Archive for January, 2009

Divorced and Dating?

– January 27, 2009Posted in: My Life

I suppose legally I am not officially divorced. The paperwork is notarized and in the mail, but its practically done, the lawyers just have to put their stamp, seal, or whatever it is they do, to make it official and legal.

Dating? Maybe I am jumping the gun on saying that I am dating. Then again, I haven’t been on a date in…., a decade? My ex-wife I met on the internet. Yeah, the Korean one. Ironically I was in Korea, but met her on ICQ. Talked and flirted for several weeks before I even met her. That was October of 2003.

Before her was another mistake in which I can’t really go into cause I turned 21, got drunk, then I somehow have moved to Pennsylvania. The details are fuzzy, but I do remember alcohol. I turned 21 in 1999. Somehow raising my right hand and saying “Send me to Iraq” was more reasonable that staying in Pennsylvania. (It was that bad)

Now about high school. Most of the dates I ended on, were with a long time friend that always found chicks online and they always had a friend for “safety”. Of course they were the main dish and weren’t about to bring a side dish that outdid them. In fact, I swore they tried to find the ugliest girl on the south end of a telephone pole, to come along.

Even then, I still barely had a real date. Being a high school student as well? My budget consisted of “my house or yours?” I was also a geek before being a geek was cool, so members of the opposite sex used me primarily as a door mat. (I heard a rumor that it’s cool now, I hope they were right) This made it hard to find someone to “date”, let alone know what the true definition is.

To some a date is when, two people that go out and participate in a light discussion or social gathering. To others, it’s very technical and baseball acronyms are involved.

Tonight I went out with a girl. I don’t know if I want to call it a date, or if I dare.

I walked her to her car, she dropped off her books, went to my car and I drove to the mall where we debated what to eat. When the check came I paid, and when it came time to part ways, we hugged and said goodbye. If that wasn’t a date, then I hope someone would be kind enough to explain the general rules.

To use baseball acronyms, I would have to say that the ump has told me to take a walk to first base. Nothing has happened, but I am heading that direction. Remind you that I am still a geek, so at any time without warning I may trip and fall on my face, stop and ask directions, or get short of breathe and turn around and run for my inhaler.

So there are several things about this that have me a little frazzled. This divorce isn’t even legal yet, and until a week ago I seriously had hopes that it would work out with my ex-wife. So it’s safe to say that I am on the rebound.

The other issue…, this girl is only 19. She only graduated high school, a little more than a year ago. But is that even an issue? I am 11 years older than this girl. I even compared birthday’s, to hopefully shave off a year. That didn’t help me out at all since, our birthday’s are within two weeks of each other. To be properly accurate I am 10 years, 11 months, and 15 days older than her. (I’m a geek of course I counted)

It led up to the date after a series of passing notes in English class. (A 6 credit, 3 hour class) I don’t think I heard anything that was said in class today, nor do I really care. I had a smile on my face and was blushing the entire class. One thing we talked about was that she noticed I wasn’t wearing my wedding ring today. I explained a slight summary and concluded at lunch with the fact that my ex-wife is mentally unsound. From there it was just casual flirting and constant blushing.

I don’t know how I would ever spend time with her though. She always has her homework done more thoroughly than any other student, holds 18 credits, works two jobs, and takes care of her appearance like a beauty queen. I don’t know how I would manage everything she does, let alone dating?

Bottom line this girl has me very interested, and I have logical reason to believe she is also interested. She is cute as hell which baffles why she would be interested in me. So maybe I am just an idiot.

I just hope I am not jumping to any conclusions, or rushing into this. She is very cute, very smart, and overly independent. All of which are the main qualities that I find important in a woman. In short I like her, and hope everything works out. I hope to ask her out over the weekend, but pray she can squeeze me into her schedule.

It’s raining tents

– January 26, 2009Posted in: Military, My Life

Trying to change the pace and lighten the spirit from my most previous posts I thought I would write this article. I don’t remember the exact date but it was before I started writing my blog (in 2005). During this time I was in the Army and stationed in South Korea.

I was born and raised in New York. I know what winter is like and how cold, cold really is. Or at least I thought I did. Winter in Korea has to be the coldest most miserable experience I have ever encountered. Then again, I never attempted to sleep in a tent during -15 degree weather in New York.

As a soldier in the Army I was expected to do many various things. Some of them just plain retarded, but we did them as a “training” experience. That word training seemed to come around a lot. So much that it would make my stomach turn.

This one night in Korea I will never forget. If had to ask me that night, I would have told you without a doubt that it was the worse night I had ever encountered in Korea. Luckily some many years later I can sit down and write this with a smile on my face.

With the war in Iraq, soldiers in Korea got almost zero money to buy equipment. Or so I had been told. My platoon had this one tent though, that looked nearly 20 years old. It was called a GP medium, GP meaning General Purpose.

There was nothing general about this tent though. It took nearly 6 men to carry it and even then we couldn’t go far. It was made of a tar coated canvas. The canvas made it durable, and the tar made it water-proof. These two combined also made it a fire trap, which I fortunately never had to experience.

The unique thing about this tent wasn’t the material, it was the history it told. And each story was shown with a hole, rip, or broken tent stake.

It took several hours for a platoon of nearly 30 people to set this tent up. Not because it was complex, but because it was so old it couldn’t be pulled tight. The roof sagged in the center making it hold snow and rain like a swimming pool. Summer was easy to fix this, everyone just used a poncho as a blanket or installed it as a tent on the inside to re-direct the rain.

A common solution to removing the dips in the tent so that the snow and rain would run off, was to use a camo spreader. This is a device that was intended to setup a cammo net over equipment. The spreader has three arms that are about 2 feet each with little circles on the end of each arm. Then it is placed on a pole and pushed into the camo netting to create support.

This one night that is so memorable, winter was nearly over. The snow had melted and had turn the ground to mud. Not the sticky, “eww my boots or muddy”. It was the throw your body weight to give extra momentum in hopes that your leg comes free.

A visit to the site we were at, on a nice sunny day, you would find everyone wearing rain pants. We were in mud up to our knees and after running out of clean clothes in the first 24 hours of being on this mountain top, we quickly adapted this to our uniforms.

During the night hours the ground would freeze making all those new potholes created by walking tripping hazards. Then the morning would come, and the mud would return.

This constant thawing and freezing would take a toll on the tent stakes, so that when we got a wind storm this one night, they didn’t stand a chance.

I woke up in the middle of the night, my head deep in my sleeping bag to keep dry in case it rain. Everyone is screaming for me to wake up. I try to situp, but I can’t. Barely awake I’m confused, I am rolling around and trying to move but I can’t move my head. I bring my hands around to feel and a camo spreader has falling within an inch of my throat. I try to slide underneath it but my chin hits it. I stall, trying to think, it is also blocking my hands from rubbing my eyes and uncovering my head.

Then Chuck runs over and grabs the spreader, shaking it up and down hitting me with it, telling me to wake up. I manage to move my arms up in between beatings to my throat that allow me to scream “Stop!”. I twist and move like I just caught on fire and I am out of the sleeping bag.

I look around and see everyone is half naked, standing on their cots, yelling. Some of them are wearing nothing more than boxer shorts and unlaced combat boots. I rub my eyes trying to think that I am dreaming, I’m not.

There was a wind storm and half of the stakes had been pulled out of the ground, which caused the tent to fall on top of us at 3 o’clock in the morning. Even for an Army guy, that’s early.

I throw my boots on, forget lacing them and run outside to help the others pound in stakes. Wearing only boxer shorts and a t-shirt. Several of us scattered grabbing a rope and acting as a stake until someone with a hammer could come by and pound in a stake.

After about 30 minutes the tent was back up and everyone had gone back inside to start the stove inside. Someone had turned it off at the first warning that the tent was coming down.

Jokes started to circle about how everyone was glad that while only wearing boxers, no one “slipped” and fell out while working. Other jokes about how it must be nice to be a female, since they all have a seperate, more stable tent.

After a short while the tent was starting to get warm again, and everyone settled down and went back to sleep. The next day we pulled out 6 foot long grounding rods and turned them into tent stakes, while the highest ranking person on the site complained about how it was our fault in the first place.

Irrationality sets in

– January 26, 2009Posted in: My Life

As I head out to class this morning my wife calls me, and wants to know why I talk badly about her parents in the last blog post. Then threatens to take me to court and get every cent she can out of me for child support, and change the paperwork from seeing my daughter once a week to twice a week.

This is what I have to deal with every day.

Now keep in mind that my wife is Korean. Not in the racist way, but in the way that English is not her first language. She basically learned English from talking with me as well, so her skill is only 5 years old at best. Each word I say aloud, or write in my blog must be translated before she can evaluate the meaning. The bad part about this, is Korean grammer is so completely different that translating something directly can entirely change the meaning.

So to clear this up I will write what I said about her parents to be translated directly.

My wife got pregant, WE LIED! She was 7 months pregnant when we told her parents. Any parent would be mad!

Now that all this is cleared up I want to make another thing clear. When my wife is mad, flustered, or uspet, her mind races, just like any normal human being. This interferes with the translating and several key words tend to be mis-translated or skipped in the process of only skimming the document.

If you are going to read my blog Dohee, calm down and read it again. Take a break (several hours) and then read it again. Make sure you translate it with a clear mind and read every single word. Calling me in the middle of a class so that I have to pull my battery is childish.

Just stop and think before you act. I’ll do most anything you ask, but only if you’re rational. If you’re mad and yelling, I’m just going to hang up then talk again when you are rational.

From Divorce to Start

– January 25, 2009Posted in: My Life

Without getting overly detailed and long winded I am going to try and explain my best as to what is going on with me and my wife. I am going to assume that you haven’t been reading posts here on the blog nor have you been keeping up with my tweets on twitter.

My wife got pregnant on accident and because of that we rushed a marriage. Quiet, crappy, *stamp stamp*, you’re married style wedding at the US embassy in Korea. My wife sat on a bench while I handed some lady our paperwork, then turned around and we were done. Not really a wedding, but it was legal.

My wife didn’t tell her parents about the marriage for several months, then when she did, it was more of “we finished all the paperwork” and nothing more. Then about 6-7 months pregnant, she finally told them about the baby. She gave birth to a healthy baby girl, and less than a year later we moved back to the states. (Well, I moved back the wife and baby moved)

After several months the brother-in-law moved in with us so that he could study English here and save money living with us. I agreed one night I was spending apart from my wife and was half-asleep. I called the next morning to ask if we could talk about it more, and it was too late. Her brother was with her and she had already told them. These little events became quite common.

After about a year in Tennessee, we moved to New York where he parents came to visit. We were living in a crappy apartment, I was earning most of our income from the internet so was at home all the time. The parents saw this and put pressure on me and started treating me like crap, more than usual. I said in Korea, while in their house I will take it, but I am doing my best and in my house I expect my guests to show me some respect, regardless of what they think. That just pissed them off more, so I told them they are welcome to leave. Well, I might not of been that polite and some language that would make a nun faint may of been used.

They left and went to their brother’s home in California. The wife, brother, and my daughter stayed. After several weeks we got things patched up and it felt like we were getting our lives back on track. My mother-in-law asked my wife to come to California to be a translator for her and help invest into some business as they intended to re-locate to the states.

What I didn’t know was that just before the in-laws left, actually the same day, they had taken my wife to a lawyer and had divorce papers and everything filed. She held them until she was in California for several weeks. I had heard promises that she was coming back but also running into a border control employee at the airport in NY, I played the Army card and he warned that he should probably arrest her since her immigration paperwork isn’t complete. (The lawyer she hired for that is the most incompetent lawyer I have ever known)

All alone in New York, I surprisingly got the letter in the mail for divorce.

Having my wife tell me she loves me the night before, I was beyond confused and called her immediately to explain. I never got a straight answer. More about how I am not how she imagined marriage would be, and how I am not prince charming.

After getting drunk for a week straight I looked around the empty, trashed, foul-smelling apartment and decided that I wasn’t going to quit. I cleaned the house, and sorted everything that I no longer needed. All my Army crap, and old electronics all got posted on eBay. I pulled a state-of-the-art radar detector out of my car and sold it for $450. Haven’t got a speeding ticket since, yet I got around 4 or 5 after I bought it.

With as much money as I could save, I packed my little 4-door Chevy sedan with a list of stuff she meantioned she wanted, which included a toddler bed, and then took as little as possible of my own stuff, then left.

I drove from New York to San Francisco, sleeping in my car the whole way to save money.

Once here I setup a tent on Mount Diablo at $20 per night. Then found a gym where I could shower. After a couple days I packed up and went back to sleeping in my car. One night the car was broken into and my GPS was stolen, I attempted to fight the guy and stop him but was so focused on trying to kick him I couldn’t situate myself and properly aim. He got away and I had to resort to driving around without a GPS in a new area.

I looked high and low trying to find a “real job”, or whatever my wife’s family thought one was. I had no luck. One day while looking I got lost and stumbled into a college campus. I pulled over and explored it a little more. They were still accepting registrations. I remembered that my GI bill pays me a flat rate just for going to school and that as well as my internet income may be enough to live here.

I signed up, and started will all late start classes. I picked whatever I thought was interesting. Now I realize that not a single class can be used towards the degree I want. The GI bill only covered half the classes as well.

At this point I was seeing my wife every couple days or so, sleeping in my car about a mile or two down the road in a safeway parking lot. I accidentally found a cop here on the night my car was broken into and felt it better to sleep where the cops hang out. I had the occasional 3am wake-up and ID check, but after a while all was good. Until someone called and complained.

I had met an older guy who lived alone on the other side of the fence and had offered me to park in his driveway if it ever became a problem for me to park at safeway. Eventually he offered me room and board and after several months I finally accepted.

At this point my wife was convinced that the divorce was best, and would always come back with “look at you”. Implying that I am living out of my car. I got her to agree that she would give me a fresh start, and we would try again at our relationship, but I had to give her the divorce. My condition was that I don’t hear about the divorce and as my wife I would trust whatever she told me to sign.

She didn’t live up to that last part of the deal.

Her mother is now looking to go back to Korea for several months, but my wife has to stay here, since she doesn’t have the proper papers to leave and come back. Living with her mother means that mom pays for everything. So to save money they have all moved to Sacramento where the housing is cheaper than the San Francisco bay area, where we have been living.

Two weeks ago I drive all the way to Sacramento, unknowingly about her intentions for the day. She gets in the car without my daughter anywhere in sight and hands me a manila envelope. I look at the first page and know instantly that they are divorce papers. She gives me a hug for nearly 2-3 minutes, which she has always been terrible at showing affection like that. I almost think she was crying.

We found a nearby park to get some privacy versus the parking lot to the large apartment complex and talked everything over. After an hour I said I want to read everything carefully first but now I want to see my daughter and enjoy the time there. We went and got her first haircut, which I hate. Then got something to eat and had a fairly decent night.

Then yesterday happened…. before I left she told me to make sure I brought the papers, she read over my notes. Then we went to a Kinko’s and she edited everything to suit our needs. I will get my daughter 54 days a year, and pay $200 per month in child support directly to my wife. There is no third party involved at all for anything. Educational decisions are made by my wife only, everything else is joint. (I still don’t understand why I couldn’t be trusted with educational decisions)

We got everything notarized, and now she just has to mail everything to her lawyer and do that part of it.

From here I don’t quite know how to handle what I am suppose to do with my wife. Part of me is ready to move on, another part wants a happy family and I think that’s still possible. My wife, or the ex-wife/girlfriend, isn’t the same person I married. But, neither am I. I am still going to try to work this out, just not as hard as I have in the past. Her parents won’t even let me in the house or so much as look at me so I know they are placing an influence on her as well. I just can’t believe that even though I have don’t everything to try and save this marriage she is still ready to throw it away so easily.

If you want to know more then all I can tell you is to stick around and follow me. Subscribe to the feed for my blog, which is where I post my long stories like this one, or follow me on twitter and get the news faster, but in smaller pieces.

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Obama isn’t black, he’s President

– January 20, 2009Posted in: General

I think that I have heard over a hundred times today, that Obama is making history. When hearing this I am only able to interpret it one of two ways.

You’re an idiot
You’re a racist

Last I checked every single President this country “makes” history. Even the dumb ignorant ones that start wars to make their father happy by capturing his arch nemesis. And who also got booed when he walked on stage this morning at the inauguration. No one may like him, but yes even the assholes go down in history. So if you are unable to realize this then, you are an idiot!

If you do realize the role that every president takes on and that they become part of our history, then its likely you are making a remark about the color of the man’s skin. Yes, he is black. So fucking what? Last I checked the black population in the US was considered a minority. Meaning that less black people living here, less chance of one becoming president. It’s simple math! Other factors in our past were also an issue, but if you want to sit here and divulge on past events we will never be able to move forward.

How does this make you a racist? Well it doesn’t. Unless you feel that him being a different ethnicity than previous presidents, is an important fact. Meaning, the color of someone’s skin is important to you. If you are proud that he is president because he is black, that is a racist perspective. If you are proud that he is president because he is the man for the job, then congratulations you have a clear mind and are able to think logically. This constant reminder that he is black though? I’m not blind and I don’t feel its an important quality. I voted for him cause I bought into his “CHANGE” philosophy he used for his campaign. Not because I believe we need to change from having all white presidents, but because we are in a recession! Or did you forget about the war? Now I just hope he sticks to his word.

Those that are reading this are also probably thinking that simply because I am writing this, because I am bringing the subject up, I am a bigger racist than most people. Probably so. Except, my racism goes against people that believe skin color matters. I’m a white boy, married to a Korean girl. Every time I see my in-laws they turn their nose up at me. I served five years in the Army, then started college. According to their philosophy if I was Korean I would already have done that backwards. At my age I should have a degree, a job, and everything needed to start a family. But because I’m “white”, I’ll never be as good.

So hearing it in the news, hearing it on twitter and facebook, over and over, about the color of another man’s skin. We passed overkill several months ago. Please let it go and shutup.