Redundancy

I’ve finally come around to understanding why my father always talked about having a plan B, C, D, and even Z. It only took me 23 years.

Contingency plans. Back up plans. I like to call them redundancies (I think influenced by reading Nassim Taleb’s anti-fragile?). Back ups of my back ups.

The thing is – things go wrong. Not everything works according to plan. Cliché, cliché, cliché. In practical terms, I’m an officer in the military now. A butter bar with butter fingers. That is to say, I lose things. I forget things. I misplace things that are right in front of me. Sometimes that means that I’m missing a flag patch on my right shoulder. One other, particularly embarrassing time, it meant that I was missing my patrol cover (PC). In those brief flashes of time, no amount of excuses or clichés could save me from the fact that I was out of uniform and that it was usually painfully obvious.

To fix that – I put several redundancies in place. I’ve got three sets of PCs. One on my head, one in my car, and one at home. If I lose one on my head, I replace it from my car, and then buy a new one at the earliest opportunity. I carry an extra flag and unit patch in the pockets, under which my flag patch and unit patch respectively go. As soon as a patch comes off (it comes off with my ruck in the field, for example), I’m able to fix the problem on the spot and go about my day as normal. I have a back up set in my car and two at home (a total of 5 pairs of patches).There have been times where someone else in my training platoon lost a flag patch and I was able lend him one and he’d return it to me the next day.

Redundancies save lives, you know.

~Wald

God I Hope So

God I Hope So

I hold a lot of beliefs or thoughts. I don’t believe every belief equally. Most of them I just hold in the back of my head and compare to what I see as I experience life. A lot of the time, I don’t even pursue satisfaction of my curiosity about them because I think it’s a waste of time.

I don’t like vaccines (1, 2, 3)

I think there is such a thing as sleeping with too many women.

In my heart of hearts, I want to get married and have four children.

I think it’s possible that the earth may be flat.

I believe in the theory of r/K selection.

My life’s dream is to buy an island off the coast of Brazil.

That’s to name a few. At this point in time, I don’t really express everything I believe except to my best friend and a maybe a mentor of mine. Anyone else I’d talk to would likely call me crazy in some shape or another. The thing is – the reason I don’t talk to them, more than the fact that the conversation would go likely nowhere, is that they’d never be prepared for my response to being called crazy or a tin-foil hat conspiracy theorist.

“God…I hope so.”

~Wald

Blog Notice: Technical Difficulties

Since roughly October, my blog has had technical difficulties. Often times, I will post a comment in reply or submit a blog post and get a blank page that reads something like

“Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 268435456 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 72 bytes) in /home1/oconnete/public_html/wp-includes/wp-db.php on line 2347”

I’ve neglected to fix the issue as I neglected to post much since mid November and saw no need. Now, I plan to post regularly once more. If you comment, please copy your comment, in case my blog eats it. I’ll do what I can to fix my blog this weekend and report on Monday next week.

~Wald

Random Facts about Walderschmidt

I’ve been reading Tom Arrow’s blog, Man Without a Father for some time now. I’ve decided that I’m going to shamelessly rip-off one of his post ideas because I want to write a post, but have nothing I can publish just yet.

So here goes nothing. Random facts about myself:

1. Since I was four years old, I’ve wanted to be in the military. I’ve got a family legacy of service. My great-grandfather chased Pancho Villa across Mexico in the US Cavalry. My grandfather served in Darby’s 5th Rangers on D-Day and the rest of WW2. My father spent 27 years in the Navy as a Naval Aviator and my brother was an Officer in the Army for 8 years.

2. I’ve traveled to over 30 countries.

3. I’ve moved house 16 times, been to 10 different schools, and have lived in 4 different countries.

4. I was sent to military school in middle school at sixth grade, as I was lazy, didn’t do my homework, didn’t clean my room, and made bad grades despite doing well on tests. When I got to military school, I made straight As for three years and graduated Valedictorian of my class with an overall GPA of 96.7. The saludictorian actually made better grades than I but deliberately sabotaged himself in hopes of not even earning a GPA high enough that he’d have to speak at graduation.

5. I lived in 4 different countries.

6. I started learning German in eighth grade. I like to tell people that German was my second love, after Japanese. I had started learning about Japanese in sixth grade until I discovered German two years later and never looked back.

7. I’ve been in a boarding school situation for 11 years straight (3 years military middle school, four years of boarding school, four years of military university).

8. I’m in the military.

9. Without modern medicine and good genes, I would have died at childbirth.

10. I can play three songs on the piano by heart: Cantata 147, Moonlight Sonata, and Mad World, but I cannot read sheet music.

11. I’d had about about 6 or 7 different best friends in my life. I only really keep in touch with one at this point – and he is a thought criminal like I am. I consider him a brother; I’d give my life for him and his and I know he’d do the same for me.

12. I’m a voracious reader and always have been. I believe it started when my parents used to read me bedtime stories when I was little. When I first discovered the manosphere I read EVERYTHING. Went through the entire Roissy (now Heartiste), Roosh, and the Spearhead archives. Read all of In Mala Fide and so forth and so on. I read less now, as it seems there’s less I read that is new or different to what I’ve previously read. One of my more proud accomplishments is reading 10 years of one man‘s writing within a month.Suck on that, Hooked on Phonics!

13. I’ve spent 11 years of my life in a boarding school environment – 3 years in military middle school, 4 years in highschool, and then 4 years of military university.

14. There are times where nothing can shake my focus, save the end of the task at hand. Frustratingly, the times where I can hardly focus on anything are more frequent.

15. I’ve realized in the last year/year and a half/two years that family is probably the most important thing to me.

16. To an extent, I can talk about this stuff with my parents and my best friend and as time goes by I notice I can get away with a lot of stuff around people if I just tell them I’m not politically correct. But it’s rare that I meet someone with a open mind I can tell anything.I’m very lucky that I have the parents that I do and a best friend who’s as much of a thought criminal as I am. I almost had a girlfriend (adopted girl from Russia) who was a thought criminal too – it didn’t last – but that’s neither here nor there.

Despite this – I still feel lonely at times. That scares me a little, honestly because though I can’t imagine it, I know that guys who don’t have one or either of those surely have it worse. So I don’t talk about it, generally.

17. I credit pouring over a lot of manosphere articles with my parents circa 2010-2012 as part of the reason I never went through a phase where I was bitter towards women.

18. It’s only in the past three years that I’ve come to seriously appreciate my parents, “warts and all”, with the benefit of a grown up perspective. I’m extremely grateful that I let them both know this over a year ago, as now I live in constant fear that one of them may lose the will to cling to life at any moment. I’ll never sit alone with bottle, mad at myself for never letting them know how much I love and cherish them. I give C. M. Sturges credit for giving me advice which helped start that.

19. This blog has been discovered by one of my former girlfriends (see here for distinction of former girlfriend versus ex-girlfriend). I’ve shared it with my parents, several friends (my roommate being one of them), my best friend, and a girl and her mother; family friends who I’ve known for 14 years.

20. Though in my day to day life, few people are privy to the complete range of my thoughts and emotions, I have my moments where my life looks too bleak and a permanent sleep looks too good to pass up on. I credit my father telling me that “it’s the coward’s way out” and consequently realizing how many of my family members I’d hurt, were I to do it, for preventing me from passing before my time.

21. I once ran away from home into the woods in a fit of anger, in fourth grade. My mother was both worried and impressed because I had cleaned my room first.

22. As of 8. January this year, I’ve been writing for four years.

23. I’m the age at which my list ends.

~Wald

Writer’s Block Theme Park

tumblr_nk8hx2Bu7I1slwzpmo1_500Despite what appeared to be a good closeout to 2015 in October/November, my life’s gone back to the up-and-down roller coaster, only the highs are less high and the lows are more frequent.

This has made a profoundly negative impact on my will to write and sapped my inspiration.

The coldest comfort I have and could ever give to someone in a dark spot is that I know it will end. I just don’t know when or how.

~Wald

Poem of the Week: A Colder Winter

depressing cold

“No good deed goes unpunished, the Devil tells the sinner,

Repent all you like, enjoy a much colder winter,

 

The New Year passes by, with barely a peep,

And now it hangs over me, like a dream,

 

Sometimes as I drive, I drift in and out of sleep,

The good that thawed in me, begins again,

To freeze.”

 

~Wald