Iraq Day 21
I’m in my trailer, having just returned from the gym.
It’s Valentine’s Day, and the MWR(Morale Welfare and Recreation) ppl have made a big deal out of it.
First, there were pink frosted V-Day cakes in the DFAC at lunch and dinner. Second, V-Day cards from schoolchildren were scattered about the palace and DFAC in astonishing numbers; hundreds if not thousands of cards. Of course, none of them were addressed to me: they were all to ‘the troops’, not ‘the blood-sucking civilian contractors’, but it was a nice jesture.
Third, there’s a v-day party in the Green Been at the palace tonight, complete w/ live music (the ‘Baghdaddies’, a band of muscians with day-jobs in the Embassy; yes, it’s as bad as it sounds). However, as I have an aversion to both painfully loud music and a pressing throng of lonely and desperate men pursuing a precious few women, I have recused myself.
I’ve never been too big on V-day, so there’s no additional lonliness or despair; it’s the same low-level annoyance I always feel on a holiday which celebrates monogamous pairing to the exclusion of singles: why should I care?
The derth of women (and, even more seriously, attractive breeding-age women) and the huge volume of men of all varieties, from grisled soldiers to preening PSDs to State Department policy nerds) results in a classical economic problem of extremely limited supply and extremely high demand, in this case for the attention and affection of one or more women.
For many men here, even men who typically enjoy considerable attention from women back home, this is a difficult situation. But, for me, this is not dissimilar from the day-to-day life of a geek, particularly a strongly left-brain computer geek. I’m so accustomed to my status relative desirable women that I find the situation here in Iraq quite familiar, w/ the added amusment of a more varied selection of males to share my predicament. That said, I definitely notice the effects of reduced eye candy: I catch myself gazing longingly at women whom I would not give a second look before I arrived here.
In today’s lecture I covered .NET collection classes w/ the Iraqis. First we reviewed the FW 1.1 collections, and immediately R noticed how they break type-safety. From there I left their text behind and covered generics in C# 2.0 and the new generic collection classes in FW 2.0. They all seemed to grok generics immediately, which was remarkable considering how long it too me to get my head around templates in C++.
Tomorrow Y and E will be out, taking the TOEFL exampl. Y hopes to attend an American college, and of course the TEOFL is a prereq. R is traveling for two days, so it’ll just be A and U, so there won’t be any lectures. Pretty quiet, overall.