I looked up the definition, and I can say with a fair amount of confidence that I am not a sociopath.

Art is philosophy in action.

I have a bottle of pure water that I brought back with me from a glacier in New Zealand. It meant something to me; it was symbolic and I'd wanted to give it to someone special when I met someone special. Alas, it leaked all over one of my bags on the journey North.

But aside from that one casualty, I am safely arrived in Groton, CT.

But there's something off about the relationship between us, like we're both afraid to be honest about some deep secret. We are each shoring up a carefully crafted outer shell, a better version of our selves to show the prying eyes of a judgmental world. It makes us harsh and aggressive, for the best defense is a good offense, and so we play rough to postpone the day of reckoning. Beneath her soft exterior lie teeth and claws, but beneath these a softer creature who'd rather not have them. She always seems like she's struggling, like she is making a Herculean effort simply to keep it together, to hold back the chaos. I just want to hold her, like a trembling doe, and tell her that everything is going to be okay. I want to curl up with her, and let her know that I'm here, that she doesn't need to suffer alone, that maybe we can both leave the lies behind us. I feel like we're never talked, never relaxed and been open with each other.

And that's how I know that it isn't love. If it was love, if love exists, I'd smile an honest smile and there would be nothing else in my heart. No fear, no acting, no drive to impress, just an honest embrace of who another person really is. I've never know that comfort, that brave openness. It may well not exist in this imperfect world, but what should we lose by looking?

The past six months have been the hardest of my life.

The point of Prototype is to turn someone who graduated Nuclear Power School, who knows all the theory and explanations behind how a reactor works, into a qualified watchstander, capable of operating a power plant on a submerged warship, and able to deal with everything that can go wrong. As an Officer, I'm specifically training to stand Engineering Officer of the Watch, who, for 6 hours out of every 18, is responsible for the entire back end of the submarine, from the nuclear reactor to the propeller turning in the water.

We all train and qualify together, so I'm one of the few guys in khakis surrounded by a bunch of Enlisted kids straight out of high school. OCS was a pressure cooker, but the atmosphere was like a boot camp: I was just a subject being beaten into shape, a widget on the assembly line. And we went to the same Nuclear Power School, but the atmosphere was more like a tough college than anything else, and Officers and Enlisted were on separate floors anyway. This has been the first time I have been in a position of authority, the first time I have been called Sir by the people I see everyday. I'm only a few years older than them, but they look up to me, even before we get to know each other, simply because of the uniform that I wear.

And it is still terribly daunting, not least because the pipeline seems built for exactly the kind of person I am not: talkative, extraverted, more interested in facts and details than big concepts. And yet, here I am. I gave my word that I would do this, and the whole reason I joined the Navy in the first place was because I wanted a challenge. I would recall this line of reasoning time and again over the past few months, and would think to myself, "Well, I wanted an easy challenge. I wanted something that would be hard for other people but that I could do no problem. I wanted constant ego gratification, to just walk around and collect high fives." I doubt that's actually true, but I know for a fact that I am in the wrong profession for that.

I make light of it now - now, with all of the trials behind me, as I look forward to a few days visiting friends, a life-affirming road trip back to my homeland, two and a half months of doing "jack and shit" in the dreary grey Elysian Fields of Groton, CT, and my final goal: the endless summer and the endless workday of a fast attack submarine, the USS Greeneville out of Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. I make light of it now, but the past six months were the darkest of my life. Far darker than I would like to explain in the open air of a public journal, and made darker still by my difficulty in explaining exactly what the problem was. I'm sorry, Evan, did they make you work long hours, for a bunch of days in a row? Did they not compliment you on a job well done, tell you that you're a valued member of the team, and offer you a hug when you needed one?

And yet, it is not as worthy of ridicule as all that. I have become increasingly certain that I have a condition which, if diagnosed and reported, would disqualify me from military service of all kinds, let alone in the Nuclear Navy. Which leaves me with a choice: I can get diagnosed, report it, and get disqualified, leaving an Officer-sized gap in a fleet that is already struggling to have close to enough people. Or I can ignore the rules, presume that I know best, and go out to sea in violation of a standing order. After the bombing of Pearl Harbor, my grandfather lied about his age so he could enlist in the Navy, and I think he made the right choice. But this is rather more serious than ignoring the assumption that people magically become more mature on their 18th birthday. Now, perhaps this is all for nothing. Perhaps I am exaggerating my symptoms; perhaps I am the psychiatric equivalent of a hypochondriac. But I go where the evidence leads me, and for now the data points seem to match up. Which brings me to the hardest decision I have ever made: I do not want to abandon my duties and my shipmates. However, I also do no want to be the Watch Officer of Team Chernobyl. So I deferred judgment to those who presumably know better. I decided that, if I can get through the program, if I can get qualified and graduate, then I can do my job successfully. And here I am.

The view from the top is for those who have climbed the mountain.


Edit: Apparently this came off as more negative than I had intended. It was supposed to say, "This is what I went through, this is why life had been shitty, but I survived, and now I'm going to Hawaii."

Met a cute girl from Boston who's living in DC now.

She lives in the 'Gayborhood' near Dupont Circle, doing government affairs - "what everyone does in DC" - for Boeing. We talked about the Foreign Service, and how we each needed to get a few years of outside experience, since they don't hire anyone straight out of college. She had interned at the American Embassy in Germany; I at the Canadian one in Washington. We talked about books; she had read and loved both On the Road and The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. She asked me if I'd ever heard of A Brief History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson; I've read it twice, have it sitting on my bookshelf, and push it to anyone who will listen. She just finished War and Peace; I just downloaded it for my Kindle. We talked about Australia, and how we'd both love to go. I told her about my trip to New Zealand; she told me about her honeymoon to Italy.

:/

Sunrise in the city. I feel alive again.

All the poets have told of sunrises, of pastel hues fading into each other and a warm sky that seems to smile back at you. I cannot add to that, save to lament how few I've truly experienced. Perhaps it's something in my caveman brain, some trigger in the pink East that told fragile primates huddled in the darkness not to be afraid, that everything was going to be okay and it is safe to come out now.

Walking through an old urban neighborhood with birds chirping and flying about me, everything was beautiful and nothing hurt. I need this, I have needed this for a while and will likely need it for some time to come. Even the streetlights, phone lines, and rundown buildings look good and right, for this is how everything is supposed to be. I try my best to save this moment, to store it away for some more desperate time: a light in dark places.

And it is all over too soon. The becoming melts into the being, and this time for new beginnings has quickly become just another day. I had barely gotten to know it, for how can one get to know something that is still unfolding before one's eyes? The sunrise is gone, and a strange hollow remains, but a lesson as well: for everything is going to be okay, and it is safe to come out now.

There is something right and pure about driving in a Jeep with the top down on a beautiful day, blasting Stuck Outside of Mobile off key and out of rhythm.

And I said, "Oh come on now, you know you know about my debutante."
And she said, "Your debutante just knows what you need, but I know what you want."

I love the Tappen Zee bridge.

The canyon walls tower above the Hudson, lined with green and hardy trees clinging for purchase, while precarious houses shoot through the canopy, clamoring for a better view and to bask in the rising sun. Suspended over the river, I have zero eyes on the road as I take in the fleeting landscape with each precious second.

And in the distance, shrouded in clouds at the start of an endless sea, lies the one and only holy city. New York is a mythical place, made as much of collective dreams as concrete, where a rag-clad immigrant can see the world open up before him while an heiress wallows in self-pity. Where taxi drivers never stop talking, and give unasked-for advice or provide grim narration to a film noire city. No one's heart skips a beat when they see the LA skyline.

I'm embarrassed to admit, but I've only been there once, for 2-3 days. It was New Year's Eve, and the train broke down so I didn't get to my friend's apartment until 15 minutes to midnight. This was back when I was an aspiring young master of the universe, and I took a random walk down Wall Street the next day. I arrived to find the sidewalk empty, and eventually realized that even bond traders don't work on New Year's Day. It was strangely sad, like an amusement park on the off-season. I'd had this vision of men in fine suits in a hurry, hustling for their next thousand dollars, and felt cheated when they failed to show up.

I need to go back, or to go for the first time. I've still never been to Times Square or the Statue of Liberty. I need to be there, at the heart of it all, and to stay until the madness gets to me. I need to live within stumbling distance of a dozen good bars, to have a place of peace and solace amidst the chaos, but to know that the chaos is right outside if I only choose to get amongst it. I need to be where the coffeeshops open before the bars close, and only the tedious have an excuse to be bored.

I despise routine. It's efficient, but it kills everything magical and curious about the world.

From now on, I will take in the view as though I had never seen it before.

There are a thousand ways to die on a submarine. Blind Man's Bluff, a short history of submarine espionage, provides a sampling: Sodium chloride is ordinary table salt, dissolved in salt water as Na+ and Cl-. But under the wrong circumstances, it can evolve deadly chlorine gas, used as a chemical weapon in World War I. Hydrogen is two out of the three atoms in a water molecule, but it also electrolyzes into an explosive gas. Fire is dangerous enough on land, but on a ship there nowhere to escape to and no one to call for help. On a submarine, where oxygen is precious, every second of combustion is disastrous. Then there are enemy weapons, possible collisions, millions of gallons of seawater that want to come in and crush us, and a controlled nuclear reaction at the heart of the ship.

I don't say this to scare anyone, nor to brag about my job, but rather to share my awe and passion for the task in which I am able to participate. I studied politics in school, which, while perhaps not the best technical preparation for my career, has encouraged me to take a critical and big-picture view of things. But after four years of study, internships, studies abroad, and countless readings, voluntary and required, I can't say that I really know anything. I am less confident in my beliefs now than when I started. And while that uncertainty is probably right and virtuous, the hallmark of a liberal society, it is not terribly practical. In politics - and the more politicized parts of economics - everything is mush and everyone is an expert. Nothing is ever falsifiable, so nothing is ever false. Evidence is irrelevant, and the truth is whatever you want it to be.

But in science and engineering, in nuclear power and submarines, reality matters. A is A. Existence exists, and it is coolly indifferent to your presence and well-being. Nature is what it is, it is fixed and given. It is the action and the prime mover, all you can control is how you react to it. There is no one to complain to, no bureaucracy to navigate or opponent to discredit. Otto von Bismarck once said that a conquering army on the border will not be stopped by eloquence. How much less so will nature be dissuaded by question begging and character assassination. You can either use the rules of the natural world to your advantage or you can be obliterated, but the universe is cosmically indifferent.

Everything in this sphere is stark and pure, arduous but intellectually honest. I have begun to wonder if I even want to be President anymore. The world will not end in fire or ice, it will slowly turn to mush.

We put in our Dream Sheets tomorrow. Basically it's a list of our preferences for home port and boat type. The detailers look at what we want and the Navy needs filled and try to find as good a match as they can. This is the next three years of my life, so it's kind of a big decision. Here's what I'm going with:

1) Pearl Harbor, Hawaii
2) San Diego
3) Bangor, WA (about an hour ferry ride from downtown Seattle), fast attack boat
4) Guam
5) Bangor, guided missile boat
6) Bangor, ballistic missile boat
7) Groton, CT
8) Norfolk, VA
9) King's Bay, GA, guided missile
10) King's Bay, ballistic missile

Hawaii is an island paradise filled with beautiful beaches and beautiful women. I want to believe that it combines all the best parts of America and of tropical developing countries. Sure, it's pretty expensive and far from everything, but I joined the Navy to see the world and hey, it's Hawaii, it's worth the price. Plus, there are a ton of subs out there, but sadly about half my class has it as their first or second pick, so my odds aren't that great.

San Diego needs no further explanation, but it's in just as much demand as Pearl, and without nearly as many boats to fill.

Bangor is supposed to be a really nice area, and is pretty close to Seattle. The weather isn't that great, but it's a pretty cool part of the country; I wouldn't mind spending some time there. I'd prefer a fast attack: the smaller boats that do spy missions, stalk ships, and protect carrier battle groups from other subs. They're busier, but they do cooler stuff, and I want to have some stories to tell. Their schedules are unpredictable - supposedly I could get a phone call saying to pack my bags, we leave tomorrow for a secret destination - but I'm young and single, so I don't see a problem with that. But a boomer (ballistic missile sub) out of Bangor wouldn't be that bad. They don't make port calls, but they aren't as busy either, so I'd have more time to enjoy the area.

Guam is a bit of a wild card. It's a tropical paradise, but also a backwater. It's in a booming and important part of the world - the Western Pacific - so we'll always have cool stuff to do. We have a saying in the Navy, that the closer you get to DC, the more stupid bullshit you have to put up with. That's why Norfolk is choice #8 out of 10, and why Guam is a lawless libertarian utopia. The surf isn't supposed to be very good, because it's surrounded by coral reefs, but the diving is excellent. I am somewhat concerned about the fact that there are substantially more men there than women, and that they fly out fresh strippers all the time. I'm not sure I want to live in a place where the atms dispense one dollar bills.

Groton was originally higher on my list, because it's only about 45 minutes from home, so I could hang around with all the people I grew up with. But my family is all moving away, and I joined the Navy to see the world, not Southern New England.

Norfolk's only redeeming quality is that it's a three and a half hour drive from DC, and King's Bay has no redeeming qualities at all.

Yesterday marks a year since I showed up at Officer Candidate School, bright-eyed and bewildered, carrying all my possessions in a standard issue black garbage bag. It's been quite a journey - possibly the best year of my life - and I felt it would be a pleasant diversion to take some time out of my schedule for a bit of writing and reflection. Sometimes we need to lose our focus on the daily struggle and look instead at the future, and the past.

I have written before about OCS, shared a few anecdotes and vignettes from that magical place, so I will be fairly brief on that topic. Boot camp is finishing school for men. They will teach you how to walk, how to talk, and how to carry yourself. You will learn to move like a warrior and to approach every situation with calm and confidence, regardless of your inner feelings. They will teach you to stand and confront any challenge, even if you genuinely think you cannot do it -- and they will do this the old-fashioned way, with a lot of yelling, and pushups for anyone who fails to get the point.

It's easy to romanticize and wax nostalgic, and indeed I can now see how silly much of it was, but it was almost exactly what I needed. I have always been a dreamer and an introvert. And while these largely define who I am, and I would never want to change them, I learned at least two valuable lessons: First, that the world is shaped by those who work to make their dreams a reality. Like any good permanent adolescent, I instinctively recoil at the conventional wisdom, but I am beginning to wonder if perhaps it is conventional for a reason. My 25 years have taught me the painful truth that it might perchance take more than narcissism and a sense of entitlement to get what I want out of life, and that great things are purchased in blood, toil, tears, and sweat. Second, you have to be willing to be loud, to interrupt, to deal with people, and to be an asshole, if that's what it takes. You cannot tiptoe through life.

It's sad, my schedule is forcing me to update my journal in installments. I should be able to write more tomorrow: we get out early for a mandatory fun night.

I'm finally starting to pay attention to my finances. Ever since I got commissioned, I've been spending money like it's going out of style, which I doubt it ever will.

I now realize that getting a grown-up paycheck and not having much time to spend it does not mean I should just buy whatever I feel like. So I'll stop impulse buying things, maybe eat a few more meals at the galley, and start cooking some more of my own food. I'm moving downtown as soon as I can, which should save a few hundred bucks a month, despite going from the ghetto to a nice neighborhood, and an apartment where everything breaks to a house where maybe not everything breaks as much. And moving in with some roommates will make cooking more practical. Making up a meal for one is a comically sad sight.

I figure I should probably get a handle on living on my own before I get put in charge of people.

My reading list keeps getting longer, not shorter. Just sitting on my countertop, waiting for me to pick them up, I have:

-Ender's Game
-Heart of Darkness
-Blind Man's Bluff: The Untold Story of American Submarine Espionage
-On the Road (re-read)
-Dreams from My Father
-Harvard Business School: Becoming an Effective Leader
-Harvard Business Essentials: Time Management
-Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr.
-The Power of the Actor
-The Complete Idiot's Guide to Car Care and Repair
-Lauren Fix's Guide to Loving Your Car
-Popular Mechanics Complete Car Care Manual

I've started almost all of those, but I never have both the time and the mood to finish any of them. Plus I'd love to finish reading The Godfather, but the copy I bought on Amazon is missing 150 pages in the middle.

My soundtrack:

Bob Dylan - Tangled Up in Blue
The Beatles - Hide Your Love Away
Dizzy Gillespie - Mas Que Nada
The Smiths - This Charming Man
Leonard Cohen - Take This Waltz
Something Corporate - Punk Rock Princess
Elliott Smith - Happiness
The Rolling Stones - Miss You
Modest Mouse - The World At Large
Tupac and Dr. Dre - California Love
Tommy James and the Shondells - Crimson and Clover
Morrissey - Come Back to Camden
The Cure - Lovesong
Jimmy Eat World - If You Don't, Don't
Bob Dylan - Don't Think Twice, It's Alright
White Stripes - Fell in Love with a Girl
Bach - Fugue in G Minor
Jay-Z - Big Pimpin'
The Shins - Girl Sailor
Leonard Cohen - So Long, Marianne
Simon and Garfunkel - America
Elliott Smith - Waltz #2
Weezer - Long Time Sunshine

It's been an interesting trip so far, and those are the songs that have meant the most to me. Some of them are corny in hindsight, but that's sort of the point. I'll post more if I remember more of my life.

For the first time in a long time, I feel free to take care of myself. I just know that if I take time to focus on my own problems, the world will be fine without me. It is a time for healing, a time for renewal.

Queenstown is the Olympics of rowdy. The only people in the city are here for the adventure sports: hiking, rafting, sky diving. This is where bungy jumping was invented. And the only people on the pub crawl are looking to get plastered and wander from place to place. Any given group of people here consists of the British and various places they colonized. Now, I haven't seen the literature on the subject yet, but I hypothesize a correlation between adrenaline, alcohol, and violence. Not me, of course - I'm as gentle as a lamb, even when there are drink specials - but the Brits and Aussies just can't get enough of it.

The night before was mediocre. I was looking to chill out, maybe dance a bit, and talk to some people. However everyone else in Queenstown was looking to get hammered and loudly jump around, stumbling into each other. So, when in Rome.

Dustin and I started doing jagger bombs (Jagger Bombs!) in the hostel right after dinner. Apparently he missed out on the My New Haircut youtube video internet fad, so he cannot share my enthusiasm. Our roommates are an unfriendly German and an unfriendly guy who I think is Middle Eastern, so I can only assume they would not endorse our recreational activities. We take turns mixing drinks in the bathroom while we watch Trainspotting; I'm curious what they thought we were doing. I would assume that all the people in hostels are like us - in their twenties and pretty much down for whatever - yet almost everyone I've met in them has been weird and antisocial. When I am the most extraverted person in a room, something has gone seriously wrong.

Then we catch up with a pub crawl as it gets going, and the jagger catches up with me. Met some dude from Princeton (or maybe Yale) who's name I never remembered (Saryam? Sirhan?), and he hasn't seen the My New Haircut video either. Apparently I dreamed it.

Being part of a mob is fun, I can see why people do it. As we stumble to the second bar, I look into a souveneir shop window to see if someone I met is working, and loudly thunk my head into the glass in front of 50-odd people. I have hit my head into a staggering number of things in my lifetime, I begin to wonder if it's caused any damage. But before I can stop laughing, another guy walks into a telephone pole with an even louder thunk, and all is forgotten. This rapidly becomes a regular part of the transition between drinking establishments.

All I remember about the second bar is riding a mechanical bull, and wondering why the bartenders were all dressed like cowgirls. It now occurs to me to wonder why the Wild West themed place did not have a mechanical bull or staff in cowboy hats, but the Postmodern Futurist Fusionist place did.

Sometime between bars four and five, everyone was standing around in a pedestrian street. The usual loud babble of nonsense turned into an unusual babble of nonsense, and I turned to see everyone facing the same spot and cheering as two girls wailed on each other. This escalated into two guys wailing on each other, although whether they knew the girls or were just inspired by them I do not know. Also, a guy jumped/fell off a second floor balcony, but I'm sure he'll be fine. While we were waiting to get in, some girl was telling me how she had no idea why another girl was in her face yelling at her. The other girl then came back and started to smack her head into the wall.

To Do: (X) Break up a cat fight

Apparently she had cut in line?

Then the police got there, although I kind of wonder why they didn't just follow the pub crawl around from the get go. It seems like good policing, but maybe they hadn't heard of my hypothesis.

Later we went back to one of the first bars because it had had the best music and dancing. The bouncer saw the bracelets we had from the crawl and asked to see our hands so he could check our knuckles. Apparently this is par for the course.

I've been sore since OCS, and been complaining about it for about as long. I finally decided to get a massage today.

They kept asking if I'd ever been there before, and didn't believe that I hadn't. The place looked like someone's house, the sign on the door didn't match the name I'd googled, and when I called they just answered the phone, "Hello." As I handed over my credit card, the masseuse said, "You know this is just a straight body massage, right?"

To recap: I spent the first three-quarters of my massage appointment wondering if I was in a massage office, an underground brothel, or a massage office filled with people who thought I was looking for an underground brothel.

I spent the last quarter listening to my masseuse swear at me about the girl she'd just fired because she was giving out more than just massages, and this isn't that kind of establishment.

A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.
- Robert Heinlein

I figure I can do about seven of those so far. Eight if you have a generous definition of 'tasty'.