EPTTo bring some of these points to light, I have to point out a bit of my history. Due to my parents divorce, I bounced between them. My mom tended to move around a bit for her job, so I usually moved back with my dad when that occured. my sister would go as well, but I almost never saw her since she's 2 years younger (and therefore went to a different school before high school, but due to my obsession with video games, I almost never left my room anyways). So my residential history kinda looked like this.
Staten Island, New York (born-1st grade)
Cupertino, California (1st grade-5th grade)
Hacienda Heights, California (5th grade-7th grade)
Newark, California (7th grade-10th grade)
Hacienda Heights, California (10th grade-graduation)
It's more or less like that, a lot was fuzzy because I was young. Anyways, you might have noticed I lived in Hacienda Heights twice, and that's where I enlisted (The recruiting station was in Whittier, but it's close enough). This was interesting as I attended the end of elementary school and the beginning of middle school there. As a result, when I moved back, I saw familiar faces. However, it had been 3 years, almost no one recognized me. There was one person, who I will mention later on, that did recognize me. Anyways, due to the fact that some of the people I went to middle school with ended up going to an entirely different high school, I was basically forced to make new friends all over again.
You guys might know what I'm talking about. I'm one of those quiet guys that sit in a corner, do my work when I'm told, and is generally reserved. As a result, I have few friends, and I got picked on a lot. This was only amplified by the fact that I was usually the new guy, no one was around to defend me. Those movies where a kid valiantly stands up for the geek that's getting bullied? Yeah, that's a load of shit. But because of my oppressive dad, I was able to deal with it anyways. This eventually lead to a bottling anger personality, which persists today. But I'm straying from the point now.
When I finally made some friends, I didn't even notice it, but they were a year younger than me. I was a Junior at the time and they were all Sophomores. I had a few acquaintances in my year, but for the most part, they stayed away from me, and I kept to myself. The fact that my friends were a year younger than I would become an important factor in the coming years, and I didn't even realize it.
I was deep into several hobbies at the time. Specifically video games, anime, and TCGs. Video games had not changed in who knows how long. I had to keep it to a down low, because my dad detests video games, viewing them as a waste of time and energy, and I should be focusing on school work (Ironic, as he was the one who bought me an NES at age 3). I was also watching some stuff on TV (DBZ, Pokemon, Yu-Gi-Oh!, kids stuff at the time). But TCGs were the big thing that kept me going. I was browsing forums to figure out new deck strats. I was able to fund the decks because my grandma would literally just toss me money whenever I walked out the door (seriously, I turn her down everytime, but she always insists. You can't turn down an 80 year old woman, you just can't). This is what most of my friends and I would do at lunch/breaks. We would just ... play. After school, sometimes, we'd go back and play some video games (Smash Bros. Melee was big at the time), and sometimes we'd just test out new deck strats. Despite how big we were into it, we'd eventually fade out of it near the close of high school.
The end of the year came and my friends and I kept doing the same thing through the summer. Get together and play games as much as we could, not a care in the world. It never really occured to me or them that I was forgetting about something really important. It's probably more accurate to say that I was ignoring it. What was step 2 after high school?
Senior year started. I continued on as if nothing had changed, until someone asked me what school I was going to. I said I was undecided (the blah answer), when it hit me, I had absolutely no idea what I was gonna do. I took my SATs, sure (my dad had signed me up for SAT classes that I didn't take seriously), but that still didn't answer the question of what I wanted to do after high school. I had considered going to college to figure that out, but I had low self esteem (and to an extent, I still do), and was unsure as to how I'd fund it. Applying for scholarships and loans, in my eyes, would only end in rejections. Same with college applications, and for some reason, I didn't see Community College as an option.
A lot of you might be asking why any of this matters. It's all about high school and some stupid shit that went into it.
Well, it was a combination of all that shit that eventually lead up to my decision to join the Air Force.
As I said before, it was about halfway through my Senior year that I joined. As I stated above, I was going through a period of blissful ignorance and apathy. Focusing more on having fun than planning ahead. When it came down to crunch time, I had nothing.
Asking my friends didn't help, they weren't in the same shoes as I was, as they had already planned their paths out way in advance, or they believed it wasn't time for them to worry about it yet.
Asking my peers didn't help, as I spent so much time distanced from them, it was hard for them to give me advice based on the little that they knew of me. This was true of academic advisors, they didn't know me at all since I was still new to the school (And I didn't make an effort to go see them anyways, since I had no direction).
Asking my parents didn't help. I didn't get along with my dad (he was too busy yelling at how bad a 3.83 GPA was at me) and my mom didn't live with me.
So, when my mom did come to visit me, she wasn't really surprised I hadn't made up my mind (I guess mother's intuition that I would be indecisive, probably based on how I act). She took me over to the recruiter as an option, and as I stated in the previous blog, when I woke up from my stupor, I blurted out "Sure let's do it".
That leads us to about the beginning of the last blog. What I failed to mention was the ASVAB. Basically, it's a military test to test your basic knowledge and specific job knowledge. Something along the lines of math, grammar, english comprehension, basic stuff. Then there was more technical crap, like electrical knowledge and motor vehicle knowledge. It's normally a test you take before you enter the military. You'll say you wanna do it, they take you to the testing center, you take it, and pick your job based on your scores.
However.
For some reason. To this day, I don't know what it was, but for some reason in Junior year, my entire school took it. It was quite an odd sight. We all piled into the gym and they seated us. We all tried to sit next to our friends, like normal, and we started. It was honestly a little intimidating. I had never met an active duty member prior to that, so it was weird seeing uniformed soldiers (Although now that I think about it, I have no idea what branch they were in, it wasn't important at the time) walk up and down aisles to maintain academic integrity (read: prevent cheating).
So because of this strange occurance, I had already taken the test, but didn't find out the score (We were still in high school. And it didn't count for a grade. We didn't give a shit). When the recruiter sat down with me and discussed possible job options, she breezed over my ASVAB scores. Apparently I had done very well. Or something. She immediately recommended me for a Linguist. I figured, hey great, I know Chinese to a relevant extent, it should be easier for me than someone that can only speak one language. However in order to do that, I had to take another test, the DLAB.
Oh god, that shit was weird. I was told it was a test to see how well I could learn a language. I was sent somewhere (can't remember where) where I sat in a room with a few other people. About that time, a soldier came in and gave us all our testing materials and sat us down at some desks. He put in a compact cassette and watches us take the test. Yeah. A compact cassette. This was in 2005 (or shit, maybe 2006). The test essentially gave you a fake language with some set of rules, and you answer questions based on these rules. The set was broken into 2, audio and writing.
But the compact cassette played its part. It was probably older than me, and the shit was hard as fuck to hear, let alone comprehend and interpret a FAKE LANGUAGE THAT YOU DON'T KNOW. It baffled me. I spent more time staring at the soldier to see if he was gonna do anything about it, but he just kept on watching us.
I eventually finished and got the results a couple weeks later. I got a 99. This was bad. The test was out of 179 or something, and I needed 100 to pass.
>_>
I waivered in. Thinking back, this is likely a key reason I didn't get the language I wanted, but that's what happened.
And... I was set. I breezed through the rest of high school (where I purposely took easier classes for the sake of making it easier on my workload), graduated, and sat around the rest of summer to enjoy my life before Basic. I still had my friends, so I figured hell, I'll just use this time to relax and stuff. It didn't occur to me that, HEY, YOU SHOULD GET READY FOR BASIC, SOMETHING THAT IS KNOWN TO BE PHYSICALLY DEMANDING (which turned out to not be entirely true anyways). I was like 5-9 125, something sad. And it didn't bother me.
Things didn't work out as planned. My friends, as I stated above, were 1 year my junior, and as a result, duing my post graduate summer, they were frantically getting ready for college. I spent that summer playing WoW by myself, essentially. This didn't really help my ego, or my mood, if you couldn't tell. I was more or less lonely through it, dealing with boredom and frustration at frequently cancelled plans over study sessions.
The end of August flew at me way too quickly. All of my peers were already moved into college (or settled in at home if they didn't dorm), my friends were getting ready for the beginning of school, and I was by my lonesome packing what little I COULD bring to Basic and wondering what was going on in the near future.
There was one little oddity that occured before I went back to MEPS to swear in and finally fly out to Basic.
My recruiter switched out. As I learned after I got in, a recruiter is a special duty, anyone can do it for a short period of time, as long as you put in the package for it, recommendations, etc. Well, she swapped out with a much more laid back guy.
The day I left for basic, it was probably important to note that my dad actually had no interaction with anything involving the Air Force until that day. I had to go see the recruiter every month to make sure that nothing had changed to make me ineligible, but I typically drove there on my own, and it was after school.
Well, my dad met my (new) recruiter, who I guess didn't even know he had to take me over to MEPS. I was still early so my dad drove me back and talked to me for a bit. He started fuming over unprofessionalism or something. When I came back to the recruiting station, my recruiter was there. In shorts and a T-shirt. Yes, it's California, but my dad was more than agitated to know that this was my recruiter. Even though I barely knew him a week. I drove over to MEPS and did that whole circuit again, with the exception that I stood in a room with about 9-10 people and swore in.
I wish I could make it more dramatic, but really, I was standing in a room, right hand up, and parroted a guy standing next to a flag. And I guess it meant something, I dunno.
I flew to San Antonio, Texas on August 28th, 2006.
