iraqistan

Last night I had an odd dream about someone showing me new sneakers they had just bought. For some reason, I woke up and had something of an epiphany:

I just don’t care.

Why the shoes (I can’t remember who was in the dream showing me the sneakers, as though that would somehow make it relevant) made me realize this, I am not sure, but it felt liberating.

I have spent an awful lot of time in the Army caring. I still do care, at least about some things. I want my Soldiers (the ones that put effort in) to get something out of it all and do well for themselves and for the Army. I want to succeed at my job and still stay in the field. I want my reports to be right and for my office to have a purpose. I still want and care about all of those things.

What I don’t care much about anymore are things that the Army doesn’t care much about either. The Army wants to send me to a school that could end up cajoling me into staying in for another go? Okay. They don’t because of some inane reason they just came up with five minutes ago? Okay, too. I finally realized that I don’t really NEED much from them anymore, never really did, only I was the one that kept forgetting that whereas they had not. I could get out tomorrow and be just fine. I’d like the school, sure, not just for outside career development but to maybe stay in, but do I really need it? Nah. That makes it all a nice surprise if they actually keep their word and send me this time.

The feeling I got from this realization was completely liberating. I actually worked more today because of all of this, to the point where I think I annoyed people in operations from the absurd number of reports and odd questions I had for them today.

Speaking of surprises and oddities on a completely unrelated note, I happened to be in a main train station the other day and saw several things which both scared and intrigued me:

1) Lots and lots of mullets. The mullet is coming back in Germany. Not as though it ever really left, but I counted at least 20 professionally groomed and long (in the back only, of course) Kentucky Waterfall hair-dos in about five minutes of standing in the middle of the station.
2) A guy in a full Ernie (Sesame Street) costume but without the little screen in the mouth of the costume so you could see the guy’s face. It looked like Ernie had eaten a man and hadn’t fully gotten him down yet, like a snake trying to take on a mouse too big for it to get all at once. Disturbing.
3) A guy in a penguin suit. No real explanation, but there he was, following Indigestion Ernie around. He had the screen in his costume, but may have been too short to see out of it properly as he bumped into things repeatedly.
4) A clown in full get-up exiting an extremely small Fiat. I have no idea how his shoes fit in there, and that actually puzzled me more than anything else for a good while.

Germany is strange a strange place. Luckily, I have at least found mental liberation for a short while. I tend to get sucked back in all the time to caring and trying again, but at least for now I can enjoy the finer things in life, like counting German mullets and seeing if Ernie is about to cough up a man like my cat periodically does her hair.