I Think, Therefore, I Can’t Decide

Before intel training, officer candidate school, and Guantanamo Bay antics I had nearly three years of US Coast Guard Station Montauk New York with which I had to contend. Like many who are not from New York, I was not familiar with Long Island. I thought I was going to Staten Island, so arriving at an earthy, isolated surf and fishing town, 100 miles from New York City, with more secrets that an Agatha Christie murder mystery, I was pleasantly surprised.  I reported to the small 20-25 person unit in August, just as one of the hurricanes that rocks the eastern end of the Island each year was hitting. In the exact hour that I walked onto the unit, the Chief of base was out on a ¨training evolution,¨ that he mismanaged and would cause him to soon be relieved (fired).  Following that event, the unit was the mostly in disarray. There were various temporary replacement leaders who were unable to understand the unit enough to make any progress against its misfit culture. I slo...

My friends and I thought that Coast Guard boot camp would be like a militant version of Bay Watch. We would train on the beach, practice valiant ocean rescues, and learn advanced first aid. However, t he only thing Baywatch-like would be our cheap and ultra thin bathing suits that showed every crevice and nipple detail.  As three woman who signed up for this in Ventura, California, we received tons of athletic swag from the recruiter (who took us surfing on base like he had some kind of backstage pass, which he kind of did). It was a tough reality to find out that the Coast Guard was not sponsored by Billabong and pushups were not going to give us a Pam Anderson physique. We were about to have eight weeks of bootcamp nonsense led by three dudes of varying respectability. Of the three company commanders (CC’s) in charge of leading our group, one was mostly respectable, another was half-way decent, and the third was a grown man taking out his Black Sabbath tee shirt and...

Traveling and failing provide some of life’s greatest lessons and sometimes you can do both! Thirty days in Peru have given me plenty of lessons and two small lessons to share. I learned not to put soccer on the TV during dinner and that failing in understanding the difference between a normal R and a rolled R while speaking Spanish can affect communication. Lesson 1 : While cooking dinner at home during the quarantine with my Peruvian partner, I made the mistake of putting on soccer highlights. By the time we sat down to eat, the YouTube algorithm (following our past 24 hour viewings of Peruvian surf videos) had turned to playing solely Peruvian soccer videos. Having these videos on in this moment was a mistake for two reasons:         1. Every time I took one second to look down at my food, to coordinate food on fork movement, it was demanded by my companion that I,  “Mira! Mira!” (Look! Look!) because Peru was about to score a goal. “I am mira-ing,” I resp...

Overall, I did not apply myself fully to academics and came out just fine. It was confirmed for me that I came out just fine a year ago when I ran into a former high school  classmate in the halls of my DC job. He had taken every advanced placement (AP) class growing up and went to a prestigious university, where I had dropped my only AP course two weeks into freshman year because I didn’t realize people would actually do the summer reading. Here we were with the same job and grade. I get a mild inner chuckle whenever I think about how different our lives were during those teenage years, have fun actually reading the Scarlet Letter?  But good for him, I wouldn’t realize I enjoyed school and learning until my second semester of college, when I would veer in the opposite direction and dedicate myself intensely to each class, in place of socializing like a normal person. It was what happened when I could choose my area of study and start my classes mid-morning.  I eventual...

More writings available at  medium writings Insta:  follow me Fairly Smooth Operator: My Life Occasionally at the Tip of the Spear available Sept 2021. I talk a lot about therapy in my comedy set, but in reality, the extent of my therapy is having three sessions through the Department of Veteran Affairs (VA) during January/February 2020. The therapist had an in-home private practice and when I arrived to the address I was pleased to see I was at a large house in the ritzy area of Bethesda, Maryland. I figured the therapist here was making bank in her private practice and had a fabulous built in office, styled by Restoration Hardware. The office would obviously be located in one of the wings of the house where we’d have some privacy from her east coast polo-popping kids and dapper husband. It was around 7pm when I arrived, so they were likely about to come home from lacrosse practice. The therapist was probably providing sessions for veterans like the pro bono work a lawyer do...

“A blog is a conversation no one wanted to have with you,” - Michelle Wolff Fully aware, so thank me later for not calling to go over these topics with you. WHY ARE YOU WRITING THIS? Why does anyone write? To process and possibly share. I  had a hard time deciding whether or not to publish this because there is a such a benefit of writing for oneself and not thinking of the audience. Even in this post, I already censored myself by deleting one “fucking” and deciding that since my parents are probably going to read this, I’ll stay away from sex or maybe post a BIG RED WARNING when close family should pass on an entry. I also realize I have a pattern since I was a kid of not being able to make decisions easily and constantly going back and forth on the potential butterfly effect of any decisions I may make. Maybe through writing I can see that nothing matters. Or maybe, I’ll see that everything matters and I every decision I’ve made has put me on a new trajectory that I can d...

“Life is not fair.”  -My first leadership lesson, care of my Dad. Growing up in Northeast Ohio, people were a weird blend of polite to your face and also incredibly rude in revealing their judgemental thoughts without a filter, often over-sharing what they thought about your life, occasionally revealing too much about their own life or condition. Cleveland suburbs are a place where no one is allowed to be better than anyone else, but at the same time, everyone knows better than you about how you should be living your life.  Just look at how they treat Lebron James - a God and saviour in their eyes - who also made poor choices by leaving Cleveland for Miami or Los Angeles.   I was about ten years old on a routine trip to the dentist when the hygienist made small talk by asking if I had siblings. I told her I had one older sister and one twin brother, to which she replied, “Oh, so you’re the extra,” with complete conviction of the idea my parents wanted one bo...