Labral Pains

What's up world? Thank God it's Monday, right? Last week before Spring Break. That's pretty nice when you disregard the fact I'm not fucking going anywhere for the first time in like literally six years. It's unfortunate but with this surgery bullshit I gotta deal with I guess I'm glad I'm not wasting a trip over it.

Wow I just got side-tracked from blogging and spent a half hour doing flight commander shit. Now I'm not really in the mood to blog. I hate it when that happens.

One of the benefits of having a really painful surgery and being a crippled little asshole walking around in a $120 sling all day is that I get pain killers. I mean I pretty much have a bottomless orange prescription bottle of oxycodone; if I do get to the bottom of it, which happens occasionally, I just shoot an email to Nurse Sandy and within a few hours she hooks me up with more drugs. It's pretty nice. I've kind of been using them every other day so I'm able to shit more than once a week and to keep me from getting a tolerance and then getting addicted and then having to inevitably go through the hell of weening myself off. I've heard oxycodone withdrawal is like the nastiest shit you could go through so I'm really trying to avoid it. But what sucks is I try my best to keep my oxy intake on the low end, and then I think "oh cool my shoulder doesn't hurt anymore I could totally just not take any and be fine." And at first it's totally cool, but sooner or later my shoulder decides to throw a fucking temper tantrum and if I'm not within a minutes reach of my meds then I have to spend more time than I'd like to dealing with the nerves in my labrum kicking over chairs and shit.

I assure you, however, it's all good. I'm pretty good at covering up everything and going about as my normal charismatic self. The true bullshit of having surgery in the middle of the semester is having to catch up on two weeks worth of engineering classes. That type of bullshit can't be muted by getting high on narcotics. In fact, while getting high off narcotics is a nice euphoric little escape from it all, it really makes learning quantum mechanics quite a bit more difficult than it already is. I mean I've been back for a week and I'm still fairly behind. Of course it's not like I'll be far from my textbooks over Spring Break so it all evens out.

Oh by the way in the past few days I've made a nice chunk of change in my trading. I really like making money. The Wolf of Wall Street sums it up nicely in the opening monologue of the movie by blatantly admitting the most addicting drug of them all is money. The only difference of course is there's no hangover or withdrawal, until you lose it, so as long as you keep making more and more of it your joyride continues. Oh I just thought of a nice little side story to write about.

So last semester I made sure I was the first POC of the academic year to give the "Every Cadet has a Story" brief. The "Every Cadet has a Story" idea is that if you put a sharp POC in front of the entire wing and have him speak about what drives him, all of the young little GMC (who are always finding role models to look up to) will get motivated. In fact depending on what the POC speaks about, a few cadets will personally relate and hopefully be inspired. By doing these "Every Cadet has a Story" briefings occasionally, it gives over-confident upperclassman an outlet, and over time each underclassmen will have someone to look up to and as a side effect they try harder and get a lot more out of their training.

By doing the first personal brief of the year, I hoped to capture the imagination of the 100 class early on when they're at maximum naivete. As for my actually presentation, I spoke for a full five minutes about how fucking awesome I am. I talked about the flying, the travel, money; I threw the fuck down on the 290th Cadet Wing with all I had. It seemed pretty certain that I touched at least one young mind, which was enough for me.

So in my briefing I talked about stocks, how I love money and have a knack for analyzing so why not try to become a millionaire? As it turns out, I inspired a senior to get in the market. He asked me right after the brief, "So you actually own stocks? And like, make money?" To my delight I told him all of my successes and that I taught myself everything I needed to know.

Well, several months later he pulled me aside again. He told me he's been looking into it, and the way I talked about it in my presentation just kind of got him into it. So he took my advice and did some reading, set aside some coin, and opened up an account for trading. So far it sounds like he's making some profit too! Good for him, right!? Of course when he makes a profit it's almost laughable to me, "Dude I made like $30! By doing nothing! That's awesome!" while I'm over here tossing around hundreds of thousands of shares. Oh wow, thirty dollars, is that before tax? Either way that's enough to eat at Applebee's!

I shouldn't laugh; I remember when I invested $80 in a bankrupt American Airlines and to my amusement I turned it into like a whole 130 dollars. But that's how rich people get there, you gotta start somewhere. Hundred dollar trades turn into several hundred dollar trades which turns into an order for $500. And then it really scary because you're just like holy shit I might lose $500, but then after a stressful few weeks or months you execute a sell worth like $750 and shit gets real.

Despite the profit not even covering rent, seeing such a big number in green letters is what fuels the addiction. At this point you've accumulated enough off of those little hundred buck gains, you consider it safe to throw a grand, then two grand, or whatever is necessary to get quadruple digit returns. The snowball continues to grow as long as you keep selling higher than you buy and this is supposedly how rich people are made.

Anyway, that senior I inspired is currently in the "cool I made thirty dollars" phase which I think is adorable. And a few weeks after he started playing the market another POC came to me for some initial advice. He was all like "Yo Decks I heard you are the person to talk to when it comes to stocks" and I was all like "What do ya wanna know?"

So once again I'm setting the trend, it's just this time it might lose my friends a lot of money. I've kind of become a guru in ROTC as far as stocks are concerned, and once Hundley makes a single profit and gets all excited and tells everyone he knows about making $30 before tax I'll probably get another pupil to show the ropes.

Anyway I think I spat out of enough assorted shit for you to read. Enjoy your Spring Break, I'll be at home. Hopefully whoever's reading this has some better plans. Until next time...