It is for mornings like this that I own a coffee brewer with a delay brew timer.

Today is a Safety Day. Two or three times per year, Fort Rucker shuts down entirely for one of these, no matter what they were otherwise doing. People on the flight line just lose that training day, and make up the hours later. WOCS candidates and AIT kids get the day off from training. They even bring the SERE people out of the field and give them access to showers and the same crappy lunch pizza that everyone else can get. The Army rents out the civic center of one of the nearby towns so that the thousands of us can all sit in the same place and watch the briefings. The briefings are the same every time: Drunken Driving Will Kill You. Motorcycles Will Kill You (And Owning One Means You Don’t Love Your Family). Think Carefully When Starting Fires In Your House. Don’t Be Stupid On Vacation.

For the rest of this week, I’ll be in the simulators. Everyone, including the trainers, prefers real flight hours to simulator hours. Still, simulators are valuable for the most dangerous parts of training: the first few days encountering the aircraft, the first few days in instruments, combat maneuvering flight at terrain flight altitude, sling loads. It is the last of these that I’ll be doing now.

Sling loads are unique in that they really aren’t dangerous to us. We used to train them in the aircraft. In some of the training LZs, you can still find the practice loads, which are nothing more than big blocks of concrete each with a U of rebar looped into it. Nobody can verify the story, but everyone agrees on it: one day, one of the training devices failed in flight. The rebar just slipped out of the concrete block, which then holed someone’s house. Now we train sling loads in the simulator.

I should head out now. When briefing us about the safety day, our class leader gave us the mandatory accountability time, and told us to bring a book: there are no scheduled activities until more than an hour after we have to show up. We all also know that this accountability time is according to the Army schedule: if we have not already checked in with our section leader ten minutes before accountability, everyone will consider us late. It is for this reason that I am leaving at 0600 for a day whose activities start two hours later.

It was a deal too good to refuse.

There are some hassles associated with motorcycle ownership, at least around Fort Rucker. Every month or two, there is a mandatory motorcycle inspection; you have to spend an hour for someone to look over the thing, dip the oil stick, measure the tread depth, then send you on your way. I’ll probably have to retake the Motorcycle Safety Foundation basic riding course, as I have no idea where the certificate is from the first time I took it. Base policy requires that I wear a reflective belt over my reflective motorcycle jacket; otherwise in the event I am injured riding they may make me pay for any resultant medical care.

Even so, there are also advantages: the military gives motorcycles better parking spaces than even handicapped people get, and commanders all up the chain officially support motorcycle use: last month, my company commander gave anyone with a motorcycle a Friday off in order to participate in an organized ride. Beyond that, it is nice to have to fill up the tank only every second week, and then to spend only $10 on it.

The best reason is the simplest, though: motorcycles are fun.

For those interested in the bike itself, it is a 2007 Buell XB9R Firebolt.

Braking late raises the risk of becoming unable to brake hard enough to avoid rearending someone. Braking early ensures that more aggressive drivers will maneuver around you and get ahead in line. It’s interesting watching people choose when to begin their deceleration and inferring truths about their personality.

I tend toward a cautious aggression: I begin braking, softly, at a point which ensures that even if the queue extends as far as I have ever seen it, I will not cause an accident. Speed, in this context, becomes a resource that I hoard until forced to dispose of it by traffic. It’s an essentially centrist approach, pleasing to neither passengers who demand defensive driving nor to ones who want to spend as little time on the commute as possible. However, I usually end up with a pretty good position in line without ever facing moments of real risk.

I’m curious to see in the debates tonight how close the candidates come to a centrist, presumably populist approach, and how far out they go to appease the extremophiles among their supporters. Their problem is analogous to the braking problem: how close to the center can they come without angering their hardline supporters at the edges?

I had been proceeding up until now with the expectation that I would join my class within a week or two of Christmas. That was fine, if annoyingly long; it allowed me to sign up for the JLPT on the assumption that with nothing better to do with my time, I could study Japanese.

I went today to see the cadre member in charge of scheduling; if my start date were a week or two earlier than I had expected, I wanted to see if I could delay it until after the test. Instead, I received a surprise: the unofficial estimate by the man who will eventually make the final decision is that I will class up on October 10. This means that I’m likely to finish flight training by the end of January, and graduate from flight school perhaps a month after that.

This is great news, in the sense that it means that I’ll probably be out of Fort Rucker months before I had expected. On the other hand, it makes it unlikely that I’ll be able to take the JLPT. The universal word is that you have to study harder for your advanced aircraft than you ever did in primary. Consequently, there will barely be time to sleep each night, let alone study up in a foreign language. I could possibly switch tests and take the level 4 after two weeks of not studying Japanese; I’d expect to pass, but it seems kind of pointless.

Until I actually get a finalized start date, I’ll keep studying. Even if nothing else, I do enjoy learning the Japanese language. Still, I can’t help but regret yet another missed opportunity to get some sort of formal qualification in it.

I like the Japanese language, of course; its grammar is simply better than that of any other human language I’ve ever encountered. I’m still not sure that I agree with the notion that kanji are inherently more efficient than spelling everything out, but the more I learn about them, the less I find them distasteful. Japanese is aesthetically pleasing in its structure, and an interesting challenge in its implementation. Even so, there’s no real need for me to study it; I have no need of it unless I return to Japan, and the most likely case in which I go back to Japan is the one in which I do so for the purpose of studying Japanese.

You’d think that the time I spent there would have been enough. I made some friends, proved to everyone concerned that I could support myself far from the safety of my family, got to soak in the experience of living in a foreign culture. I got to figure out that job satisfaction requires more than a generous salary for minimal work requirements. I even exceeded my own completely arbitrary minimal stay length by about 15%. All in all, it was a successful year-and-change abroad.

My current living conditions are closer to what I had when I lived there than any others I’ve had since my return. It is perhaps because of this that I most often find myself wishing I were back there. I live in a small, mostly rural town–but where Matsubushi was defined by its parks and paddies, Enterprise is defined by its giant strip-malls and chain stores. I live in a very humid, barely temperate climate–but where in Japan this led to refreshingly cool midnight bicycle rides, here I’m constrained by the knowledge that every day, I have to wake up again at 4 AM to get to work on time. During the bubble of non-training at least, I work almost as few hours as I did as a teacher while making more money, but it feels like my options for extracurricular exploration are far more limited here. This town exists because of Fort Rucker; it boasts large-scale generic commercialism, long roads of identical housing units, a few smaller stores supporting the local farmers, and little else. In Japan, I always felt like I could walk in any random direction and find something interesting, from a park to a shrine to an otherwise normal intersection done up in aesthetically pleasing tile patterns.

There are advantages to being in the US, of course. My apartment now is three times the size of the one I had in Japan, and includes amenities like a drying machine and a private toilet. I have a car here, and despite all my complaints about its cost of ownership, it’s still cheaper in every respect than its equivalent there would be. It is easy, unconscious, to socialize as much as I want with my coworkers here; there is no process of picking my way through the translation of both language and social norms.

The thing is, I think I would trade back those advantages to live in Japan again. It’d be difficult to go back to an apartment as cramped as I had last time, but the car and the easy socialization feel like incidental benefits that I could easily live without. The sense of being surrounded by fascinating things which make it worthwhile to get out and just explore seems a lot harder to replicate here in the US.

Perhaps I’m approaching this all from the wrong direction. I never really question myself for thinking that programming is an interesting and fun mental challenge, or that flying is a pretty awesome thing. I just accept that I can personally take those as self-evident facts even if they are not so to the general population. Maybe I should just accept in the same way that I’m fascinated by the prospect of returning to Japan any way I can, and that studying the language is rewarding in and of itself. There’s a nice sort of symmetry to it, if I can divide my interests into the Productive Hobbies of programming, flight, and Japanese, and the Personal Hobbies of books, video, and games.

The Holy Grail, then, is to find some sort of paying job which unifies the Productive Hobbies and leaves time for the Personal Hobbies. Such a thing, in this case, would be an odd job indeed; I can’t really imagine how it might plausibly exist. There exist jobs using various combinations, though, and those seem like interesting possibilities to investigate in the future.

I think I will take that approach. There’s the danger of sugarcoating my memories of my time there and rushing back to find a nation that would be quite happy without me, but I think it’s a risk I can take. In the worst case, I spend my interest in the place and language and end up with a much clearer picture of where I should take my future. In the best case, I love it again, and further my goal of living interestingly.

In June 2004, I was working among my friends and acquaintances at a small company they had started. Very soon thereafter, noting that they owed me thousands of dollars of salary and had been giving me the runaround as to when I would get it for over a month, I deleted all of my work from the company’s server in a bid to hold it hostage against my pay. I still haven’t seen that money.

In June 2005, I had a brand new computer science degree and my first post-college job. Naturally, the two had nothing to do with each other. I had no idea what to expect, living overseas completely outside my local support network, but figured that it couldn’t be all that hard. For the most part, that turned out to be correct.

In June 2006, the person who owned the franchise I worked for had recently died, and I had recently heard that his heir intended to close the business. The larger company would have happily relocated me; I was getting good reviews up to that point, but I had decided by then that I had very little interest in making a career out of teaching English. Since making that decision, I had been putting some effort into realizing a long-shot plan to fly for the Army.

In June 2007, I was sweating my way through Basic Training. I thought Fort Sill in June was unbearably hot and humid, but that was because I hadn’t yet been to Fort Rucker in August.

It is June of 2008 now, and I’ve completed the basic portion of flight school. A week from today I’ll know which advanced aircraft I’ll be training in, and three to seven months after that, the training will begin. In the meantime, I’ll be in a bubble: doing details much of the time, but with lots of time to myself. I think I’ll be able to deal with it.

I can’t help but think, looking back, that there are some advantages to taking a random walk through life. I may spend a lot more time before reaching any particular milestone, but I would have missed a ton of cool stuff had I decided to proceed in a straight line to and through any of them.