First Blog Ever--Ode to Janet

Okay, so I'm going to blog. Give the credit (or blame) to Janet from theartofgettingby.com. She believed I ought to blog because of the letters I used to write her while I was marooned in the U.S. Navy for four years. She thought they contained some amount of wit and depth apparently. We became penpals due to the most random of circumstances. Her college sent out letters to we poor lonely sailors deployed out in the middle of Extreme Boredom Tedious Sea and hers fell into my hands. Those letters brought a little hope of hooking up with a young, fresh-faced college girl to our grizzled, sea-weary crew. Of course I considered the purpose of my letters to her to be much more high-minded and intellectual than pursuing such a coarse and common goal, but underneath it all was the vain hope we would one day meet and live happily ever after, or failing that, to at least hook up a couple of times.

Alas, it was a misguided hope.

A couple of times I called Janet and although our letters were full of wit and playful banter, our real conversations turned out to be tortured episodes of awkward silence. I guess we just worked better on paper. After one such unproductive hour, I placed the pay phone on the receiver, mourning the lost minutes of the ten dollar calling card I had purchased, and noted that my arm-pits were soaked with copious amounts of sweat as a result of the experience. I had been in such a state of anxiety that my hands were shaky. Truthfully, I would have driven the however many hour trip from Norfolk, Virginia to Rowan College, New Jersey with the slightest word of permission from her. Thankfully she never gave it. It probably would have been a grand debacle of some sort.

I never quite fit in in the Navy for whatever reason. I like to think it was because my life ambitions consisted of more than where I could find the closest bar like many of my shipmates and also I eschewed endless games of cards to stick my nose into countless books and thus missed out on many bonding opporunties. But those are probably inaccurate reasons born of misplaced snobbery. In any case, to me, the Navy was bondage and slavery. My enlistment gloriously ended in July, 1998 and I headed back to civilization. I have been in a considerably happier state of mind since then. I continued to write Janet for some time after I went home, but no longer felt the desperate drive to communicate with her as I did during my Navy years. It was like the second I became a civilian again, a yoke of almost clinical depression came off my back entirely. Her letters were beacons of light on the deep, dark sea during that time and I still have all of them in a shoebox pushed to the back of my closet. To me, they represent fond memories of a lonely time.

I read her blog now as part of my morning routine. They always crack me up but she's really thoughtful about a lot of topics too. I think she's a born columnist. I always think it's kind of cool to meet a person in such a completely random way and then stay in touch with them in a quasi-way throughout most of your life. Pretty cool how things work like that.

So this ends my first blog entry. This was completely from the hip and I wonder if I can really do this regularly. I'll probably branch out into many topics and we'll see what happens.