Your J. Alfred Prufrock Open thread

Has the invasion of Greenland already begun in an unexpected way?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FGpC91qs8yA

My husband and I are measuring our lives in terms of progress on his effort to get Canadian citizenship and the vagaries of the housing market. He hit a roadblock at the starting point when he found out that his mother’s birth certificate didn’t match the name she used for the rest of her life, including in legal documents. So just last week we achieved one of those points of measure when Montana sent us a corrected birth certificate. We are now waiting on Quebec. And we have an appointment with a Canadian immigration specialist in September!
Meanwhile I have discovered a great deal of confusion over my legal name since my birth certificate, my Social Security card, my voter registration, and my driver’s license are all different. I caused some of the confusion by taking my husband’s name when I got married the first time and then I assumed that the divorce automatically caused my name to revert. (And maybe it did. I got divorced 20 years ago and simple started life under my original name with no problems until I began thinking about my application for permanent residency in Canada).
I’m pretty sure if SAVE passes I won’t be able to vote.

Tomorrow marks me being one week free of pins and out of a cast. My thumb’s range of motion is still quite limited. My hand and wrist are still sprained, stiff, puffy and achey. I’ve improved a lot, but it’s challenging to keep that in focus rather than focusing on how far there is still to go, or wondering what sorts of consequences may linger from a serious injury. Eh…I have Swedish heritage and I’ve read Marcus Aurelius. Life will go on.

I’ll see the orthopedist again in a week to get his assessment of my recovery. Working to get more range of motion back before then, and hoping that the swelling continues to lessen.

In other news, I’m in the midst of a milestone teaching evaluation, assembling materials that cover the last nine years of classes. It seems that over that time I have taught somewhere north of 1100 undergraduates. That seems a small number in an age of huge lecture classes and MOOCs, but writing instruction needs to be intensive and personal by its very nature. I knew the names of every one of those students, and knew the contents of every one of their paper drafts.

…at least for the time that they were enrolled in my class. Most of them leak back out over time, though a surprising number manage to stick and stay real people long after the class is over.

It’s disheartening how little of that experience goes into the evaluation process, and how little of that experience goes on to shape the institutional conception of what a university education should be. I’ve never had a dean, or a chancellor, or a regent ask a single question about the intellectual life of my classroom. Their concerns lie elsewhere.

this week my wife’s oncologist declared that chemo can do my wife no more good.

and it’s apparently on me to decide if she gets in-home- or in-patient hospice. she wants to come home but i don’t feel competent to handle her care at home 24/7, and haven’t for a long time. we’ve been to the ER 9 times since mid-June. but now her needs have increased greatly due to a sudden lack of mobility and the constant haze and delirium from pain meds.

we have no family in the area and few friends close enough to come over on short notice.

bringing her home feels like a disservice since it’s a task i can not possibly handle. sending her to inpatient hospice feels like a betrayal.

Best wishes to you and your wife, cleek. No easy answers there.

I’m so sorry, Cleek.

When I put my wife in memory care three years ago because I couldn’t keep her safe 24/7 I felt terrible. Everyone in my family told me it was the right choice. All of the pros told me it was the right choice. Part of me still feels guilty about it, though.

I spoke too soon. She has declined so much in the last day that going home is officially off the table.

(((cleek)))

No one has mentioned Trump’s latest foray into the naval architect space. He’s ordered up a plan for converting the latest Ford-class aircraft carrier’s launch catapults from electricity to steam. Contrary to lots of what has been reported, the memo orders a plan, not an actual change (yet). It applies only to the Doris Miller, the fourth of the class. The Miller has not been laid down yet, and following a two-year schedule slip announced in May will not be delivered until 2034.

My own expectation is that the Navy can easily drag its feet over this until Trump’s term ends, then go ahead with building the Miller to the original spec. Also that the same will happen to the battleships, and that no significant money will be spent opening up a new naval shipyard.

Stonekettle’s latest published thoughts on the USS Abraham Lincoln situation (multiple places, most requiring some sort of login, so…):

Given my background, a number of readers have asked me about these reports. 

Honestly, I’ve avoided saying anything because given my experience on long deployments, stories beginning with “families say…” are usually followed by breathless hyperbolic hearsay originating with some perpetually disgruntled Sailor.

You could serve Thanksgiving diner every day in the galley and there would be a Sailor who hated turkey and complained to his Chief. 

You could field day (clean) and inspect every day (and you do) and some Sailor would be disgusted by the showers (and yet that same skylarking shitbird is also nowhere to be found when the LPO calls away field day in berthing).

There’s always a broken fixture, a backed up toilet, a fire, a short circuit, a ruptured steam line, a leaking pipe, an endless list of failed equipment awaiting repair and not enough time in a day to fix any of it. You take one of the most complex machines ever built, fill it full of people, dunk it in saltwater, and drive the hell out of it every day, all day, well, shit breaks. People get tired. Welcome to life at sea. 

So, up to now, these stories, the poor meals and lack of food, the backed up toilets and moldy showers, mail and communications being cut off, etc, well, I tended to take with a grain of salt (no pun intended). Deployment is ALWAYS difficult, endless work, lack of sleep, close quarters, no privacy, tension, tedium, even the smallest most mundane jobs can go bad in a hundred ways and there is absolutely no end to the long long LONG list of things that can kill you out there. 

It just never ends. It FEELS like it will never end. 

Extend that voyage, it gets infinitely worse.

You expect Sailors to complain. They have for centuries. I mean, hell, it’s how you get through the day. You expect their families and those who aren’t familiar with life on a warship at sea, those who’ve never stood the watch, to imagine the worst.

Now, don’t get me wrong, sometimes it IS the worst. 

Then, inevitably, it gets even more worse.

That’s the thing about life on a warship, it can ALWAYS get worse. And usually does.

I was once on an old cruiser off Africa and through a series of comical and increasingly ridiculous events, we ended up with VERY limited fresh water. No, I mean, VERY limited fresh water, no showers, no laundry, literally reduced to brushing our teeth in warm canned soda (until we ran out of that). No air conditioning. In 100F+ heat. It SUCKED. You can’t believe how bad it sucked. And it just kept getting worse. Four hundred unwashed men with yak mouth locked in a steal can in that goddamn horrible heat. And that went on for months because that’s what the mission required. That was Ronald Reagan’s Navy. That’s a special kind of hell. 

(and just because I’m telling this story, when we finally made port and they brought a water barge alongside to fill our tanks, that water was contaminated with JP4 jet fuel. Every cup of coffee after that had a beautiful rainbow sheen floating on top and smelled like a Shell Station. Just in case you ever wonder why so many of us end up with cancer or worse in our later years)

So, again, I take these stories filtered through my own often miserable experience. It shouldn’t be like that. It shouldn’t. We should be improving as a civilization, as people, as a military. Active duty today SHOULD have it better than the previous generations. No one should have to live like that. But they do. That’s life in the military.

Being a Navy Sailor, being a Soldier or a Marine or an Airman isn’t for everyone. And sometimes you don’t find that out until you’re in the middle of it.

HOWEVER

Now it’s in the Military Times and let me tell you why that’s different.

The Times used to be the Army Publishing Company, nowadays known as Sightline Media Group. They like to claim “independence” and non biased reporting, but no one carries water for the military, the defense industry and conservative warmongering politicians like the Times editorial board. 

One of my favorite pastimes back when I was on active duty was to write letters to the editors of the Times, often under a pseudonym. I’d show the letter around before sending it off, and we’d wait for it to be published and howl in laughter at how the words were edited to reshape whatever criticism I’d written to fit the Times’ gung ho narrative.

Sometimes it was so blatant, just such obvious propaganda, you’d wonder why the retired officers running the outfit didn’t just write the letters themselves. 

SO, for the TIMES’ to be reporting hellish conditions onboard the Lincoln, out in the open, well, that’s significant. It must be very bad indeed. Yes, I do note the “families say” weasel words in the headline, but still there it is and its bad. 

Bottomline: again, from my own experience, the military will endure damned anything so long as the mission is clear, the nation is behind them, the danger close and present, and most of all: the leadership is from the front and by personal example.

But this deployment, this nation, this idiotic war, and these so-called leaders are anything but.  

sadly, the hospice issue is now solved.
she passed late last Friday night.

Condolences from me too.
(Sorry, I am terrible at finding the proper words on such occasions, so I better abstain from even trying).

I’m with Hartmut at having difficulty finding the right words to express the sympathy for the sadness.

Jeez, cleek. I’m so sorry.