@Elaienar My ex is in the Navy, and we were dating through that, so... I know there are some variations between branches of the armed forces, but I will spam information in case it's useful, because god, basic is stressful. Spoiler Yeah, they do that "hurry up and wait" nonsense a lot. You will likely not know anything with any reasonable amount of notice, the military just kind of... does its own thing. :P It's a huge pain. Basic is normally more like nine weeks, not nine months. Contact is very limited during basic. I got an address to send letters to after a couple of weeks - you'll probably have to bug your parents for that, they only send it to parents and spouses if I recall correctly. I didn't get any letters back for about a month. After that, for a couple weeks, they were allowed to send letters every Sunday morning, though my ex was able to write letters in the evenings sometimes. After that, they started being allowed to send letters several times a week. Phone calls and more frequent letter writing are a reward for good behavior, and are awarded as a group, so it's basically luck of the draw; if you get lucky enough to be in a good group, you'll get more of them. I think I got about three phone calls while he was in basic. There might be a family/friends "support group" for each barracks on Facebook. This can be really nice because people share news and gossip, but you also will probably want to be really careful about what you say, because everyone gossips in every direction in the absence of news. :P You may be able to find it through the base's page on Facebook - the Navy one also does stuff like weekly trivia contests, where the winner gets a picture of their loved one's group. Navy has a big graduation ceremony after basic, with family strongly encouraged to attend. So you should be able to basically spend a whole weekend with him, if you can get to the base. It's limited to immediate family and maybe a couple guests, as I recall. Don't make super solid plans, because if he gets injured or something, he may have graduation delayed. :P Which sucks. My ex got sick and was stuck there for several extra weeks. Folks usually get leave after basic; the only exception is if the next school is starting up right away and there isn't time. After that, Navy has something called A-school, which is where you learn about your actual job; I believe the Air Force does something similar, but I'm not sure what they call it. That can last anywhere from two months to like a year, depending on how fancy your field is. The good news is that in A-school they have a lot more privileges. They slowly ramp them up - as usual, based on the group's behavior - but after a few weeks he should at least have regular internet access and the ability to go off-base with permission, though not to sleep other places overnight. Again, probably will get leave after that. After that, the particularly complicated jobs - like, engineering jobs - have what the Navy calls C-school, which is also like a year, from what I know. My ex didn't go, so I don't know as much about that one, but I know that it's basically "normal" privileges - you can go off-base, you have normal access to things, it's basically normal life except that you can't go on leave in the middle of school. And then you wait around until you get sent to your actual job. Like I say, it's all "hurry up and wait", so there may or may not be some downtime between any of these phases. For instance, my ex was just sitting around for about a month before A-school because he was waiting for enough people in that specialty to graduate. :P Once actually on the job, it's mostly just a normal job; you can live off-base and travel reasonable distances and all that fun stuff. It's just school that's really strict. So... yeah. It sucks and it's super stressful, but... finite.
@albedo Thanks for sharing, reading that calmed me down a bit! The nine months is 8+ weeks of basic plus a bunch of other training - I only heard basic when he first explained it - the rest of it is several months of Advanced Something or the Other. He said graduation will be at um ... seven and a half weeks? So it's not like I'll never ever ever see him again. And it's combat control, which is what he was hoping for. So! That's good. If he's going to be in danger at least he'll be in danger in the occupation of his choice.
my ipad apparently didn't charge when i plugged it in, and now it's dead. i'm trying to get it to charge now, but i don't know if it will.
I was just about to complain about that. Woke up to my grandma telling me Stan Lee died because it was the first thing she saw on Facebook and she forgot what day it was -_-. My sleep's been fucked and I'm mildly dissociating on-and-off and some of the sites I use have pranks I can't turn off. Everything is way too goddamn bright, my eyes hurt, and there are a lot of moving patterns/pallet shifts/visual fuckery making it worse. Fuck today.
that's ok, my favorite rp forum is now all comic sans and BRIGHT GLARING RAINBOW. and now also everyone is pretending to be this one member which is wigging me out
I am so glad I have noticed almost nothing of april fools day, except for a friend who posted on facebook that she had a new kitty, and then it was april fools :( I didn't like that joke very much... Though I suppose it's mostly harmless.
Dear mom did you have to get your haircut at a hair and nail salon? I cant breath with the amount of nail polish fumes in the air...
want to get a haircut, have no money #college life i think long distance gf and me have lapsed into an off-again span, and I can't think of what to do or if i want to do anything about it. half feel like if i go up to canada and plan it with her, then we have a higher chance of staying together, but long-term I don't think we're gonna work out anyway. It's more of a "we're too similar" issue than anything, and I'm going to cali in october, and moving progressively more and more south because I'm vaguely hoping that SAD wouldn't be so bad if I'm not in ND. unrelated note, i'm really sick of north dakota in general. a friend from wisconsin just visited and now she's gone and i wish i was gone too. i miss trees and hills quite horrifically, and it snowed here (lightly) the other day. i miss sane weather. bluh bluh bluh
my iPad, the shitty cottage Internet connection, and tumblr's sideblog no-notes thing are all interacting to make tumblr rping really fucking difficult.
I'm going to snap. My roommate is driving me crazy. Spoiler Roommate has invited over a guest without even giving me a heads-up beforehand. Roommate has given me no indication of the relation of this guest to Roommate. I don't even know his name. Guest, the first time he was here (unannounced) a few weeks ago, made a "joke" about "accidentally" eating all my food. I paid for that food. I don't appreciate having money stolen from me. Roommate is Cooking. I hate the cooking smells; they make me want to throw up. Counterintuitive, but there it is. Oh god Roommate is making bacon and the oven fan is not on like I asked for. This is the most throwuppy smell that Cooking makes. Roommate was having sex with Guest over the weekend. I know, because when I turned my video game off to go to bed, I heard them. Through the wall. Roommate is currently blaring music loud enough that it is drowning out my video game. Through the wall. I have no idea how long Guest is staying, but if it's through tomorrow, I have an 8 AM and they need to be fucking quiet after 10 PM. They might not know that, though, because the undergrads have tomorrow off but the law school doesn't. Roommate is also drinking underage in this apartment. If she must, could she just not do it here where I can see? It irritates the law student in me. No, I cannot talk to her about any of this. The last time I asked her to do something, she gave me a Nastygram (literally, a two-page typed letter) telling me that She Is An Adult and can do whatever she wants, and that I have to "ask her like an adult" to tone down anything I'm not okay with. Which in this case means groveling. I'm not okay with groveling to assert my legitimate boundaries. I'm going to sit here with not-good-feels locking up my joints all day, it seems. I wanted to get work done today and she's just. Obnoxious. Reminder to self: Your lease is up in July. You are moving out of here whether you have a job or not. You are moving to a nice apartment where you are the only resident. You only have to put up with this for a few more weeks before you get a break and go back to parents' place to sort out your shit.
'Someone made an ignorant remark, let's attack them, because personal attacks are okay because we're fighting against ignorant tumblr social justice and the ignorant party is a celebrity!'
Once again, the Homestuck fandom. I end up crying every time I read the part where Jade hurts Jadesprite for crying because it's almost exactly what my mom did every couple of weeks during the schoolyear and once or twice every summer. I think I skipped it a couple of times because it's just too much to handle. But, like, nobody else seems to notice it. I've never heard of anybody getting horrified by it or thinking Jade is a bad person for it. Fans rightly talk about how awful Vriska's mind control smooch with Tavros or Cronus's nasty talk with Mituna was, but when it comes to Jade screaming at and physically hurting somebody for crying, because they are crying, for a long time, which I would think ranks among those things, it's just "Oh, twee Jade made a little mistakey-poo, how embarrassed she must be! <3 <3" I guess not many people have been on the "Jadesprite" end. I started off annoyed writing this post and now I'm just scared and thinking about mom. I tried to be emotionless like all the other traumatized people. I repeated "I have no feelings" to myself over and over. But the tears just kept coming out and I wanted to die because the emotions were too powerful and it overwhelmed me and wouldn't stop. I couldn't scream loud enough or cry hard enough to express it and move the emotions outside of me in the form of sound waves. I just wanted her to stop screaming at me and to stop holding me down and to comfort me for once. Is this post too whiny?
maybe people don't talk about it 'cause she's essentially doing it to another version of herself... like that's my first guess... which yeah, is probably a bit colder a response from me than you need (thus me not tagging you) but... i figured it was worth mentioning anyway.
Jadesprite's experiences have done a lot to differentiate her from Jade. She's a lot more fragile, for instance. I mean, I don't see anything about them both stemming from the same person that changes the person yelling/person crying dynamic. And honestly, I think dream Jade was always a bit different from Jade. In the very beginning people comment on how she talks weird when she's dreaming.
