Funkiness

all right. so i'm having sort of a bad day. well, it could be much worse, but i'm in sort of a funky mood. i'm at the lab right now, grinding seagrass samples (yes, on a sunday), and i'm pretty much the only person here. well, every now and again someone comes through for something. craig came in for a chat earlier when we were the only people in the building. but now i'm all by myself, listening to some tunes.

anyway, allow me to explain the source of my present funk. it stems from a couple of things. most recently, i managed to lock the keys to my lab's storage area in the storage area. and of course, our friendly neighborhood maintenance men aren't here to cut off the padlock so i can get in to retrieve the keys. this is only a problem because gretchen and i left some very stinky items in there when we returned from port st joe (PSJ) friday night (hey, it was late, like 11:20, and we didn't have the energy to scrub the algae-encoated pvc), and they're stinking up the whole storage building. i went in to get some gloves so i don't burn my hands with liquid nitrogen while i'm using it to grind seagrass in, and when i exited the storage area (aka the cage) i had my lab keys in my hand, so i assumed that i also had the keys to the cage and proceeded to secure the padlock. then, i realized that, no, i did not have the cage keys after all. i peeked through the wire fencing that separates our cage from the others in the storage building, hoping to spot the keys so that i might find something to fish them out, but alas, they were nowhere in sight. so, while i have the required gloves, i will be unable to return to the cage later this afternoon to remove and clean the smelly pvc. i guess it won't kill anyone to have a stinky storage building for one more day. i'll take care of the lock situation first thing in the morning.

ok, on to the second source of this major funk. this is really a couple of things wrapped up in one. i've mentioned that it was late when gretchen and i arrived at DISL from PSJ on friday, and it took us a while to unload everything and return the car and stuff, so it was after 12:30 a.m. when i finally got home. and that was after waking up at 6:30, driving the 40 minutes to st. joseph peninsula state park from our hotel, working in the field for over 8 hours, driving the 5 1/2 hours from PSJ to dauphin island, then making the 45 minute trip home from the island. so, when i finally went to bed around 1:30, i was really freakin' exhausted. now, just imagine my intense irritation when chad's cell phone rings at 6:30 saturday morning. i don't like being called that early in the morning when i'm not absolutely exhausted, and i was especially annoyed then. of course, by the time we woke up to answer, it stopped ringing so we went back to sleep. then our apartment phone rang a little before 9, and again, i didn't really wake up until right before the answering machine picked up, but no one left a message. anyway, i decided that sleeping in any later was not going to happen at that point in time, so i just got up. about an hour later, chad's cell phone rang again, and this time i was awake. it was his mother. she had been the person calling repeatedly early on a saturday morning when she knows that we will be sleeping - when she knew that i wouldn't be getting home until after midnight on friday night/saturday morning. yet she still felt the urgent need to call us at freakin' 6:30 on a saturday morning. i sort of felt bad for being so pissed when i found out why she called so many times instead of just leaving a message to call her back asap. but i was still pissed. anyway, she had just gotten their morning paper when she called at 6:30, and on the front page was an article proclaiming the tragic death of one of our high school classmates. so she felt the need to call and let us know as soon as she read it, which i really didn't think was necessary. and then i felt like the biggest bitch in the world for thinking that she so could have waited to tell us that. so chris winchester, a guy who was in my graduating class in high school (and i went to a very small school, so of course i knew him) was killed by a roadside bomb in iraq. i don't really know how i feel about it. of course, i feel bad about it. it's a very sad thing to have happen to someone you know. but we weren't close or anything. to tell the truth, i hardly ever talked to the guy. i never actively disliked him or anything, we just traveled in different social circles. so in a way, yeah, i feel sad. i feel for his family and the people who were close to him. but it feels wrong to feel any sort of really intense grief over it because we weren't friends. i didn't really know him that well. i don't want to be one of those people who acts like someone was his/her best friend after they've died when they really weren't close. people like that always piss me off. the last funeral i went to was when i was a sophomore in high school. my friend shari's mom had cancer, and when she passed away, shari asked if i would go to the funeral with her. of course i couldn't refuse, even though i really hate funerals. then, i really did feel sad. mostly i felt really bad for shari, losing her mother and all. but i'd hung out at her house before, and her mom had always been really sweet to me. i'd also been to visit her in the hospital with shari, so i also saw how hard the whole cancer situation was on their whole family. i never felt like i was intruding, though. i just felt like shari needed me, so when she asked me to go to the hospital with her, i went. we drifted apart in the couple of years after that, and that kind of makes me sad too.

anyway, hearing about chris also made me think about the war in general. chad and i have talked about it a lot, actually, and i know how i feel about it. i don't agree with the reasons that were given for going into iraq. i think that we were egregiously misinformed and that we were effectively lied to about the reasons for invading and for remaining there for so long. i don't think that it is our place as americans to interfere there. i think that we should have left after finding that there were no WMD, if that was the real reason we were there. i always hear arguments that they killed people on american soil and that's why we're over there, and i want to shake those people. we went into afghanistan because of 9/11. no one seemed opposed to that. i've seen no evidence that it was iraqis who were responsible, and i think that the 9/11 argument for the war in iraq is totally invalid. i don't have a problem with ridding the world of saddam hussein, but if that was the goal, we should have been told that. if we're there to "save" the iraqi people, we should be told that. personally, i don't think it's our place to "save" iraq, but that would be a more valid reason for americans to be there than "we were looking for WMD, and even though we didn't find them, we think iraq is bad, so we're going to set up a new government there." even though i don't think we should have been in iraq in the first place, i think that now that we are there, we have to finish what was started. it would be wrong of us to go in and throw their lives into disarray, disrupt their government, and walk away saying, "whoa, my bad. we'll leave you to clean this mess up now." i agree that terrorists need to be fought against, but i think that a lot of people have died needlessly in iraq because of bad information. i also think that this whole iraq thing has actually taken away from the war on terror. we've been concentrating on getting things settled in iraq rather than combating terrorists elsewhere. my final verdict: we should never have been in iraq and we should leave as soon as humanly possible.

all right, i'm still in a major funk, but i have work to do so i can go home. lay-tah.