A thought-provoking weekend

I was going to post about my lackluster run yesterday and sleeping in this morning, but I had occasion to go to Myrtle Beach this weekend as all my in-laws were converging on my parents'-in-law house, so this'll add it to the end.

On the way down on Friday, I finally got around to reading Euripedes' The Trojan Women and it was a sobering read. I was prompted to read it after some reading of the Melian Dialogue (which I've commented on before).

Someday, when I have occasion to look back on my service, I would hope that I never have occasion to say that "we lost our way." The most pointed parts of it for me (as a parent, at least) related to the death of Astyanax, Hector's infant son, who is killed by the victorious Greeks by being pitched off the walls of Troy before the city is burned. I think back to the promise I made myself at the age of 18, about how I could only serve with a clear conscience. My conscience is still clean, for now, at least.

Earlier that morning, I'd read a little about the ceremonies of the 60th anniversary of the destruction of Hiroshima. There was some more about it in the NY Times, but the Washington Post article was the one that stuck in place. Maybe it was the commemoration of the Korean victims of the bombing. This is not to debate the morality of destroying Hiroshima or Nagasaki (which was destroyed three days later on 9 August 1945), because IMHO, the Japanese would have continued to fight on...and I think casualty estimates for Operation DOWNFALL would've been largely correct, at least the ones from the Joint Chiefs of Staff saying 1.2 million casualties with about 267,000 KIA/DOW (died of wounds). And that's just for the American side.

Then again, after a win of that nature, would we have won the peace that we did less than ten years after the end of World War II? That's a topic that's weighed heavily on me as I go through the course I take at Carlisle. The American Civil War lasted for about 5 years of open hostilities. It was the inability of the Union to win the peace (i.e., the failure of Reconstruction) that led to having to pass things like the Civil Rights Act of 1964. I would conservatively say the peace in the South was not won until, I'd say, about 1972 or so. It took some legislation and an activist Supreme Court to set things right.

This was a strange and somewhat shitty weekend.

I got a crack in my windshield on the drive down on Friday. I'm particularly assed up for the basic reason that THIS IS THE THIRD GODDAMN WINDSHIELD ON THE CHRISTALFUCKINGMIGHTY MOTHERFUCKING KUBELWAGEN THAT'S CRACKED IN THE LAST TWO, SHITTY-ASS, GODDAMN, FUCKING YEARS.

That being said, it happened in Baltimore on the way down to BWI airport. Some asshole cut off the guy in front of me, the guy hits the brakes, I hit the brakes, something hits the goddamn windshield, and I get a fucking 14 inch crack in my front windshield on the DRIVER'S SIDE. This led to about 90 seconds of invective that I can't say in front of the kids.

I also neglected to pack casual shorts on Friday. I was a little fucking pissed since I was thinking about it, but had to turn in the final of my exam and realized that my exam was too big, and I had to go back and turn in a corrected version, at 1:45am the night prior. I wasn't really thinking straight. I should've checked, especially since I was actually thinking about it as I was driving away from the quarters on Carlisle Barracks.

I spent a lot of time with my children this weekend. That was time well spent, and I read to them at night, and played in a swimming pool with them, and it was good.

I spent no time at all with Household6. Our only substantive conversation this weekend, on the drive back to Myrtle Beach airport from the in-laws' house (about 30 minutes), was an argument about money, since from what I can tell, we have more going out than we have coming in. I have very fundamental problems about living off credit (or in this case, trimming into a savings account to stay in black at the end of the month). I can rationalize it, sort of, when I realize that the Princess will be in kindergarten next year, and the Sledgehammer will follow the year after that, but in the meantime, I don't like paying interest on shit that I don't really need to pay interest on, IMHO. We didn't discuss anything else other than loose shit about her job, or brief gory details about the mechanics of some my my in-laws' relationships. The last two topic areas collectively took about 150 seconds of conversation all weekend.

From what I can tell, here's what's bothering me:
- Both parents love their children. That's a given.
- One parent can't let go of (some potentially ersatz) intellectualism and in doing so, has driven himself into some fairly punishing introspection. He's also thought about what it would mean in the worst-case scenario.
- One parent is so devoted to the children that she runs herself into the ground without thinking through the second and third-order effects of what has happened.
- Both parents are gotten sidetracked to the point where in trying to be good parents, they've lost what it means to be a couple.

On the way back to Carlisle Barracks, I was working through the other plays in the anthology (translated by Edith Hamilton), the last of which was Aeschylus' Agamemnon. Clytemnestra, Agamemnon's wife, kills him (and the princess Cassandra, who has gone clearly insane, as Euripedes describes) upon his return from Troy, for having sacrificed his own daughter Iphigenia as a human sacrifice to give good winds for the battle fleet sailing for Troy. Between my reading about the Beyond Goldwater-Nichols project at CSIS, I guess I'd rather be reading Greek tragedy. It's lighter reading for me than government interagency procedural reform.

Oh, and the run yesterday:

5.02mi, 41:43
Guided By Voices, "Hold on Hope"
Rush, "Mission"
Rush, "Turn The Page"

WX at 0700: 81 (27), DP 73 (22), BP 30.10 (1019), calm, RH 76.8%

Odometer 2: 477.8mi

Z2 start, Z3 mid-high finish.
Resting heart rate before start = no reading.

I attempted to cut short the length of the pre-start, and went about two miles before finding an open latrine that allowed me to take the desperate relief that I should've planned for. Sigh.

The finish was okay. I was running a bit better at the end, particularly at the first end, but altogether not a bad finish for a weekend where I was pretty tired.

Tomorrow I do speedwork, and I'm going to make it as brutal as I can make it.

0.98: 7:47 7:47 (7:56)
4.04: 41:43 33:56 (8:24)