From dust till dawn

Tuesday, Apr. 24, 2007, 10:36 a.m.

Until today, the tent I live in housed approximately thirty women, and it was a little cramped. Now, it houses thirty women, and I am sensing that blood will be drawn before the week is out. Although it was a pleasant surprise to come home from work to find my belongings scattered about and my wall locker moved so close to my bed that it wouldn't even open, I'm going to have to protest if any further steps (the next one, I'm assuming, is to just move someone into my bed with me) are taken to make this deployment just a tad bit closer to the fine line between Annoying But Bearable and I Will CUT A BITCH.

The weather's been nicer here for the past few days (high 80s and sunny, with minimal sinus-invading dust) so I went to the pool Friday and Saturday to start working on my war tan. (What? I am stuck at a desk in a cubicle on a camp in Baghdad for the next 14 months. The very least I should be getting out of this deployment is a Hilton-level Bronze.) It was intensely odd to be back there, especially because it looked exactly the same as I remembered it. I mean, it's not like I just vacationed here one year as a kid and then came back for nostalgic purposes. No, no -- this is a place that I looked at two years ago and sighed happily, thinking, "I will never have to see this place ever a-fucking-gain." And then, if I listened very closely, I could have heard God chuckle.

I am obscenely tired and would like to get to sleep before the wind picks up and the tent heats itself to 90 degreees and the day-shift people come back here for their lunch hour to talk really loudly about the heat and the fact that they all really deserve to be slapped for never having learned the concept of the "indoor voice," so I will leave you with a picture of the puny dust"storm" we had last week. It's just dusty enough to be depressing, but not bad enough to have a full-fledged whine about. Go figure.

This was taken at about 7 p.m., right when I woke up to get ready for work. I could tell already that it was going to be a lovely day.

P.S. Thank you thank you THANK YOU to those of you who have already sent me wonderful care packages/cards/letters. Your postcard is on the way!