Irreversible Momentum

Even before you consciously ever find direction in your life, your life is following a path.  That path has irreversible momentum.  The path can alter a little to one side or the other based on how it deals with pits and bumps in its way.  Does it bounce over them, skew off to the right, or vault over to the left?

Before I met Candice, my life was shit.  Most people (probably) couldn't tell, but I felt it and hated every bit of it.  I drank heavily, not because of a compelling need to drink, but because I wanted to fog it out so I wouldn't experience it.  I stayed home for the majority of my non-work time.  I was lonely, but I feared rejection so bad that I was frozen with fear to try and overcome this phobia-like fear and find someone to help me along the path of life.  The few times I'd managed to crawl out from my phobia of rejection, I would slap me in the face with a two by four and I'd go running back into my wall of protection vowing never to try again.

But my life was firmly rolling down the hill of life and wasn't about to roll back up to find a different path I'd missed out on.  What I didn't realize was that my life was only temporarily shit, likely because that was the path I needed to take to get where I am today.

After going to a period of basic training at Parris Island (Marine Basic Training) while I was in ROTC at Parker High School, I swore I'd never join the military.

But apathy when I was going to Clemson led me to not go to classes as often as I should, so many semesters, I'd have practically no GPA to speak of to offset those semesters when I'd have close to a 4.0.  I realized that there was no way in hell I could maintain that rollercoaster ride, so I decided to drop out of college before they kicked me out.  (It would at least give me the option to return.)

But before I dropped out, I needed a plan for how to get my life straightened out.  My life bouned over to the side as I quickly realized what I needed was a life that forced me into structure.  So getting a typical job paying a high school graduate but not a college graduate in South Carolina was not a viable option.  Que up the job I swore I'd never do, the military.

Now, I wasn't naive enough to think that the Army or the Marines were going to be what was right for me.  I wanted to guide myself down a more technical path and give me some valuable experience towards getting a better life once I got out in four years.  That left the Navy and the Air Force.  The Navy had some highly publicized issues with people dying in several different incidents around that time, so I called the Air Force recruiter.  I took the ASVAB test and the results came back that virtually any career field was open to me.

I wanted to be a computer programmer, but they currently didn't have any openings in that career field, so I came in "open electronics" meaning I'd go into an electronics based career field (that includes computer programming, etc).

But when I graduated from basic training, there still wasn't any openings in that career field, so I chose and rank-ordered 10 career fields that did have openings from the available list.  I got the third (or really fourth since computer programming wasn't open) choice on my list and became a "Space Systems Operator."  (It sounds way cooler than it really is.)

That career field pretty much shielded me from anything even close to combat or danger related.  And it also "tethered" my career to Colorado.  But also, I was given an opportunity to do some computer programming, which ironically I later learned, I'd almost certainly have never done had I gotten into the actual computer programming career field.

When my four years were up and I could move on back to civilian life, I decided to stay in just a little longer, my life bumped over the next bump of life and kept rolling forward.

I was "rewarded" for that decision by getting an assignment 80 miles south of Fairbanks AK.  Look at your map of Alaska, and you'll find there isn't anything to speak of 80 miles south of Fairbanks.  When I got that assignement, I was quite upset, mostly because I had been working an assignment (that I was probably going to get) in southern California.

But it turned out to be a great assignment, and I had fun - yes fun - there.  My follow-on assignement listed three places I could go.  Buckley, Buckley, or Buckley.  So I chose the lesser of three evils and went to Buckley.  While there, I did more computer programming.  My enlistment time was coming to a close on this enlistment, so I had a serious decision to make.  I had a job opportunity in Colorado Springs making way more than I was currently making in the Air Force or I could stay in.  If I decided to stay in, I was staying until I retired.  After looking at it objectively from every angle I could think of, I decided to stay in and not get the job on the outside.  I viewed it as an 11 year investment in my life to never have to worry about job security for the rest of my life.

As it turns out, the job I was to be hired for never would have materialized as that company didn't get awarded the contract they were bidding to get. So yay for making decisions with my head instead of my wallet.

Then I got a new assignment to England that I had sought after.  I got to "see" the world, even if it was only a whirlwind one day one city type.  So, yeah, I've seen Paris, Brugge, Barcellona, etc, but I was rushing through them so fast with only a day to spend in each, that I didn't really get to experience them.  I plan to rectify that in the future if my irreversible momentum allows me to.

My follow-on assignment was suppossed to be in Colorado Springs, and it was, just not the same one I was promised.  The new job was overseeing configuration management of the Air Force's space-based missile warning systems.  That, in turn, led to my job being moved back to Denver when the Space Wing I was in split into two Wings and my part moved.

So I moved back to Denver.  My tether was keeping a firm grip on me.  Then in a forum I visited regularly, someone posted a link to a website in a thread about interesting things on the web.  It was Where's George and being a nerdy guy, I thought this was a cool little project.  So I started tracking where my money went.  Then I found that there were forums for that hobby and I started frequenting them.

I met someone who flirted with me online and once she realized we were basically in the same city, she demanded we meet.  So in mid-January we did.  I, of course, being naive, though it was just another "georgers meet."  But once we met, something else happened.  We didn't talk at all about the hobby until several hours into the meal, and then it was only an afterthought when we went to pay.

We went out to walk around in downtown Denver for several hours, I wierded her out by offering to hold her coat that she wasn't wearing (I've always been a chivalric person), and she shoved me around.  When I mentioned it, she had to point out to me that she was flirting with me.  Yeah, I can be that oblivious to signs, especially when I'm not looking for them.

I started to get a new outlook on life.  My life actually garnered a hopeful attitude.  It had started to roll on out of the shit I saw it as being in.  By April, I knew we were soulmates.  Skeptics would say I was simply love struck and blinded by it, but I'd been there before and this was a different feeling.  The past few relationships where I'd been blinded hadn't left me seeing a hopeful future in my life like this one did. 

So, I bought a promise ring.  Often times, they're considered a way for the guy to "postpone" getting married for a while, by "committing to commit."  But since we hadn't ever discussed it at the time, it was more like the old-fashioned me coming through.  I got a card and had Gabe give the card and ring to her one day.  She was definitely surprised and cried tears of happiness.  That was the exact moment I knew she loved me as much as I loved her, especially given how much she'd shunned marriage in the past.

I then did another old-fashioned thing.  I asked her grandmother for permission to marry her.  Her grandmother (who was essentially her mom), loved it.  I'm pretty sure I was the only boyfriend of Candice's she ever liked, and she liked me from that first date when I insisted on coming inside and meeting her before the date rather than just picking up Candice and taking off.

I proposed and Candice said yes.  We got married a little over two months later, but didn't spend a lot of money or stress on a ceremony.  In some ways I regret that, but in others I don't.  Our finances weren't drained, and we'll always have the memory of the "crackhead county clerk" to laugh at.

Today is our fifth anniversary.  I've retuired from the military since then and gotten that nice paying job on the civilian side.  We have three wonderful kids together (I legally adopted Gabe).  And we have a nice house where we live (and where her grandma lives, too).

My life is not shit and never was, it was just going through a bumpy patch during my irreversible momentum of life.

Life is great, and always will be because I found my soul mate.  And I found my soul mate because I was destined to.  I couldn't have avoided it because of irreversible momentum.

That's all for this post.  Thanks for reading.