not spam, please read with an open mind

[Ray]

Oh, I know what you mean. A lot of the people who get out of the military assume a gruff, SGT Rock attitude -as if they were made of nails. I hate that.

Being in the military is no guarantee of manliness. Like I told my sister: there's all kinds of people in the military. It's just like looking around in class --the same kind of people you see in your class at school are the same type that turn up in the military. Fat kids, skinny kids, kids who climb on rocks! Even kids with chicken pox!

I started out in the Army National Guard. I did 6 years (because in the Guard, if you don't have any prior military experience, the initial term is SIX YEARS!) I almost immediately regretted joining the guard because they assigned me to the artillery which made the whole endeavor pointless. I only joined to get some kind of experience so I could get a better job! And what kind of job do artillery skills get you?? Dumb move on my part.

When the 6 years expired, I joined the active-duty Air Force and stayed for 23 or 24 years --I forget. I retired from active-duty Air Force in 2004 and now work for the Department of the Air Force as a Department of Defense civilian.

But the point is: I am well familiar with the type of ex-military you mean and I didn't think you intended it as a slur.


*not that I think anyone will but the obligatory, "thank you for serving our country" is not necessary. The military and this country did much more for ME than I did for IT.

[Earl]

Wow. Donâ??t get me started on PE! Yesterday my wife and I were talking about the failure of traditional PE to encourage physically unfit kids to pursue a wellness routine. Commenting on the claim that the intent of making PE mandatory was to promote physical fitness, she said, â??The road to hell is paved with good intentions.â? Yeah, and this particular hell was reserved for nonathletic kids. Since her early childhood, my wife has had RP (retinitis pigmentosa), a degenerative eye disease that eventually results in total blindness. Although she is able to see some (although her eyesight is getting worse), she has never been able to drive a car. When she was attending Sam Houston State University, she was forced in a required PE class to play badminton, even when she told her coach that she was legally blind! (As the humorist Dave Berry says, Iâ??m not making this up.) The State Commission for the Blind had a case file on her. All her coach had to do was check to see that she was not lying. Since my wife completely lacked peripheral vision, she never could see the birdie; and she ended up receiving a â??C,â? which was the very first time that she had ever received a â??Câ? in any class since kindergarten. You see, she excelled academically. Can you believe that? Where do these boneheaded coaches come from? BTW, Millhouse, that coach was deliberately humiliating you, because he apparently was a bully who never grew up.

[tnt633]

I have read the first comment with an open mind .But what bother me about sports is that many people think that if you don't like any sport at all ,its weird. For example you can say in a conversation,
"I don't pay attention to baseball/golf/ field hockey" and one would assume you like some other sport. But if one says , " I don't care for any sports ", then that person is looked at being weird .

I hate all organized sports: fishing, martial arts, dodgeball , lacrosse. But society imposes on us that we must like some sport.

[Ray]

I have read the first comment with an open mind .But what bother me about sports is that many people think that if you don't like any sport at all ,its weird. For example you can say in a conversation,
"I don't pay attention to baseball/golf/ field hockey" and one would assume you like some other sport. But if one says , " I don't care for any sports ", then that person is looked at being weird .

I hate all organized sports: fishing, martial arts, dodgeball , lacrosse. But society imposes on us that we must like some sport.

yeah, that's true... you can get by by saying, "I don't watch _______" whatever sport it is you're trying to escape at the moment, which is what I usually do. Nobody apparently is expected to like every sport. But once in a while, I'll just say, I don't watch sports --and yep --you get the look --like whaaaaaaaaaaaaa????

But I can live with fishing and martial arts.

[blackdog4444]

Lacrosse is probably the only sport I can stand because it's a popular culture sport for the Onondagas in New York. My cousins love it, and it's not highly publicized like football or any similar sport is. It's the unfortunate aspects of previous P.E. experiences that still discouraged me from going to any of my cousins' games.
That wasn't the only bit of discouragement I got. I even got discouraged about staying in shape. I always thought when the teacher was saying "excersizing makes you live longer": who the hell would wanna suffer another 4 years? Then there was the fact the damn workouts make you look like a total drunken retard and you were forced to hold hands with kids that were constantly sick, snotty, or getting into something gross. I even continue to tell the counselors in the school I'm currently going to : "You know, excersize machines work just as good as jumping around like hooligans. We're always working on our social skills in every class anyways, haven't the teachers whined about that already?"
Though I guess they like dirty little ape children raiding their homes, spreading some mystery illness like meningococcal meningitis or mononucleosis. I probably know more than most of them do about such things and more.