Month 7 Day 5

Notebook Entry
None

Journal Entry
Yesterday didn’t end it just bled into today. I went to the gym a second time half out of bordom and half because Lt Jim McDermott said to me that I was looking puny compared to what I was at OCS [a school that I went to years ago]. He is right, but it was still a dick-head thing to say. I had to get on a bus to the Kuwait international airport in a pair of trousers because I was not allowed to wear my shorts. I changed back out of these loaner trousers on the way to the airport and when I arrived, lo and behold there were plenty of locals there who were wearing sandals, shorts and short sleeved shirts. Cultural sensitivity is one thing, but it is generally sensible to [know] the culture that you are purportedly being sensitive to before presuming that you can cast a sensitive air. The presumption [that] a conservative society is basically just like the American south is one (or perhaps several) presumptions too far.

So the airport that oil built was spectacular. The shopping complex was nice, the architecture was impressive. The only hitch was that I didn’t bother to check the exchange rate prior to busying my donut at the caribou coffee. I think it ended up costing me about 15 dollars for that and a hot chocolate. I am dubious about the real need to arrive there at 2000 as we did I think It would have been more than sufficient to take the bus that went at 0100, but the lazy contractor who masked his small job with perfect grammar, enunciation and hid behind a wall of bureaucracy tried to pack every soul onto the bus that left earlier. It must have been a terrible inconvenience for him to wake in the middle of the night to give his thirty second liberty brief and them tell all of the passengers that “under no circumstances are you to return to K2.” [this was the holding tent where we were prior to processing] He is just one of the thousands of contractors who are feeding off of this way. I must admit it is pretty tempting to do the contractor gig for a year. There is a guy working in the S2 [Intelligence] shop on Dwyer who makes 1,000,000 per year for making statistics in excel. Yep, it would suck, no doubt, to be away again, but we could be free of all material concerns basically for the rest of our lives if we could pay off the mortgages.