Mmmarines.

It's official: I find our United States Marines seriously attractive.

The Friendship and I just spent the day with two of them currently "at liberty" for a week in Southern California. Mmm. We lay out on the beach, swam in the waves, got dinner on the boardwalk, took the ferry to Balboa Island and back, and ate Oreo ice cream at the beach house while listening to their cool stories about military strategy and training. It was surreal- I never pictured my friends and I hanging out with actual members of the Marine corps. It seems so entirely...grown up. We also got to learn some tricks of the trade; for example, I learned that when one enters a house to kill people, one should shoot them twice in the chest and once in the head, in that order. It's not like that'll come in handy anytime soon, but it was fascinating to talk and play with the two strong nineteen-year-olds: people my age on track to war.