History part II.a2.0

Hah!

I found these three things while cleaning up my files, and I just couldn't go pass them. These three thingies mean a lot to me :D

It would probably require a whole lot of approval from peeps on the shot, but I just have to add it to my memoire :D Shot was taken was after 19 weeks of fuckwit training in the country's worst training centre - and by worst I mean it was the hottest place and instructors were a nightmare. I have never been so thin or so athletic in my whole life! I think I cried in the bathroom every Monday morning, knowing what pain and trial I will have to put up with the following week, but now that all that's forgotten, it was a really cool experience. It teaches you a lot, that kind of strain. Pity I never kept up with any of the girls from there. We were warrior queens, at least for those 19 weeks. They chose good ones, none of the whiney abused babes in the wood you see in the movies. Some were the kind that ate men for breakfast. Not me, of course. I was the chubby, mouthy, idiotic type that always came last to the finish line and wrote articles about warfare diplomacy to the barracks leaflet. Was popular, though. If anyone, folk in the unit is bound to admire someone who can shoot like that..

              Interesting closure, however, was when 4 years later, they sent me back to train for an officer status and I was suppose to undergo a similar training - but by then I already saw what becomes of female soldiers, what with watering the ficus and making coffee and cleaning ashtrays for some near-retired old fart in some god forsaken old warehouse.. The first time an instructor yelled at me to humiliate me as part of the training, I walked out. No fucking way I'm falling for the same propaganda twice.

The second thingie is a design for the cover of my book called The Necessary Bard

The design depicts me, standing in front of a see-through screen, covered in my thoughts, behind which is my bleak reality. On this side I'm a kick - ass bard. This was the first epic novel in my own language I have written in adult life - my attempt at actually adding a cool adventure novel to our literature.

Of course I never finished it - but I did get pretty far.

                The story takes place right after the War for Startracker - after all we had was destroyed and vast majority of my colleagues dead. I wasn't sure what I was, but I did wake up in a forlorn forest with some of my things and came to discover I was in a completely outlandish environment - it wasn't Earth, it wasn't modern, it had no books. It was something like Middle Ages France, but a bit fantastic. And I had nothing to bargain with. And winter was closing in. Slowly but surely, though, I managed to earn enough for bare necessities - a mule, for example, and began exploring the land, drawing a map and teaching people to write. Yes, I was a one-girl plague of literacy :) Thorough the tale, I acquired a few companions, most of which one way or another turned out to be my old colleagues, looking after me. There were some new ones, too, such as Tempa Medeidre and her demon, Behemut, which stayed on to date as a kind of my girlfriend.  This was a cool, cool book. I better finish it someday, now that I'm in just the right business ;D

 And this...

... is my favorite family photo of them all. This speaks so much about us, about my dad and our nature and the situations we put ourselves in.. It's simply monumental.

                 Long time ago, long before I had any say in it, there was a nasty earthquake in Skopje - a Yugoslavian city got leveled to pulp. Journalists from near and far all gravitated towards the ruin to lend a hand and write back home with reports. This is my dad, the young journalist tailor-made for the occasion. I think he even bicycled his way down to get there..

               See the press center? The smallest tent ever. The ground? Mud and silt. The tiny carpet to protect the tool of trade - an old newspaper under a huge type-writer. My dad, skanky, hairy and in tight shorts, his shirt buttoned the exact same way as he wears it still, and a pair of rubber boots by, for field effort...

Can anyone imagine still the old school journalism? Where you had to get your butt dirty?? These days we log on-line and wait for the press reports and what we get is half a tourist pamphlet of the location and half some political statement about the society. The mud, the fleas, the dead, the lack of instruments, that's beyond anyone's interest now.. And news of those kind would linger for a long time. Almost everyone around here remembers those days, those disasters. We, the latest slaves of the info onslaught, remember perhaps three of the worst per year, perhaps 3 years back. Two out of three of those are from USA, as they simply can't get enough of self-pity and drama. I always get the feeling, like with that dreadful tsunami that wiped out the eastern shores of Asia, that Americans *instantly* needed one of their own and as they lost part of a city, it simply needed to be a faaar worse tragedy than all of the eastern Asia combined. But then again I think most of the eastern Asia shore has recovered by now whereas poor Orleans is still dumbstruck.

Sulivan Af or History in between II. and III.

And in between there was Africa.

I left for my big African trip in the start of 2007. My African name was Sulivan Af (as I change names according to continents) and my then husband was all too happy to see me go. Gods, that man was an avatar or poem

'The pains of love be sweeter far than all the other pleasures are..'

The trip took me across Europe, across Gibraltar and around Morocco, then Mauritania and Senegal and then they finally kicked me back when I tried to cross to Gambia. Plan was to make it all the way to Burkina Faso, but in half a year's time I got tired and lonely and wish i could say I redefined my priorities, but I didn't. If anything, I stuck onto all the wrong things even more. A month of rain in Ireland cleansed me of the dirt road grime, but the bookstores and museums didn't make me any happier. I had to go home and face reality of my situation - the "grass is always greener" mode HAD to go.

Looking back now, I realize it was a certain freak show or an opera at the closure of an era. I was 3o and in dire need of a divorce and I realized I'm not gonna succeed abroad any sooner than I was at home. And it's not polite to abandon a ship just because it's moist and sinking. I brought back half a million pickies and in different seasons I highlight the different ones to be my favorite :) Here's just a quick few..

History part III.

The second uniform came with the little yellow moped. This was after the divorce, after the ridiculously embarrassing suicide attempt. One lovely February end I was sitting in a cafe and got distracted from my self-loathing and hardcore commiserating by a postman, zigzagging around the street. he seemed so cool, such a happy jack on that stupid little moped. Such a grin on the man.

So, me being me, I walked into the post office and told them I want to be one. There are no girl postmen obviously, which is probably why they hired me almost at once (it's a wanted job, so there's quite a waiting list or so I'm told), and the first smack to reality when I walked into the hive, was a handshake from the biggest, best dressed man I've ever seen. Not that the suit was overdone, it was just the man wearing it that struck me. The army instinct nearly made me run from him, as he was the build Gods made for marginally brain dead bullies, but he turned out to be totally awesome.

If you wanna know just how it felt, buy the picture book :D But for half a year, that was a really really cool job. HARD like a s.o.b., another weight-loser, sometimes 14 hours of dragging around Ikea catalogues through regions populated by half literate and often unpleasant costumers. But overall, incredibly cool job. I even put my mind to purchasing a fancy power bike, to be a leather working biker chick, and then crashed my little yellow moped at 4km/h and broke my shoulder blade and scraped the side of my leg, where never a hair grew away.

History part II.

Hah! A fortune teller once told my grandma that I'll be wearing three uniforms in my life... Counting my childhood, I've already reached that set, but if she was referring only to my adulthood, I've one left to find me... Hm, hm, not counting prison or hospitalization ones, what oh what could it be? :D

This is the pickie of me from my military ID and there are other shots of me in the uniform, but never any from the field. They allowed us to take cameras to the field just once, tho I was still using the 35mm at the time and all the pics were of my colleagues looking fabulously feisty. (I trained with an all girl group as part of a non-friction experiment.)

I served for four years. The first half a year was great - that was the extended basic training for women, 19 weeks plus and it was like a weight-loosing farm meets an adrenaline park. Ridiculous amount of heavy lifting and rolling around, being yelled at and blowing stuff up :D It couldn't have been easy on my instructors, because I am the sort of a person who thoroughly lacks the organ for ambition: I just do stuff cause it's fun. They'd yell:" Pick up your pace Goddamn it! Do you really wanna be the last?!!" and I'd continue hopping around, shrugging:" Well, sir, look at those girls in the front - they are really into all this, they should probably get the glory." Fact was, there was plenty of stuff I was best at, athletics just wasn't one of them. I usually assembled the rifle fastest, I just never announced it. (Got caught once and the whole squad had to do 5o push-ups while I stood attention, being punished). I usually paid the tiny mass-destroyer's focus in class and got top marks on the exams and some of the officers appreciated me for it. The bit that stood out, though, was my marksmanship. I far surpassed my mates and some of the officers and had a natural feel for weapons. There was a time when I couldn't hit anything smaller than a landscape, but that quietly changed and evidently I got the talent from my mother (as dad couldn't hit water falling from a boat.) Be it hand guns or my darling AK, I was good. And it was brilliant, all those terrain exercises. Just image wearing all the field gear, covered in a camouflage poncho, paint on your face, grass in your helmet, at night, in the rain, shooting with old sniper rifles at targets half a click away...

Then of course, because girls aren't supposed to be better at the boom boom bang bang stuff than the boys, I was assigned in an old tank mine storage in the woods outside my home town, sweeping the yard, opening the road ramp if need presented itself, running after my geriatric cunt of a superior asshole, saying 'Yes, sir, no, sir' to him for the next four years. Pay was a joke, I never even saw a rifle after that, I was constantly being demoted, at times to a cleaning lady for the rest of the men and in the end, because I complained about being the only one constantly getting the negative work reviews, the captain asked me to sign a piece of paper saying I agree to being cut down a rank to fit my position and then my work reviews will be positive. I'd be less in rank and pay than from before I enlisted. So I signed a similar piece of paper, quiting, went to the press and unleased PR Dogville on the old farts. Pen mightier than the sword yet again..

But there was a positive side to sitting on guard for twelve hours nightly.. (Besides secretly painting and writing, evidently.) Not a single Zen monk could EVER challenge me to a patience contest again and for a while I had the superb skill of being able to sleep standing up.