The only way

I love being back home. Bills to pay, floors to scrub, trash to take out, disposals to fix, clothes to wash, bags to unpack, cars to repair, letters to open, email to answer.

And work, of course; couldn't forget that. Meetings, paperwork, bureaucracy, red tape, egos. All in a day's sweat. Negotiations: it seems I spend my entire day negotiating middle ground between parties who speak slanted at each other, never revealing their true intent or subjective prejudices.

I'll be honest: I'm working my own angles, too. The guise of "recovery" has opened many rare doors thus far this year, in a line of work where stopping to breathe is a joke at best, and at worst, anathema. But this angling is a delicate dance on the sharp lip of a double-edged sword. Am I well enough to work? Then I'm well enough to reassign. Am I fully healed? Then no need to spend so much time with family. Feeling good? Then stand duty and quit taking leave. Think you can handle the rigors of underway life? Then surely you should work longer days, take on more responsibilities, and focus more on the job you've got rather than jobs you like, jobs you want, jobs you might someday get.

I've been angling for underway time on the locally homeported cutters (one of which, after all, I might well find myself assigned to next summer). Manpower, particularly at-least-slightly-experienced-manpower, is always at a premium in the perpetually-strapped Coast Guard; so as long as their berthing arrangements allow, cutters are usually glad to fatten their watch rotations. Of course it's mainly to benefit me, to gain experience and earn a qualification letter, but if I can pitch the time as useful to the ship - so much the better.


And such an opportunity has opened up, with one of our cutters headed for an out-of-hemisphere deployment all spring. They asked for help standing watches, and I was quick to pull the volunteer trigger. But this requires some, well, negotiations. Clearance level, weapons quals, passport, country clearances, arrival and departure coordination with port calls; these all will follow in due time. The sticking (or perhaps just sticky) point is school attendance. I need a certain school to stand the watches; but typically the Coast Guard won't pay for you to attend these six weeks of school until you have permanent orders to a job that needs it. I'd almost certainly be attending the school this spring, once I've received orders for next year, but here I'm asking to attend early, so I can sail for more of the ship's deployment. The detailer's not going to sign off blindly. So negotiations proceed.

Meanwhile, the music of the road hums demandingly in my head, and I'm pressing out time everywhere to capture it on paper (or on disk, as it were): lunch breaks, commuter trains, late nights, public plazas, sequestered with laptop and noise-canceling headphones. A dual-track race to the finish.