5 Questions Meme

[aadler]

 
So, to break through the long-time non-posting deadlock, this is my response to the meme for which honorh was kind enough to tag me:

1.  Leave a comment, saying you want to be interviewed.
2.  I will respond; I’ll ask you five questions.
3.  You’ll update your journal with my five questions, and your five answers.
4.  You’ll include this explanation.
5.  You’ll ask other people five questions when they want to be interviewed.

1.  What’s the one biggest lesson that being in the military has taught you?

First, let’s distinguish. My military ‘career’ came in two sharply distinct phases. First was the not-quite-eleven-years with the Air National Guard, during which time I never left the contiguous United States, and — except for basic training itself — was never in uniform for more than two weeks at a time. My experiences in that service weren’t unpleasant, but neither were they inspiring, and after my second enlistment ran out, I didn’t renew it.

This was followed, of course, by my deliberate choice [a] to re-enter the military at a time when I could see (in fact, because I could see) that the U.S. was about to go back into Iraq, [b] to select the Army Reserve this time instead of the Air Guard (because if I was going to war, I wanted to be close to what was actually happening), and [c] to choose the unit that headed the list — I asked — for “likeliest to be deployed soonest”.

In case there is any doubt, I don’t count the first eleven years. They count for retirement points, but it was a different service, in peacetime, for brief interludes otherwise surrounded by civilian life.

So, what’s the biggest lesson I learned from what I do count? There were three such lessons, actually.

The first, I already recounted in another entry, at another time: when, during the long drive from Kuwait up into the northern sections of Iraq, I spent an entire night shifting from the turret (where the wind was so cold that I eventually couldn’t stand it any longer) to kneeling on provisions in the center of the cab (until my knees cramped so badly I couldn’t keep doing that), back and forth all night long. And my noting calmly, even then, that it was amazing how much one could tolerate if there wasn’t any choice. That was the real point: I wasn’t even upset about the situation, it was the way it was and I did what I had to do and after awhile the night was over, and I went through the rest of the tour with the same mind-set.

The second: after four or five months of dealing with people all of whom were wearing the same uniform and 85% of whom, for convenience, cut their hair as short as possible, I found myself really noticing faces. If you’ll think about it, most of the time we see people in sets of context: hair, manner of dress, place of work (I once, on encountering a female Episcopal priest in a supermarket, absent her vestments, came within a hair of exclaiming, “I almost didn’t recognize you in clothes.”), and we tend to place them within this totality of circumstances. With external distractions removed, I came to appreciate for the first time just how many different kinds of faces there are, and to realize further — not a new concept, but it was new to me, and struck deep — that the popular notions of human attractiveness, as mostly dictated by film and television, are arbitrary, limited, and largely irrelevant.

The third ... All around me are people younger than I am, more aggressive, more naturally suited to the duty we have to carry out. They deploy, and they serve, and they gather deserved accolades, and sometimes they deploy again ... but eventually they get out of the service and move on with their lives, and I’m still here, and I continue to gradually advance in rank and responsibility and recognition. Because I’m willing. Willing to keep on going, keep on committing, set a pace and maintain it. I did the same thing back in my college judo club, outlasting and surpassing people vastly more talented than I was, but the stakes were higher here and more applicable to a larger life. So, overall, that’s THE most important lesson I’ve learned: that what counts most is to assess what’s necessary to accomplish something, be willing to do that, and then follow through.

2.  What do you hope to get across with your fanfic? What do you hope your readers take away when they read your stories?

See, this question is a lot closer to my heart, but I don’t have any deep, subtle, meaningful answer for it. Each story is what it wants to be. I’m not trying to deliver any particular overall message; even within an individual story, there usually isn’t any purpose I want to accomplish, except to tell an effective story. I do it because I enjoy it, and my hope is that the people who read my offerings will likewise take pleasure. It doesn’t go any deeper than that.

3.  You can trade places with a fictional character for one day, as in, you live his/her life, he/she lives yours. Who is it?

An imaginative person could really go to town with this one. Either I don’t have that kind of imagination, or my imagination is too persnickety ... because I would worry greatly about how much somebody living my life could potentially mess it up, even within a single day, so of course I would have to be correspondingly conscientious to avoid scrambling their life, and that puts in so many caveats and conditions that I suspect it takes me completely away from the hypothetical you’re trying to pose. So, let’s just assume that the gods of the other reality I visit would prevent me from irretrievably screwing up their preferred order, and that my ‘replacement’ would likewise be held within safe limits, so that I could act without worrying about consequences.

I guess my choice would be Reed Richards, Mr Fantastic. I would love to be inside his brain for a day, to see levels of reality the way he does, to have the whole world open up in front of me wherever I looked. (This would be the comicverse version, not the movie version.) Action is fun, abilities are neat, but perception and understanding matter more than anything else. So yes, definitely Mr Fantastic.

... Or maybe Jack Bristow, during any passionate interlude with Irina Derevko.

4.  What’s the most beautiful place you’ve been to?

Oh, Alaska, no question. (Bet you didn’t mind hearing that.) But Germany was beautiful, too. I wouldn’t mind seeing more of both.

5.  Your biggest grammar gripe?

The biggest ones, the ones that bother me most, tend to burn themselves out and be replaced by new peeves. Misuse of ’s (or just the apostrophe itself) would probably top that list, which — because human ignorance and carelessness are so inexhaustible — will just keep being done wrong until eventually the language itself changes (badly) to accommodate the ignoramuses. Past that, though, two stand out to me at the moment.

First, there is no such word as ‘bicep’. There isn’t. The biceps muscle on your right arm corresponds to the biceps muscle on your left arm. You can’t inject someone in the bicep, because there is no such thing.

Even bigger, because this is the one that (in a military environment) I encounter most often: “Hello. My name is Captain John Paul Jones.” “Good afternoon, my name is Doctor Henry Jekyll.” Every time I hear that, I want to leap to my feet and scream, “NO IT ISN’T!” Sometimes I actually do mutter it, even in official formations, because it makes me crazy. ‘Captain’ is a rank, ‘Doctor’ is a title, and those extras are attached to the name, as qualifiers, rather than being part of the name.

Fair warning to anyone who responds: I’m about to enter a period both of intensive activity and of probable restricted Internet access, so I may be able to handle only the first three or four persons (if there are that many) requesting questions from me.