Day -1: A Really Long Drive

Made it safely to Atlanta after a long....long....long drive. I know some of y'all probably have driven much farther in one day but that was the longest I have driven by myself ever. I think in total it was a little over 850 miles. I took a little detour through Biloxi/Gulfport to see the beaches of Mississippi. It was quite strange. It was dark murky water like Galveston, but had bright white sand that looked as soft as a cloud. I think I have heard that the reason the water in Galveston is so dark and murky is because all of the mud comes from the mississippi river and flows south, so I am guessing that Gulfport is where the water exits out.

Other than a nice little beach detour nothing was really special about the trip. If you have driven on IH-10 for any period of time going East you become very friendly with the great American lawyers Gordan Mckernon and Morris Bart. Gordon even becomes self-aware at one point when you see billboards with pictures of his billboards on the billboards. It's great. It drives you somewhat insane and you start begging for at least one billboard of Jim Adler the Texas Hammer.

When I was driving out of Houston I saw a sign for a turnaround point. It was just a yellow sign with the words turnaround. I had a quick Spiritual moment about whether or not I should turn around and head home. So I asked God, "is this a sign?" And I laughed.

I tried listening to some theological lectures on the way up and started getting sleepy and dozing off at the wheel. I stayed up really late packing so it was very easy to lull me on a long drive. So I turned to some podcasts to keep me awake and listened to a podcast on Casey Anthony (she was totally guilty) and one on UFO sightings. Those pretty much kept me interested and focused the whole way to Atlanta. I guess you can see the things that interest me most.

The plan is to leave early tomorrow cause I still got a couple of hours of driving to do and I want to have plenty of time to check in and get settled in at my lodging before I need to report to the Chaplain School. The cool thing about driving is that I get to bring as much stuff as I want without worrying about paying for luggage fees like on a plane. So I'll be living in the lap of luxury, which basically means I brought a coffee maker with a ton of coffee, an extra monitor for doing assignments on in my room, and my Nintendo Switch for if I ever have any time to play it.

Took a really basic Emotional Intelligence survey that the Emotional Intelligence 2.0 book recommended I take. Based on my results I have strong social competence that I have room to build on, but I have weak personal competence and I need to work a lot on it. It makes sense to me but I am pretty skeptical usually of self-examining tests. Let me know if you agree with this I guess if you know me.

Random Lesson Learned today: The way your brain operates, you always will process information with your emotions first and ration second. Your ability to recognize this and master control of your responses to things knowing you naturally respond emotionally to things before rationally is the basis for your Emotional Intelligence.