Hello all,
It has been a while since I posted anything, and with good reason. I have literally worked about 100 hours a week now for a few weeks. I am a walking zombie. Today I had a day off, meaning that I only had to work 8 hours. I fell asleep, slept through a shipboard fire drill without even hearing a damn thing and woke up just in time to get dinner before the galley closed. It seemed kind of weird that when I woke up I felt worse than when I went to sleep. I had some messed up dream that kind of put me in some sort of funk, so I decided to jump on my bike and bike up to a coffee shop or should I say THE coffee shop. Anyways they have connectivity here, so that is good.
I don’t know how much longer I can keep up this schedule. Honestly, I am having to gut check myself as I am increasingly more demoralized by my situation. For those of you who do not know I am going through the Navy’s right of passage into shipboard life, ie. busing tables on the mess decks 15 hours a day. I have developed a habit to likening work situations to comical but real life situations that are common to people. Todays thought:
You have surely heard a story when a man or women gets intoxicated enough that they wake up the next morning next to a person they wish they never woke up next to. That seems to resemble my career now. I think to myself, holy shit what was I thinking? Only here, in my life, I cannot get up, walk out and leave a bogus number. Nope, she knows where I live, where I sleep, and she has my number. There is no escaping this ugly, lustful, bitch named the Navy.
Yesterdays which was popular among some of my jovial and respectable higher-ups:
In the movie Monsters Inc, Monsters run around scaring kids in order to power their city by somehow capturing the energy created by fright. I think our ship has stolen that idea. Only it is not fear that they use for energy, they use sorrow, and anger. Every time the lights flicker or the television starts to go out, somebody will walk in and tell me that I have extended hours, and guess what? Whoosh, television comes up, lights stop flickering. It is like on out ship I am the friggin nuclear reactor. I cannot be happy or surely we will experience a black out. There is a certain level of sorrow and demoralization required for the ship to operate effectively.
I would imagine I would fair much better if I got to see my kids and wife even weekly. I cannot tell you how much my heart aches when Jade says, “daddy you gonna come see me” or “I gonna come see you on the spaceship in Maine”. Out of all the clever little saying and offerings of advice one endures in a lifetime is there one more true than “you don’t know what you’ve got til its gone”?
All the venting aside there is nothing I really can do other than push on, living day by day. All I have to do is make it. That is it. Everything else is insignificant. All my other problems are moot. Maybe I will watch Shawshank Redemption again. Maybe I will crawl though a river of shit and come out clean.