its been a relatively quiet month chez moi - some of it by choice and some of it not. but nevertheless, ive spent a lot of hours at home over the past few weeks. its been mostly good, but the downside of spending too much time with yourself is that you start over-analyzing every aspect of your self. like everything - even things that were totally fine and you had no business messing with. im generally pretty deconstructive when it comes to self-analysis thing and let me tell you, after a month in the ol' noggin, im a little sick of me. im also tired of looking at the stupid haiku.

ive managed to create a crisis around me. what kind of crisis? well its a mix of pretty much all the usual ones: career, relationships, future. actually i dont really like that word.. crisis. it makes things sound more dramatic then they need to me. it was more of a confusion stemming from a general lack of satisfaction.

so i was pretty glad when mRage called me yesterday and told me about this party on the south east side. so after dinner, we headed over to the eastern market stop. mRage has been hanging with this guy that she met sort of randomly who is a US marine, recently returned from Iraq and heading back very soon. I really didnt know what to expect from this guy, but i trust mRage's judge of character, so he couldnt have been bad, or she wouldnt be hanging out with him.

the party was what I would describe as a good party in terms of turnout, but we pretty much stuck to ourselves. I spent most of the night just talking to mRage and E, the marine. it was all pretty entertaining. he kept trying to recruit me. Occasionally, he'd say, "G, we need more guys like you in the marines". Id usually just laugh and makes excuses like "I wouldnt be able to do the push-ups" or "There's that minor issue of my citizenship". But overall he was a pretty decent guy. Id ask him questions about how he got where he was and he would tell me stories about training and how tough it could be (I later told him he needed to work on his sales pitch if he was trying to recruit me). I pretty much avoided getting into anything really heavy. Occasionally he would switch from being regular-guy and he'd let out the marine in him, but who can blame him, he is a marine after all.

i guess what i got from the interaction is a sense of how hard it must be. I mean yes, it is a choice that they made, and regardless of whatever opinions you have about the military or the war, i have a lot of respect because im not sure that is something that i'd be able to do.