Doesn’t it just figure that about the same time I’m feeling the urge to write some good, long blog entries (as opposed to the short, lame ones which have predominated lately), work has heated up to the point where I’m not only finding it difficult to squeeze in some decent bloggage, I’m failing even to keep up on the mundane daily crap that I laughingly refer to as “my life.” Like washing those dirty dishes from the yummy breakfast fry-up I had two weeks ago. They mock me with their crusted-on egg residue.
I know, I know… you’re out there making the little fiddling motion with your fingers that signifies the World’s Tiniest Violin moaning out a sarcastic dirge for my pathetic whining, and you’re probably thinking that I don’t have much room to complain because lots of people put in brutally long hours and otherwise bust their humps to make their way in this cold, hard, lonely world. Well, bully for them. Doesn’t change the fact that I stumbled home after 10 PM the other night, and my corporate overlords inform me this will likely happen with distressing frequency throughout September and October, and these two facts combined have me feeling a mite twitchy.
Now, I’m no slacker, and I understand and accept that the industry I’m in demands the occasional late night. But I’m also fiercely protective of my leisure time. I think it’s important, and that Americans in general undervalue it, and that we suffer, both as individuals and as a society, because we undervalue it. All of which means that when I see my work/life balance tipping too far toward the “work” side — and I’d say being warned that the next six weeks are likely to include a lot of late nights is a pretty good sign of the scale dropping in a particular direction — I feel justified in getting grumpy about it.
Not that anyone cares about my grumbling, not when there are product briefs that need to be proofread by EOD.
What I’m getting at here, other than simply venting my frustration over the abrupt shift from a lazy summertime pace to balls-to-the-wall, caffeine-fueled all-nighters, is that blogging in these parts is liable to be sporadic, possibly incoherent, and likely somewhat whiny for the next little while. I’m hoping to find the gumption to do those longer entries, but it’ll depend a lot on how late I’m getting home and how much creative juice I’ve got left after the caffeine buzz fades.
In the meantime, here’s something interesting for you to chew on: it’s a compendium of the military slang that’s emerging from the Iraq War. I’ve always been interested in slang, and in military lingo in particular. Slang from the Vietnam War, for instance, is extremely familiar because of all the movies we’ve seen about that conflict. So far, however, it seems that Iraq War terminology has failed to penetrate into the public consciousness in the same way. (I suspect that’s because the war itself hasn’t really sunk into the general public’s collective mind either. If you’re not part of a military family, it’s really just an intellectual abstraction, isn’t it? It’s not like we’re all planting Victory gardens and buying war bonds, or even protesting and burning draft cards. It may as well be just another reality show on the Fox Network. But I digress…)
Much of the list consists of inelegant acronyms, the linguistic currency of our technology-driven age, but there are some colorful terms that stood out in my mind. “Dirt sailor,” for instance, refers to a member of the Navy who is performing a role in landlocked Iraq. (My old high-school friend Tim, who has been sailing on nuclear submarines for much of the past 20 years, pulled a tour in Iraq; seeing photos of him in body armor and tan fatigues instead of the usual blue submariner’s uniform was… disconcerting. For the record, he made it home just fine.)
I also liked “fobbit,” a person who never goes outside the wire around the forward operating base (FOB); “frankenstein,” a truck that’s covered with unsightly weld-seams where armor has been added; “haji mart,” a decidedly un-PC term for “any small store operated by Iraqis to sell small items to Americans”; and “sandbox,” referring to Iraq itself.
And then there’s my favorite: “death blossom,” described as “the tendency of Iraqi security forces, in response to receiving a little fire from the enemy, to… fire indisciminately in all directions.” And why do I like this term so much? Because, as this article notes, it comes from the 1984 movie The Last Starfighter, a nifty little flick that, along with Tron, was a major milestone in the development of computer-generated visual effects. The Iraq War usage fits: the “death blossom” in the movie was a last-ditch maneuver in which a single fighter-ship expends its entire arsenal at once in hopes of taking out an entire enemy fleet. I’m frankly amazed that anyone in the military even remembers this movie; as I recall, it wasn’t a major hit, and it has been 23 years since its release. Although perhaps I shouldn’t be, considering that its central premise — an alien videogame serves as an assessment and recruiting tool — obviously inspired someone at the Pentagon…
