhausted from PLFs. Having a long weekend for Thanksgiving after Ground Week was perfect timing, really.

I have a lot more thoughts about Jump School, particularly regarding the remarkable pedagogy at work, but I'll probably get to that later this weekend or perhaps after Tower Week.

All The Way

I report for Jump School tomorrow. Needless to say, I'm really excited and a little bit nervous. I really oughtn't be, since I'm confident I'm ready for it physically, but it's still a bit intimidating. I guess my biggest fear is that I'd be injured and not be able to complete the training, in which case I wouldn't be able to go to my assignment at the 82nd and could end up who-knows-where. And there are few things I hate more than facing an uncertain future over which I have no control. In reality, though, there's little reason to suspect that three weeks from tonight I will be anywhere but in the belly of a C-130, waiting for that red light to turn green.

And while I certainly appreciate any thoughts and prayers, these concerns of my own definitely pale in comparison when I'm reminded that S and K, two of my closest Army buddies, are headed to Iraq on Saturday. That's where my thoughts and prayers will be this weekend.

Blog Quizzes

So, some of these things are fun, I'll grant that. Especially the more pointless the topic. But some of them are a little spooky, or in this case, leaning toward offensive. There's just something about the title, "How Happy Are You, Really?" that seems to snidely imply you're less happy than you think. And even if it comes up that you are happy, while I'm glad Internet confirmed it, I already knew that much. And happiness isn't one spectrum, because there are several things that are causing me varying levels of emotional distress, mostly the prospect of facing down a series of momentous life changes in my near future. But here it is, for what it's worth:

You Are Very Happy

Your life is totally together, and you enjoy every day. And you don't need a quiz to tell you that! You know how to find pleasure in the little things... And even when life isn't so great, you have a good sense of perspective.

How Happy Are You, Really?

Sidenote: I'm pretty sure this quiz was designed for women. Just the impression I got.

The Blog Readability Test

Along with Uvalpie's Girl, I wouldn't have posted this if it had been anything less.

Amazing

Tip from Shane. Truly amazing.

1337: Part 3

Driving

Just finished a full day of driving through the heart of the deep South. Yesterday I had the pleasure of traversing the greater part of Texas, spent the night in Shreveport, and today I made it as far as Montgomery, Alabama. I wish I had some interesting thoughts to share about my experience, but the thing is, though this is the fourth state in two days, I never really left Interstate-Land until this afternoon, when I got onto US80 to cross Alabama. One notable: there's a Waffle House at pretty much every exit I've passed through Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama. I also saw a Mister Waffle, which appeared to be a low(er)-grade knockoff, sporting a suspiciously similar sign of black capital letters on illuminated yellow blocks.

Other observations? I don't like driving at night. I prefer lonely two lane roads to the Interstate during the day, but absolutely hate them at night, when oncoming traffic means your eyes never adjust and you feel like you're driving nearly blind.

Also, I've started to notice signs of the drought that has affected this part of the country. Since I entered Alabama, I've been seeing more and more 'rivers' that look like little more than muddy ditches. I expect that will get more pronounced when I get to Georgia tomorrow.

I've Been Memed!

Well, here it goes. According to the rules of this meme, I am to list a handful of courses I'd like to take, as well as one with the person who tagged me. So, first on my list would be Beginning Bookbinding with the Elephant's Child. I mean, I already go by the nickname "Books" among half of my Army buddies, so I might as well roll with it. Plus, there's something very fundamentally satisfying about anything involving paper, string, and paste.

Next on my schedule would be Calligraphy and Hand-Lettering. I have a soft spot for dying arts, I suppose.

From dying arts to dead languages; I would love a course in History and Principles of Orthography. I have, as must be clear by now, a deep reverence for the written word. The development and history of writing systems fascinates me to no end, and a course that covered the principles of how ancient writing systems are deciphered would make me indecently happy.

Now, on to broadening myself. I am in desperate need of a course in Sports Skills for Non-Athletes. Thanks to the Army, I'm now in the best shape of my life. I still lack, however, many of the rudimentary skills of coordination necessary for even casual participation in team sports. A primary focus of this course would be not throwing like a nine-year-old girl with a broken arm.

Fundamentals of Drawing would round out my schedule. Not everyone can be a great artist (and I have little inclination in that direction), but everyone can master the fundamentals of perspective and such that allow one to quickly produce clear, understandable sketches. I can handle myself with words, but there are so many times when you can save a great deal time and effort by simply drawing a picture, if you've got a decent grasp of the basics.

So, those are my courses. Who to tag, then? Let's start with Lutheran Lucciola, and since I'm working to expand my personal blogrealm beyond mutual acquaintances with Elephant's Child, let's see if I can get a response from Lens Lover, Shane at Ramblings, and Quantitative Metathesis.

Iraq, again

So apparently the Afghans aren't a heck of a lot better at PT than the Iraqis. Go figure.



I haven't put these clips up just to poke fun, incidentally. The bigger point is demonstrating exactly how hard it is to set up a functioning country from scratch. Even on something as fundamental as physical training, the average recruit to the Iraqi army is coming with almost no practical skills. As out-of-shape as many new American soldiers are, almost all are at least familiar with the concept of performing calisthenics in a group, in cadence. I guess we can thank public school gym classes for that. Iraqi recruits, however, come from a culture in which physical fitness for its own sake is a completely foreign concept. Iraq is really hot. One simply doesn't do hard physical work unless it is actually necessary. Additionally, it's the sort of place where fitness is identified with the peasantry, where being out-of-shape is a sign of luxury and wealth. I'm pretty sure soccer is the only reason any of them are in decent shape at all. The Iraqi people are continually amazed that American troops work and patrol during the heat of the day, because to them it's something you just don't do. There are all sorts of rumors that we have special pills that let us withstand the heat, or that our body armor is air-conditioned. Don't we wish.

In any case, the Iraqi Army is a microcosm of the sorts of issues that will continue to hold the country back for a while, because the doctors, teachers, judges, and civil engineers are hardly in better shape to do their jobs. We forget that though we destroyed the physical infrastructure of Iraq in the invasion, Saddam had been destroying Iraq's human infrastructure for 30 years. We forget that the knowledge and expertise of the population needs to be rebuilt along with the infrastructure, and these sorts of things just take time. I for one, along with most of the soldiers I know, have no problem with the idea of this taking another decade, though preferably not at current troop levels, obviously. There are a lot of things that are really looking up, but there's still a long road ahead. Patience, however, is not one of the great American public virtues.

The Future of Iraq

I sure hope not.
Intel Dump.

Here Come the Holidays!

Is it just me, or does it seem like Ramadan comes earlier every year? {cue rim shot}*

The 'holiday season' is a'changing. For one, we had to rearrange the name after Ramadan moved ahead of Halloween a few years back. Pretty soon we'll see if it drops from public consciousness once it stops lining up with the major Western festival season. The liturgical year has scarcely more weight these days, so maybe we can shorten it a bit there, too, by leaving Advent and Epiphany to the traditionalist fanatics.

In any case, for now, Have a Happy Ramahallowgivingsventzaahanaksmasyearpiphany!

*If you didn't get the joke, the Islamic calendar (well, pre-Islamic Arab pagan calendar, actually, but don't tell them that) is lunar, with twelve 28-day months, so the holy month of Ramadan does actually start 11 to 12 days earlier every year in comparison to the solar calendar.

Thoughts on Augsburg

Sunday night, in quiet lonesome celebration of the Reformation, I read through the text of the Augsburg Confession. I realized, while I was reflecting on my Lutheranism, that I had never read the most accessible of its founding documents. Reflecting on it, what a phenomenal document, indeed! I could certainly spend a great deal of time reflecting on each article in turn, but I guess I'll just comment briefly on the remarkable prescience of the reformers. In Article XXIII: On Priestly Marriage, the Confession has this to say:

Many God-fearing and intelligent people in high station are known frequently to have expressed misgivings that such enforced celibacy and depriving men of marriage (which God Himself has instituted and left free to men) has never produced any good results, but has brought on many great and evil vices and much iniquity. [...] And it is to be expected that the churches shall at some time lack pastors if marriage is any longer forbidden.

This was written in 1530, mind you, just shy of 500 years ago. Granted, the Roman Catholic church has held off these twin threats for a shockingly long time, but both the fallout of "evil vices and iniquity" and a looming lack of priests are now dangerously threatening the future of the Catholic church in the West.

The other place where the reformer's vision struck me as particularly farsighted is in Article XXVIII: Of Ecclesiastical Power. I'd hate to be reading too much into this, but I don't think I'm the only one who has a hard time reading this sort of thing without making connection to the principles that underly the proper separation of church and state:

Since the power of the Church grants eternal things, and is exercised only by the ministry of the Word, it does not interfere with civil government; [...] For civil government deals with other things than does the Gospel. The civil rulers defend not minds, but bodies and bodily things. [...] Therefore the power of the Church and the civil power must not be confounded. The power of the Church has its own commission to teach the Gospel and to administer the Sacraments. Let it not beak into the office of another; let it not transfer the kingdoms of this world; let it not abrogate the laws of civil rulers; let it not abolish lawful obedience; let it not interfere with judgments concerning civil ordinances or contracts; let it not prescribe laws to civil rulers concerning the form of the Commonwealth.

It is telling, then, to notice that the reformers seemed adamant to keep the Church out of affairs of state for the Church's sake. So much debate on the 'original' purpose of the Founding Fathers in separating Church and State in America comes down to back-and-forth about who needs protecting from whom, as if the one could only be corrupted by malicious forces from the other. The reformers here demand the separation of the "power of the Church and the power of the sword" and condemn church interference in state not out of secularist outrage, but rather recognizing that wielding power in temporal things weakens the Church in regard to the "eternal things".

I realize I could go on all night about this document, teasing out the implications of each article as I see them. I don't, however, have the time or energy to do that; nor do you have the time and energy (or interest) to read it all.

Bad Astronomy

I was reminded of the Bad Astronomy website and blog by my Superior Older Sister, who today dropped me a link to a curious argument against heliocentricity. While the WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) premise is an inspiring ode to empiricism with its blinders on, it's a simple fact that there are compelling pieces of real, facts-on-the-ground evidence that show that the earth both rotates on its axis and revolves around the sun. Even if you're willing to decry Foucault's Pendulum as a hoax perpetrated by a vast Jesuit conspiracy, I doubt even the Jesuits could convince hurricanes rotate counter-clockwise in the northern hemisphere and clockwise in the southern. For that matter, if he's so determined to believe Foucault's Pendulum doesn't demonstrate the Coriolis Effect and ergo a rotating earth, why doesn't he just build one himself? It's a pretty simple experiment, really. Unless he's not actually interested in truth. Sigh. Some people. Bad Astronomy does a great job of debunking this sort of mischief, including one of my favorite sub-genres of this sort of thing, the Moon-Hoaxers, as well as Bad Movies, Bad TV, Bad News, and a variety of popular misconceptions about astronomical phenomena and physics in general. Good stuff.

Christmas Music Already

As a recently-outed Dark Lutheran, I love the fading away of the Church year, and eagerly await Advent, probably my favorite season of the liturgical year. There's something about spending four weeks celebrating in hushed and reverent anticipation, and the way the building excitement of Advent parallels and prefigures the sadness of Lent.

That said, we're two months out from Christmas, and there's already a Christmas albums display at Best Buy. At least it's overshadowing Halloween, in the music department anyway. And while it's not yet the Christmas season, I was quite excited to find Sufjan Stevens "Songs For Christmas" album for sale. For years, he's made a small Christmas album that he would give out to family and friends, and last year they were released for the first time as a 5-disc album. I had looked all over for it last year, and never found it in time for the holiday. Short story, I bought it and highly recommend it. It has a great mix of Christmas hymns and songs respectfully performed, as well as his own reflections on family and the holidays, including "Come On! Let's Boogey to the Elf Dance!" and "Did I Make You Cry on Christmas Day? (Well, You Deserved It!)". He's one of my favorite musicians, who despite working in the 'mainstream' Indie music scene has many songs which are far more meaningfully Christian than the vast majority of what comes out of the "Christian rock" music machine. Consider the album "Seven Swans" which covers topics like the Atonement, the Transfiguration, the Binding of Isaac, and a hauntingly beautiful reflection on the Revelation in the title track.

Mind Your Doors, Papists! It's Reformation Day!

Happy Reformation Sunday, friends.

Today is a good day I think to reflect a bit on my Lutheran journey. It's certainly been eventful in the last few years. I was raised in the LCMS, and from Confirmation on have been committed to Lutheran theology, as well as I understood it at that point, anyway. The liturgy and practice of the church, however, were not something that particularly compelled me in my ignorant youth. In college, I experienced the beauty and comfort of Lutheran worship perfectly performed, yet the vapidity of sermons crafted to appeal to the broadest swath of idealistic and theologically-muddled youths kept me from ever feeling fed in chapel. As a result, I ended up attending the churches frequented by other members of the (generally excellent) Bible studies I attended during the week. While one of those churches lost me early when I found out I was hell-bound due to my infant baptism, through college I generally split my time between an American Baptist church and another from the Evangelical Free nebula. Both were solidly based in the Word, but I got the Word in Bible study as well, or for that matter, whenever I felt like opening my Bible. I couldn't put into these words at that time, but I know now that I was missing the Confession and Absolution, and the Sacrament more than anything. My time in college, then, was a split between learning about Lutheranism academically in class and chapel, and learning how much I yearned for it in those other churches.

I've known what my faith meant to me for a long time; better, I've continually been in the process of learning what my faith means to me. It wasn't until I joined the Army, though, that I've really begun to learn what my theology means to me, and been struck by how much Lutherans really are set apart. With the Army so heavily drawn from the deep South, Lutherans are rather poorly represented. In the Midwest, even the Evangelicals know what Lutheranism is and who Lutherans are. For many of my colleagues, though, the only committed believers they've ever met are Evangelicals or Mormons, and their expectations are based on that. It's been very eye-opening to me, then, to be such the odd-man-out, theologically. I'm starting to get better at explaining my beliefs, but more than anything it's made me realize how much more I ought to know about my faith and my theology. So, in celebration of this Reformation Sunday, I think I'll be staying in and reading the Augsburg Confession. It's a start, anyway.

For further Reformation Day reading, see this excellent commentary on praise music from Pagans and Lutherans, and an apology (in the original sense) of the liturgy from The Rebellious Pastor's Wife.

Deadly Euphrates Shark Attacks!

Well, actually, I suppose the fabled Euphrates Shark was only deadly to itself in this case. So for "deadly" read "suicidal". Which gives way too much material for snarky comments, and I'm just going to leave that train in the station.