#ToTheGirls, Month of the Military Child, and #Tableflip2015

#ToTheGirls is trending on Twitter, and it's wonderful.

April is the Month of the Military Child, and I keep thinking about the connections between how I grew up with the US Air Force, and moving here, outside an active Army base.

There's a book, Military Brats: Legacies of Childhood Inside the Fortress, first published in 1991. Excerpts are available on Google Books. The parts I have read, she seems to be writing about an earlier generation of Brat, perhaps my parent's time, and yet there are many aspects of Brat culture that were still in place when I was growing up. Still, chapter 4: "Daughters of Warriors," hit home.

"In fact, to be a daughter inside the Fortress is to be a kind of hovering spook: a weightless creature without power, without presence, without context, whose color is camouflage and whose voice is unheard."

The world is changing. There are many more women in the U.S. Armed Forces today. Just last year, Admiral Michelle Howard was promoted to 4-star Admiral. This interview from Forbes is worth reading.

Change, like gardening, takes time. When we left Omaha for small-town Indiana, there were aspects that felt like we were going back ~10-20 years into the past. Not really, because it's still the same world, TV shows are on the same schedule, the news is the same. But in attitudes, in perspectives. This is why the Futurist perspective, "The future is multiple" makes so much sense to me. Old technologies rarely disappear, they usually are handed down to and/or continue to be used by the poor.

When I shared resources about NASA culture, I linked to a Science Friday podcast, that said (paraphrasing) "When you leave Marshall Space Flight Center, and get out of Huntsville, you are in Alabama." 

Huntsville is not the small town like we lived in, in rural Indiana. Huntsville's population is slightly larger than South Bend.

Madonna, in "What It Feels Like For A Girl", wrote the message we women are often given:

"When you're trying hard to be your best
Could you be a little less"

That's what I'm hearing from some corners of my job search. Disbelief that I've done the things I've done. Nearly three years ago, I wrote:

"Boys and girls can be anything they want to be.  Even everything they want to be, though usually not all at once."

Most of the locations I've lived in, turned out to have something uniquely special to teach. Apparently Huntsville, just two hours south of Nashville, is teaching me more about music, voice.

In Houston, it was martial arts. I mean, I had started Tae Kwon Do in St. Louis. Practiced Shotokan Karate for a year at Purdue. I moved too much to stick with a single art, until I found Kuk Sool Won in Houston. (There actually was a club at Purdue while I was there, but I didn't get involved with it then.)

I started in May of 2003, so this was February 2004:

December 2004:

2004 or 2005. For a while, several of us drove down to Galveston early Sunday morning to practice on the beach. Between graduate school and my regular training, ~6:30 Sunday morning was the only time I could fit more practice into my schedule.

My husband and I went with the Association to South Korea in 2005, to see the sights and compete in the World Tournament there.

This is Haeundae beach.

Part of the tour included an overnight at Baek Dam-Sa Temple, where an American-born monk told us a little about Seon Buddhism. Early in the morning, we did some walking meditation, and then we left the next day.

This is labeled as an April 2006 dojang picnic. I think we must have had a Texas Tournament after the World Tournament.

This is from October 2006, which may be another World Tournament.

This is from the St. Louis Tournament in 2009. We traveled from Huntsville to compete. I broke some boards, and earned the silver medal.

I worked hard, trained hard, in order to stand up for what I believe in, and to speak up when necessary. Sometimes I feel like Huntsville asks me to "be a little less" than who I am. I'd much prefer to be in a place that appreciates who I am, that values and makes use of what I have to offer. Which also feeds into my entrepreneurial research (consider tableflip.club).