Granted, I’ve grown since, but still

A while ago before stepping off for my new adventures in the Army, I mentioned briefly that I had a blog on Google’s Blogger that ran continuously from February to August of 2021 until a break due to that first attempt at Army life. The summary I made in that little speedrun was that it was crap and should be forgotten at all costs, but in a show of reverse psychology, it’s got me going back to it if only for the sake of this post, and then it’ll be forgotten forever more like the Macarena from the 1990s.

Feeling your age yet, gramps? Well, move aside, we’re peers now.

The origins of the blog were born from a time of both desperation and interest. I had graduated during the emotionally charged year of 2020, a.k.a. the Second Long Hot Summer (after 1967’s many race riots), a.k.a. The Pandemic/COVID-19 Era, a.k.a.; I’ll stop with the references now, I don’t wanna remember that year either.

I may have mentioned it before, but during that year right after I graduated from college and some change during the protests or riots depending on who you were talking to, I decided to phone up an Army National Guard recruiter. Here’s one of the first problems I ran into here: the waiting. Being in the Army now, I understand the concept of “Hurry Up and Wait,” but a civilian attempting to understand the concept with no other point of reference would be left watching and waiting for something amazing to happen.

For reasons that make sense only to recruiters and journalists who focus on the military, the reason for the wait time — at least for recruiting — has to deal with bureaucracy. A bunch of moving parts are considered before a candidate is moved onto the next step, and yes this does include fitness and health. Decades ago, you could be very physically fit with the body of the next super-soldier but unable to join because you had asthma at five. The standards have been reduced since at least 2004 in that specific case, but asthma and other life-altering maladies do require a waiver… which was what kept me from signing the paper and shipping out the same day.

My medical history was far from perfect, but then again, so were a lot of people going into support roles in the Army. Also, before this, there were loads of (now outdated, but still relevant) statistics on obesity rates in the U.S., so how different was I from the average potential recruit?

Still, I was determined to at least try for the Guard that year, but with all that was going on, including my city refusing to let anyone go outside save for emergencies, and there was no chance in hell I was gonna get into the National Guard that year. I didn’t even have faith in my pulmonary functions test until my doctor rang me up and said it was positive.

And I was ecstatic! The one malady that kept me down all my life had been defeated! But by this point I was so disappointed in the recruiting that I tried looking at getting a work in my college major: writing and literature. Impossible? Or just very difficult? Well, up until that point I was so tunnel-visioned that when it came to writing, my original goal of getting published blinded me to other possibilities, both in becoming a published author and wherever else writers could flex their skills.

The difference between traditional or even self-publishing was the barrier to entry. More experienced writers can give me different stories based on their own experience, but being a poor kid with a lot of dreams, the route of manuscript to editor to agent to publisher was more a matter of money than time. I could definitely wait on this; it took me ten years to get the damn thing published. Side note: if you’re wondering why I didn’t like waiting for the recruiter, but had more patience for the manuscript it was because I was more involved with the manuscript considering I was writing it while the National Guard recruiter was more a luck of the draw. I was dying to beat the odds on this one. Part of the reason I wanted to go NG before throwing all my chips in active was to use the cash there to fund this hobby and eventually use the benefits for a VA home loan. Biased opinion or not, I firmly believe a two-bedroom, one bathroom apartment is not where a family should be raised.

That excursion with the NG recruiter lasted from August to November of 2020. Between the last correspondence with the guy and the beginning of the first blog, I contemplated learning new skills with the Job Corps, but I blew them off for a bunch of personal reasons, the biggest one being my immediate area. The nicest way I can put it is that there are swaths of the Bronx that remind me of these important lessons from The Boondocks.

Parodical or not, where I grew up, very few people turned into responsible adults. There were only three things a black or Hispanic (or in my case, both) kid could see in their future: basketball, rap, or drug dealing, a secret fourth outcome, all of these combined. And I wanted more options. The Army would mean saying goodbye to my family to potentially defend the nation from terrorists and/or near-peer adversaries, but I just saw an excuse to see more of the world that I was missing. Remember, poor kid who wants to see the world, but won’t be able to without money for bus, plane, or train tickets.

Writing, on the other hand, was a much slower process that would have me hone my skills for better results, but there’d still be pitfalls all the same. And I’d be ready for what those could look like. That said, more research and patience to know what to expect and possible steps would’ve helped me plenty. Writing is a passion of mine, as these past blogs show. The bull crap I grew up seeing was really tired and really overdone with all these new people showing up in sports and music. Allow me to be the boomer and say that the classics beat these new folks any day.

Tear me off this hill all you want, I’ll never recant this statement!

So yeah, I was concerned about potentially sharing a workspace and probably a dormitory with a bunch of kids who essentially thought the same, spoke the same, and all that. I went to school with people like that; some diversity of thought would be a huge breath of fresh air at least.

I still had my friends from before, but we were all drifting apart over time. Hell, my best friend is a father now, which essentially makes me an uncle. Writing wouldn’t net me any new friends, but it would put some money in my bank account so that I could travel and make friends the old fashioned way.

Or so I thought. Just like this blog, the old one was supposed to be primarily entertainment, but with a larger focus on anime and video games. Somewhere along the way, my time on YouTube bled into the blog posts and s[horse neighing]t went wild. Going off the rails and everything. I’ve been careful to keep my political opinions to myself, but on that other one, it was like watching someone go mad with cabin fever. And this was 2021. We had the vaccine by that point. Maybe the maturity wasn’t there yet. I was only 22 then and at least in this blog, I put some kind of research into my topics instead of just bashing my head on the keyboard like a somehow more inept Invader Zim.

A few months later, I went all in on active duty. I’d spent the last year of high school till that point convincing my mom that the military was a smart decision for me personally, but she had her reasons for imploring me to explore different options, not all of them related to my health. I graduated high school in 2016 at the age of 17. In the U.S. at least, if you’re out of school by 17 and you want to join the military, you need parental consent and my mom was in zero rush to see me in a military uniform at that point. We were also still seeing active combat deployments to Afghanistan and potentially becoming a statistic was completely off the table for her. So it was off to community college for me.

Fast-forward to 2021, and we’re set to leave Afghanistan and transition into a peace-time Army and my mother finally tells me that if I want to I can go active duty Army, so I did. The time between talking with the recruiter literally down the street from me and shipping out was about 3.5 months, enough time for me to scramble my incoherent thoughts in a piss poor blog. I’ve linked to that blog right before I shipped out in January for basic training, but to save you all the trouble, it’s right here again.

Once again, I’d like y’all to be nice. The first attempt is almost always the worst attempt. It’s not like Einstein was born with a brain that big and heavy. Then I started this blog in 2023 after being told by another recruiter that based on my previous performance at Fort Jackson, I wouldn’t have another chance in the Army. But again, my tunnel vision, or rather my determination, kept me from quitting just yet. I’d keep looking for ways to beat the odds.

It still took some doing and a year of mostly sitting at the computer and occasionally jogging wasn’t worth anything. Literally. My folks were wondering why I wouldn’t get even a retail job and my excuse was that even though experience is different from anecdotes, too many retail worker horror stories kept me from taking that plunge. I was desperate for work too, but not that desperate.

A third recruiter bailed on me, leading me to find a remote one on Reddit (beating the odds once again), and in between then and now 2023 was just me filling up this blog with better though still imperfect content. I know I said that I’d like that first blog to be forgotten for good, but as an archive of how I used to think and feel about XYZ, it’s good to have something to remind me of how not to do something. Yay!

I know it’s a month divisible by 2, but this time I wanna try something different. No recommendation this time, but next time I want to see if I can make biweekly recommendations at least until June to get everything back on track. My notes from before still have old dates written on them and they’re pretty much invalid. Once that’s cleared up, then I’m good to give you another YouTuber to eye. Gonna step out into the wider world next time.