The pull up issue (that women got to hang) always bothered me about the PFT. I rarely got to 20 (I could do my three mile in 18 minutes, I maxed, every single time), but I didn’t have to hang. I think I could at least manage 7-10 before tiring out. And I have zero upper body strength. It’s all in my legs. Push my…

In the weightlifting world, there’s a saying I like:

I served with an absolute fireball of a female officer, that leveled up everyone around her including the men (78 push ups in 1 min is no joke) and I’d follow her anywhere. Certainly changed my views on what constitutes a person’s limits.

Ten years ago the standads were different. Women had a lower standard. Here is the PT requirements for the Army. I can do 13 pushups (all the way down and back up) in my sleep and I am DEFINITELY out of shape. It play a social normalizing role in why people believed women couldn’t handle combat. The requirements set a…

Obviously not every man could do this.

There’s nothing really to give it scale. My brain looks at it and assumes normal 8 foot ceiling and its just a scale model. Its hard to look at the pictures and think “ that ceiling is the height of a 6 story building. That the wingspan is the same as a 737, that its the same as a small stadium, just enclosed.” I’d…

Plenty of men can’t either. I know lots of men who struggled with basic PT standards. When you have so few women even joining up, it’s really unfair to compare. Until we have enough women in the services to even make a comparison, trying to find a minority within a minority within a minority as you’re suggesting is…

I firmly believe that any women who can stand up to the same exact standards should be allowed on the team. I just think that is going to be a relatively small percentage at the absolute top level like the rangers.

I never met a woman in the service who wanted lower standards. Both the Navy and the Marine Corps had them, and I knew plenty of women who got by with those lower standards, but the women didn’t feel good about it. I knew plenty of woman who really wanted to pass male PT standards if they could, and tried hard to do…

I wonder how many people went insane while they were installing these little foam pyramids?

Actually, they aren’t just foam. They are impregnated with a ferrite material. They are decently expensive to replace. They are pretty brittle too, so they won’t just deform the way you are thinking a memory foam mattress will.

where words mean the opposite of themselves

My parents did this until probably around the time I started actually trying things and eating a lot of different things. Then they started to let me have something else when I wanted, especially when they were having fish, which I never liked unless it was breaded and deep fried (the texture is weird normally). As a…

To get an idea about how big the chamber is at Pax, the Triton has the wingspan of a 737.

While I’ve never threatened to order pizza when someone else has cooked a whole meal, it’s understood that sometimes, I have to ruin my appetite to keep from passing out. I try to just snack, but when an attack is coming on, my body is all FOOD NOW.

Normally my parents are great customers, generous tippers, etc. But one Mother’s Day, I think my mother took some crazy pills with her coffee, because she bitched about everything that our waiter did in the very, very crowded restaurant we were at to celebrate. Granted, yes, the service was slow (food/drinks took…

I seriously did the “dog hearing a high pitched noise” head tilt at this story. If a member of my party acted like this I would be so completely mortified that there is no way I wouldn’t say something. Hiding out to give a tip afterwards is cowardly (probably because this poor guy is treated like this at home and is…

My husband and I were having dinner with two of his cousins and their spouses. We don’t see them very often so we had no idea that one of their husbands was a total asshole. When the check came, we quickly divided the check by the number of people, which was fine with everyone because we’d eaten family style.

We avoid eating with certain people in the family because they’re embarrassing. Don’t piss on people serving you.