Oh, land. How much more I like sea.

It's much easier to feel like you're following a blessed golden road on some destined journey, gaurded all around by a protection unseen, when you're staring full on into the sun's fierce setting glow over an indiscernible liquid horizon. The firey reflections off the rapidly darkening water shine into my eyes, giving me a sense of blindly following some plan I might have scrapped together some time ago when idealistically plotting what my life would be. 'Yes, when I waver, quiver, I'll stare into the sun and feel reassured that I'm doing the right thing. Yes, I'll stare into the sun and feel reassured that any pain or struggle along the way is temporary because someone with the opportunity to stare into an unfiltered sun is someone who will always have that highlighted path to warmth and brightness laid out.'

I wonder if my great fallibility will be my inability to reach out. If my greatest failure will be my inability to maintain those friendships which are most important to me, if my greatest weakness will be my tendency to hide from that which is emotionally challenging. If my fear of being with someone else will win out over my fear of being alone.

Oh, time.

The hardest part about being out here is not the loneliness - there's always someone to talk to and there's a certain sense of commeraderie and family from living this shared experience that's so different from the rest of the land-based world - but instead the feeling of isolation. Wanting to reach out and feel connected to the friends and family you know are out there somewhere, beyond this big stretch of blue laid out in sheets all around, is the toughest part. Sure there's email, but there's only so much satisfaction to be had beyond the few-second thrill of reading a friend's note, and I hate feeling tied to Gmail and being at the mercy of its white-highlighted lines of new mail. The phones here are in very public areas, and I don't trust myself to not giggle loudly when on the phone with 2-0-7 Love. So I work out, talk to people about their lives, their kids, the tv shows that gather us in the conference room, and watch movies on the satellite tv. I try to read, but I find that reading makes me think and sometimes thinking too much just makes me sad.

Here, too, it's especially important to be very androgynous, and not let anything thing seem to carry even the slightest hint of impropriety. It's tough to feel llike I'm constantly hiding an integral part of who I am in order to fit in in this world of sports-chaw-redmeat and testosterone. (I wonder if that's what it's like to be in the closet?) Today a woman cook flew out which brought the grand total up to 3 out of 140 people, with me being the only one under 50.

And when you like human contact as much as I do (13 times a day, it's a researched fact! You need 13 x to be happy!) and don't have Tommers around the corner for my daily hand pat or hug, I feel like I'm having to physically hold myself back from reaching out and bear-hugging someone! Especially when most everyone here looks and talks like my dad!

Because of all these realities of being out here that you really only see after it's been three days and you still have another 7 to go before heading back in, I'm becoming more happy about the prospect of only doing a 7-7 schedule in the beginning, to acclimate to hugging myself. But I don't think the self-hug counts towards 13.

I think everytime I come out here it changes me a little, makes me a little more introspective (is that even possible!?!), and a little more aware of what I'm working towards, personally and professionally. It's frustrating, too, though, when all the guys out here are so genuinely nice to me and are very complimentary (in a dad sort of way, of course - one guy told me he was sorry if I caught him staring at me, it's just that I look so much like his wife when they were my age; someone else told me I was "lovely" hehe), and I think about how great it'd be if someone my own age in my own country and state would think the same thing. *typical sigh*

Anyway, I'm breaking all my own rules by doing this right now (using a company-owned laptop! with a company-owned internet connection!) so I'm going to go back to rockin' out my hard hat.

My life, May - July 2006

May 14-23: offshore (transitioning)
May 25-29: Sandestin Beach Resort (vacation - girls' spa and beach weekend!)
June 9-16: Rijswijk, the Netherlands (training)
June 16-18: Rome, Italy (weekend vacation!)
June 18-23: Rijswijk (the second week of training)
June 23-26: Aberdeen, Scotland (vacation!)

(this part's still a little fuzzy)
June 27-July 5: NYC, Kingston, & Boston (visit Uncle Matt, Kristy, and Biffy if she's there)

July 6: my first official offshore rotation starts!
I'll be working 7 days on, 7 days off (as in, no work whatsoever, I'll no longer have an office on land), so if you want a visitor let me know and I'm there :)

I'm a little overwhelmed at the prospect of everything that's going to happen between now and the middle of July, but I'm calming myself by trying to take each day as it comes, not constantly look forward to the next exciting adventure, and enjoy each moment. That's all we can do, right?

The smell of fried chicken is comforting in its power to overwhelm my senses as my feet plod along the heavily grated streets on my walk to work. I still haven't figured out quite what those grates are for, but the medium-sized glare of the bulbs below illuminate a shallow, cavernous space. Rudimentary flood system, perhaps, to allow water to rapidly fill in these essentially hollow sidewalks and be pumped away to a canal, rather than wait for finicky street drains to shoulder the burden.

The walk had become routine, something to be spiced up every few days: Gravier to Baronne to the alley to Carondolet and the entrance; Gravier all the way to Carondolet and then west towards Poydras; Gravier to Baronne to the other alley to Carondolet and towards Poydras. This was my daily intrigue, with the sights and smells of the paths bleeding into the dynamic backdrop of a slightly depressed city. The first few weeks back sheened with the dampened spirit of a city that felt still closed to those of us try to re-enter and re-instate normalcy. Now, the streets feel more willing to accept our grudging footsteps and the city's characters have resumed their usual posts, propped up against always-grimy stone walls and surrounded by the previous day's garbage waiting to be picked up by the city. By the walk home, sometimes the garbage has been collected but the characters are still sitting. Usually in the same slumped position I first passed them in. And everytime I walk blindly by these people humanity has forgotten the irony of the garbage pick up is not lost on me -- these plastic bags of tangible trash have a courier whose job it is to gather and relocate it while the characters are left to sit and rot without a similar caretaker to gather and relocate them.

Most mornings I tell myself, "Tonight I'll give him a dollar on my way home," but I never do. What will that dollar do, really? And then I feel ashamed because my next line of logic goes something like, "If I give him a dollar today he'll start to expect it everytime I walk by, which is twice a day, and how awkward would that be?!" The day I begin avoiding helping someone out of fear of awkwardness is the day I know I am a hypocrit with grand ideals and no backbone with which to act on those personal values.