Phile: CHANGES.TXT
Nym  : withheld to protect the confused.
Date : Fri Oct 13 03:44 2000

[in pencil, across top]
Please be kind to this disorganized screed.  It's my first serious attempt at
writing anything in about eight years.
[------]
[student name]
University 101

			Coping with Change

	 There is a set of changes that in our society are more or less
associated with turning eighteen.  My experience with them may be somewhat
atypical, my viewpoint skewed, or both.  Most of these changes were somewhat
spread out.  I didn't realize how much things had changed until later since I
had been to busy to notice.
	Over the summer between my junior and senior years of highschool I
started working my first "real" job,  as a cashier at a local fast-food
establishment.  Because I had worked before, the job was less than twenty-five
hours a week, and I had no other structured time to speak of that summer, this
didn't seem to be a major change.
	Fall came. Classes started.  In the morning I would go to the Yakima
Valley Vocational Skills Center.  At around one p.m. I was at A. C. Davis
Senior High working (mostly) on the designated required courses for
seniors.   Because of classes, work was not constant and the scheduling
changed.  I often worked a few hours on Friday nights or daytime on Saturday
and Sunday.  At this time I still had enough free time to indulge in hobbies
or hang out with friends without neglecting any of my responsibilities.
	Winter came around.  It turned out that I had a few more required
courses to get through than I had previously thought.  In order to accommodate
this, I moved to evening classes at the tradeschool.  At this point I didn't
actually need the three hours this freed up for classes at highschool, so I
managed to schedule things to leave a gap between classes.  This was often
used for study time.  Somewhere beforehand I had stopped working. Towards the
end of the trimester the manager asked me to come back to work again.  I
did.  After this I had a great deal of freedom.  My parents mostly let me do
as I pleased, as I was managing my own time effectively and meeting my
responsibilities.
	Spring arrived.  A relative died under strange circumstances. This
lead to a family gathering that will likely never be equaled in several
regards.  Many things came out during this time that probably should not
have.  I missed finals week from Winter classes.  When we returned home, I got
a new class list.  Because of the time away, I needed were two more classes
than expected to graduate.  More time was spent on homework.  I was now
working the same time block every week, Six to midnight on Friday (classes
were out at 5:30 at YVVSC), five to midnight on Saturday, and opening to five
on Sunday.  On Friday and Saturday nights I would usually join a role-playing
game (already in progress) at a friends house and substitute caffeine for
sleep.  I was happy to be busy and not have time to reflect on things.
	My way of coping had become staying too busy to have time to seriously
think about anything.  I was at almost done with an eight hour shift at work
one evening, when I collapsed.  I had only had four hours of sleep in the past
three or four days.  The blackout only lasted a few seconds, but it was most
definitely a warning to slow down.  I listened, but only for a while.  A
pattern had been set.
	Summer arrived.  I graduated from highschool and moved on to Yakima
Valley Community College.

	This was all the minor stuff.

	Fast-forward: Several things happened that I wasn't prepared to deal
with, and I never finished the first year of college. A few years later I
realized I was going nowhere. I couldn't afford to pay rent, let alone save
anything for tuition.  The trade school I had attended turned out to be
literally worthless, not even being able to provide transcripts to prove I'd
gone there, let alone the actual certification. Federal student financial aid
would not acknowledge my existence.  The job market in Yakima for what I had
trained for was virtually non-existent. My vague hopes of being able to
finance getting back into college "next quarter" were never going to be
realized unless Something Changed.
	Something Changed. I won't go into full detail about the
circumstances, (and, as you hopefully have seen by now, there is an amazing
amount of detail missing from the above!) but it was probably the hardest
choice I ever made.  I found myself in the U.S. Army and going to Basic Combat
Training at Fort Jackson, South Carolina.  From there it was easy, and
necessary for survival, to be too busy to be worried about anything other than
the business at hand.  This carried on through almost four months of job
schooling, a year long assignment in Korea, and part of my two and a half
years at Fort Lewis.  Towards the end, I was usually staying distracted rather
than constructively occupied.
	On the 18th of April, 2000 my contract with the U.S. Army had
ended.  By this time I had been on leave for about a month, moved to
Ellensburg, spent some time thumbing through a course catalog forCentral
Washington University, and started on an extremely long vacation.  Or at least
I thought it was going to be a vacation...
	From a strictly utilitarian point of view, what the military teaches
is indeed useful.  The rules for dealing with change are deceptively
simple.  When your environment changes, spend some time observing
things.  What kinds of actions you need to take to cope with changes will
often quickly become apparent.
	When dealing with emotional issues, this kind of thinking seems to be
useless. For this to work, you need to be able to change your outlook on life
simply by deciding to.  My belief is that changes in outlook come mostly, if
not entirely, from experience and epiphanies.  "Enlightenment" is more often
found when you weren't looking for it.
	I hope I have by now answered how I've dealt with change (and
stress) in the past shown that I have a clue for now and the future. Learn the
rules and play by them.
	Unfortunately, I seem to lack a decent framework for dealing with
changes on an emotional level. This would have been very helpful over this
summer. To illustrate this, let us look at what has happened over this
summer.  Some months ago, my mother had a psychotic break.  She left a message
with someone to come over and pick up her granddaughter (my niece, then age
five) and take care of her.  My mother was going off to commit
suicide.  Leaving details out, she was found later and several issues seem to
have been at least defined if not properly worked out since then.  A  while
later on a Friday night, I was taking a friend home to Yakima from a weekly
gathering in Selah and my cars' electrical system caught fire.  This car had a
history of problems and repairs had eaten the majority of my savings by this
stage. So we pushed the car into a parking lot and called another friend and
get a ride back to Yakima.  It was late, so I just found a spot to go to sleep
at that friends house.  In the morning I went to my parents house, and found
out that my grandmother had died a few hours ago.  I felt like horrible about
needing to take any time away from the family gathering that ensued to try and
get my car to some place where it wouldn't get towed. The next day (Sunday) I
returned home to Ellensburg.  Later that day one of my roommates attempted,
and thankfully failed, to commit suicide.  She is doing fairly well at the
moment, but is worried about what will happen when she comes off of the
antipsychotics.  Since that weekend I've been pretty well numb, ignoring
issues of what's going on and neglecting family.  The latest fuel on the fire
is that I have learned that one of my sisters is probably a drug dealer. I do
NOT wish to get a definite answer on this as I would be required by multiple
laws as well as my own conscience to do something about it, possibly
drastic.  As long as I don't actually know then it's ambiguous for me to take
no action rather than being unequivocally wrong.  I know what is supposed to
be done about this, but do not yet have the resolve for it.  Maybe next
weekend, as this weekend I will be out with the National Guard playing
soldier.  This weekend will be dealing with whether or not I will be getting
out of the Guard or not. The ethics, emotional, and practical considerations
here could occupy several pages at least.  I will leave them be for now as....

        This paper is already a page longer than assigned, I'll try to
conclude it now.
	"A conclusion is simply the place where someone got tired of
thinking."
		Unattributed quote from /usr/games/lib/fortunes/fortunes.txt
on my harddrive

	Now, in the spirit of fortune cookie thinking (which is very often far
less painful than real thinking), I present you (the gentle reader) with my
conclusions:

	I take things day by day.  The normal things can be dealt with almost
automatically; practical considerations seem to almost take care of themselves
so long as I make minimal effort towards taking care of them. Otherwise,
anything that isn't within my working definition of "normal" must be examined
and dealt with individually.
	I try to not anticipate anymore.  While that would work most of the
time, it leads to complacency.  This leaves one completely flat footed when
things happen, as I have been (emotionally at least) most of this summer.
	I try to find the "path of least damage."  when dealing with ethics or
other peoples' emotions. I'm not very good at this some days.
	I can scarcely believe that I will turn in this beautiful example of
why I don't like to write papers.

It is now 3:11 am, and I've been staring at low quality monitor assembling
these words since about 8pm.
This may or may not have been a worthwhile endeavor.

Thank you for your time,
[signature]