Seoul Incheon: not actually very remarkable. It’s a big modern airport very much like many other big modern airports. It’s not ideally designed: it requires walking maybe 1500 meters from one end to the other, for military arrivals at least. Still, its linear design means it is at least simple. Also, free internet and occasional power ports make things nice.

Beijing: ridiculously, monumentally enormous. The extra open architecture is very pretty and enhances the impression of spaciousness. It’s got a modest selection of duty free shops and restaurants. For all its size, it’s strangely empty: the restroom has queueing lines and handy symbols built in to speed traffic through its 20 stalls and 40 urinals, but I had it to myself. Perhaps the decision not to heat it had something to do with that. There are occasional power ports, but they are of the wrong shape and voltage. Internet is available if you pay cash yuan at the business center. There is no easy way to get cash yuan. Important: do not attempt to connect there using military id and orders in lieu of passport; you’ll be turned back by Customs.

Newark Liberty: relentlessly commercial. Like many US airports, there is pretty obviously more security in place than the architecture was designed for. My overriding impression of the airport comes from one flight where I connected there from Japan: my bag took 90 minutes to emerge from the baggage claim, and then the line to re-check it ate another 150. Needless to say, I missed my connection from all of this. It wasn’t nearly so bad this time, at least. Internet and power are available at business kiosks.

Manchester Boston: a small feeder airport with aspirations to eventually grow into a hub. Its current compact size and low traffic makes it feel very comfortable. Power and wireless internet are both easy to find and free.

Tokyo Narita: efficient, artistic, elegant. Probably the most comfortable airport for its size I’ve ever been in. It’s also one of the more complex, but there is plenty of clear signage to help find the way around. Power and wireless internet are ubiquitous, but the “you’ve successfully joined our wireless page” is actually a multilingual set of links to various ways to pay for the connection to get it to stop redirecting all traffic to the links page.

Military:

RKSM (Seoul Airbase): as my home airbase, it’s the place I’m most familiar with. It’s unique in my experience of military airfields in not having a greasy spoon type diner attached to the flight ops building somewhere. The airbase is actually run by the Koreans, with K-16 being a plot leased to the US military.

RKSO (Osan Airbase): this place is run by the Air Force, so I don’t often go there. Still, if you want to see an F-16, an A-10, or a U-2 on the ramp, this is the place to (occasionally) find them.

RKSG (Camp Humphreys): this is where we actually do most training, as it’s the nearest airbase actually run by the US Army. Here’s where the rest of 2CAB, meaning the Apaches, Chinooks, and another battalion of Black Hawks, are based.

RKSY (Yongsan Garrison): a tiny heliport barely large enough to fit two Black Hawks simultaneously, it’s still a common destination because Yongsan is where a lot of the command structure for Korea is located.

RKJK (Kunsan Airbase): another Air Force base, this one only gets mentioned because it has the nicest Flight Ops building and pilot lounge I’ve ever been in. I believe it homes F-16s.

RKTG (Camp Walker): this place apparently used to have a fairly large air contingent; you can still see the remains of a runway suitable for fixed wings, and there’s plenty of parking and refuel space. However, at some point buildings were constructed over both ends of the runway, leaving only a single helicopter pad. It does have an exceptionally nice USO building.

I knew I wanted to choose a marketable degree; even though I was even then selling my life to the military, I always figured that it would be a good idea to have a backup skill. I worked it down to two choices: mechanical engineering or computer science. Neither of those was a problem, as they were both on the list, they were both concrete skills, and they both seemed like they could be fun. In the end, I flipped a coin, and ended up a programmer.

It would have really helped me make my choice if I had read A Comparison of the Educational Costs and Incomes of Physicians and Other Professionals, which actually does all the math of working out expected income over a career vs time and money in school for a number of professions. In the end, business wins out.

…I suppose I can start work on my MBA as soon as I get through flight school.

Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of earth
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;
Sunward I’ve climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth
Of sun-split clouds – and done a hundred things
You have not dreamed of – wheeled and soared and swung
High in the sunlit silence. Hov’ring there,
I’ve chased the shouting wind along, and flung
My eager craft through footless halls of air.
Up, up the long, delirious, burning blue
I’ve topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace
Where never lark, or even eagle flew -
And, while with silent lifting mind I’ve trod
The high untrespassed sanctity of space,
Put out my hand and touched the face of God.

The Air Force, of course, flys high-powered fixed-wing aircraft with more thrust than they know what to do with. Here’s the Army’s take on the matter:

The thing is, helicopters are different from planes. An airplane by its nature wants to fly, and if not interfered with too strongly by unusual events or by a deliberately incompetent pilot, it will fly. A helicopter does not want to fly. It is maintained in the air by a variety of forces and controls working in opposition to each other, and if there is any disturbance in this delicate balance the helicopter stops flying immediately and disastrously.

There is no such thing as a gliding helicopter.

This is why being a helicopter pilot is so different from being an airplane pilot and why, in general, airplane pilots are open, clear eyed, buoyant extroverts, and helicopter pilots are brooders, introspective anticipators of trouble. They know that if something bad has not happened, it is about to.

I cannot help but find the contrast delicious.

I have been dealing with this recruiter for just under three months. In that time, he has gone from a helpful but somewhat hard to reach person to a poltergeist determined above all to ensure that I accomplish as little of the recruitment process as possible while in Japan. I can’t help but feel like, were someone competent in his place, I could have accomplished all of the necessary testing before leaving the country, instead of only the very first of four tests.

Until that point, my plan for life after college had been to serve a term in the Air Force and travel around the world. I have long wanted to live in a number of diverse places, and the military seemed an excellent route by which to accomplish that. However, with that plan shot, I had to come up with something else.

After some consideration, I decided that before I was 30, I would spend at least a year of my life in Japan. To that end, I began studying Japanese. It was too late to join the formal class for that year, so I began studying on my own. At the beginning of this school year, I began taking Japanese class. I have been performing well in that class since that point. However, it is a beginner’s class; at this point, though I might be able to survive in Japan, to say that my communication skills are limited would be an understatement.

Yesterday, my parents approached me with an opportunity: If I could figure out a job and a basic survival plan for Japan, they would send me there after graduation. This is a chance too big for me to pass up; it’s a wonderful opportunity to do something I’ve wanted to for quite some time.

At this point I am trying to work out those details. I need to know how to look for a job there, how to look for an apartment there, any pitfalls or booby traps that might be lying in wait for me. I’m doing research on my own, but I’m going to ask a favor here: if you know anything on the subject, please tell me everything you know. I’d prefer to work in computer science (that being my major), but I can definitely deal with teaching English if I have to.

This is actually awesome.

I suppose the problem is that for quite some time, I’ve had a future basically mapped out and planned for myself. I defined my identity primarily in terms of that planned future: I’ve been an AFROTC cadet all through college. Before that, I was a Civil Air Patrol cadet during high school. After college, I was supposed to become an Air Force officer. Suddenly, I’ve been removed from AFROTC; the Air Force doesn’t want me. I need to figure out some driving force, some goal that I’m going to focus on and work towards, because until then I’m going to continue the pattern of just sort of drifting.

In the meantime, there are a few things I know are going to change about my future. At the bare minimum, I won’t achieve something I thought I already had: going through college without student loans. Which I’m going to have to find very soon now. I’m going to have to find an actual job after college, using my degree–another thing I hadn’t really planned on. I probably should find a job during college to pay to live.

I can find lots of things to do to keep myself busy. But busy isn’t good enough, because busywork won’t help me accomplish anything. I’d really like to accomplish something with my life.

One option, I suppose, would be to try to realign my identity as the fratboy. I’m already a member of a fraternity, complete with boozy parties and brothers who are never sober, rooms that always smell of pot and rooms (and people) that just smell unwholesome. I could set my goals simply: graduate with the minimum passing grades, eventually, while spending as little time sober as possible. Getting laid counts for bonus points. But I don’t think that’s going to happen. As time goes on, I see the fraternity turning more and more into the horrible stereotype of everything it shouldn’t be. I joined with a group of friends, but I’ve only stayed close to a few. The rest have drifted away into apathy, drunkenness, fraternity politics, or have dropped out and vanished. In the meantime, this place hasn’t been the inroad to new friendships that it was meant to be. Sure, there are a lot of cool people… but there are as many assholes. And I’ve never really fit into the cool crowd. I guess that the telling point here is that I was planning on moving out before I ever heard from the Air Force, and that’s still going to happen over winter break, barring another fuckup.

I’ve considered joining the National Guard. If nothing else, it means that I’d have an income. Hell, I might as well enlist in the Army. Their enlisted jobs are better than those in the Air Force anyway. The problem there is that the lowest-ranking Army jobs pay less than the poverty line, and I will have those student loans to pay off. Still, it’s something to keep in mind for after school, if I can’t find anything else. It’s no good for the meantime, though. The biggest problem with the National Guard is that it’s a little too close to the stereotype of a homegrown ‘militia’ which consists mostly of rednecks sitting around in camoflauge drinking beer and toting their hunting rifles.

I could delve into the schoolwork, really try hard, get good grades, all that. The biggest drain on my time is gone now, and the second-biggest will be gone after the winter break, when I move out of the fraternity. There’s not even any sort of good reason why I shouldn’t do that. But it isn’t fun, and I know myself well enough to know that even though I can start any projects I want to, I only follow through on the ones that I enjoy. There was never really a time in the Air Force when I wasn’t having fun. Fraternity life has actually become non-fun to the point where it’s overcoming inertia and causing me to break away. But schoolwork has never actually been fun, and I just can’t see myself developing that kind of work ethic in the amount of time I would need to.

I suppose that really defines the crux of the problem: I’m looking for something to do that I enjoy that’s big enough that I won’t feel silly defining my life around it. I enjoy anime and role playing games, but those arent really anything I can turn into my life’s work. I suppose I could get a job programming, but that has such a huge potential for drudgework that it makes me want to shy away. It’s not that there aren’t fun parts; it’s more that for each cool innovative thing you do, you have to spend so many painful hours debugging that it’s almost not worth it. I need to do something that I really enjoy, and I’ve focused my last few years into developing a set of skills that have suddenly become basically worthless.

The short term problem, at least, is solvable: I have to find something to concentrate on until I finish school that I’ll find fun. Maybe I’ll take up a sport. Actually, that could be good; it’ll keep me from falling too far out of shape. I don’t know. My sister races crew at her school; I suppose I could do the same. I’ll have to make a note of that, find out about it.

I suppose it’s important to keep a sense of perspective about everything. I was born and raised in the richest country in the world, in a stable family by people who weren’t poor. I’m in a good college and I’m smart enough to finish up with good grades. You can’t say that I haven’t been lucky; you could say that I’d be crazy to complain too much about my situation. Please bear with me if I complain too much, or post strange, inane things: my life is changing rather dramatically, and I’m dealing with it however I can. And it’ll get better over time. I just have to get used to things.

You remember the old Chinese curse? Well, I’m starting to realize why it’s a bad thing to have an interesting life. (If this journal is uninteresting, it’s my own inadequacy in writing; trust me, my life is more than interesting enough for me as I’m living it.)

1. Full reinstatement into AFROTC, complete with a return of the scholarship. College is quite a bit more difficult to afford without the scholarship, and I genuinely want to be a part of the Air Force. If they decide to give me the boot, it will be that much more stress in the end.
   • CONDITIONAL: I’d also like to get chosen to be a Navigator/Weapons Systems Officer, but that’s not even possible unless I stay in AFROTC
2. A computer that works reliably. It would be disappointing if it were less powerful than the one I have now, but it’d still be more useful than the one I have now.
3. Time management skills such that I’m not as stressed out as I tend to be due to my own procrastination.

Is that too much to ask?

He’s getting married.

Perhaps this would be less of a shock if I knew that he was in a serious relationship. But it just seems almost surreal. I’m still not even of the drinking age; neither is he. A good part of the surprise is simply that marraige is something for the grownups and TV, not something that I nor any peers of mine should really be considering.

Another part of it is that this is really the first time done something significant before me. The pattern was always that I would try something new; a month later he would have surpassed me at it. I started playing Magic in 6th grade and taught him the game. By the time I quit, he had five times the cards and reliably beat me at it. I started launching model rockets; although he never got his individual rockets to come out quite as nice, he had twice as many as I did. After high school, I went to college with an AFROTC scholarship; he just enlisted into the Air Force.

Now, the pattern is broken. This contributes to the surprise.

I suppose that this is a part of maturation. Earlier this summer, I was invited to a wedding in my own right for the first time. Now, it seems I get to be the best man for one. Life goes on.

I just want to note about the homework-type things: it’s not actually the homework that kills you. I did my homework for the week for one class in about 45 minutes last night; the only other class assigning homework I have a hw partner in who is quite willing to finish up the groundwork I laid in about an hour of coding. So the homework, this week, wasn’t bad at all.

No, it’s the projects that kill you. Last Thursday, one week ago, my Operating Systems teacher announced to the class that it’d be a good idea for us to start the project, because he expected it to take us 25-30 hours. This project is due tomorrow. And I had other plans for Labor Day Weekend.

So. My project partner and I (she lives half an hour offcampus and has no instant messaging services, just to make things interesting) started work early, and have both been working on the project whenever we have a spare hour or two… and it is, at this point, maybe halfway to completion. And she can’t work on it today.

This is not to mention that I have an essay due tomorrow, which due to this project I haven’t started yet.

Well, my time is up. I must now report to PT, because the Air Force likes me better when I’m sweating. We had awards yesterday, and I got the PT ribbon. I was quite amused. But that is for another time, when I actually have time.

-coriolinus