My Manifesto: The Incoherent Ramblings of a Madman

My friend Michelle is in Iraq in the middle of a war at peace time, she writes in her on-line journal sometimes - either she's losing her mind, or the entire military is:

let's see. oh yah another weird thing since I've gotten back. the toilets. the outhouses. somebody has this weird sick hobby ... somebody moves them every night. or at least they were up until two nights ago. yes, since I got back in july, every night, the outhouses all over the compound were moved around
sometimes a row of 15 outhouses would just vanish into thin air, leaving no trace of their existence except for the ominous blue sand & gravel blowing & kicking around the area. then the next day they would be back like they never left
sometimes they wouldn't be moved, they'd just be switched around. they are all different colors; sometimes mr toiletfetish would just swap the orange one and the blue one in the same row, just to mess with us. because everybody knows (who has been in a situation where you have to rely on outhouses or public style bathrooms, equipped with many stalls) that a person becomes territorial over "their" toilet. they always run to their "favorite" toilet first, and then, only if it's occupied, will they give notice to the others. when that toilet is changed or dissapears, it can be taken as a personal affrontation - "somebody has jacked MY toilet!!!" the one that would get me though, is when the whole row of outhouses just outside my part of the building would just randomly dissapear at say ... 10 or 11 pm ... obviously, when nobody was outside to catch them ... and then, just as suddenly, and again, with nobody there to see it, they re-appear at about 4am. 4am is the time given in most ufo sightings (and heart attacks, coincidentally). I don't think that the oddity of the situation was lost on too many others, as many Outhouse Dissapearance related jokes have circulated the gamut, and one day, we even awoke to find flyers taped to all of the outhouses depicting a red "no" circle enclosing a n image of a flying saucer lifting an outhouse in it's tractor beam. Finally, yesterday, somebody went and numbered every outhouse on the compound in english and arabic. they are numbered sequentially in each location (with a continuation between locations). for two days, they have stayed put. apparently, now that they realise that they have an address, and are supposed to stay put, the outhouses have lost their urge to wander around without supervision. riiiiight. we're all waiting to see how long before they move again. the numbers look nice to a distorted military view of the world, but in keeping with that distorted military view of the world, form and function are not shaking hands.

and I almost forgot. another thing that I've done to pass time is to look up all kinds of gerbil related information on the web. why gerbils? because some of the mice here look suspiciously like gerbils, and make me miss the one I had when I was little. so far, I've learned that you should never keep 3 or more female gerbils together, and that rarely can you keep 2 femalese together, and then it's only if they have been together since birth. you can put two males together, sometimes three, but it's not reccomended to put more than that together in any case. you can also keep a male and female together, even if there are newborn pups in the cage. gerbils are like swans - they prefer monogamy. also, the male helps rear the pups and it's good to have him there, on the other side though, gerbils will mate again as soon as a litter is born (though gestation will be delayed until the current litter has been weaned). gestation is 23 days. gerbils like to run, jump, climb, chew things, and take dust baths. they sleep for a couple hours, then they play for two hours, rotate. there are some simple tricks you can teach them. I like rodents. I am also brain dead from this hot summer sun. argh.

I need sleep
I'm going to dream of home, mark, my family, capone, gerbils (someday I will have my own office, and among other things in it, there WILL be a cage with a set of gerbils in it!), and so on and so forth.

Hmm - I agree with her on the sleep part - but she can keep her husband mark, and gerbils for herself.