Can't teach an old dog new tricks

What is it about the generation that's about the 70-80 year range that is so....Infuriating?
Sure I've been through the whole, 'when I was your age we had to walk to and from school in the snow with no shoes, up hill both ways.'

My step father is probably a classic example of the extreme kind of this, he's always got to be right, has to know what's going on, critical of everyone and there isn't anything you've done that not only has he already done but under worse conditions.

He grew up in a logging camp, so he's been conditioned from birth to raise with the sun, so now he's a morning person, and if you aren't something is wrong with you. Everything he brings up the "I love my mornings" I know he's trying to take a jab at me.

I'm a night owl, always have been, probably always will be, a lot of it has to do with my light sensitive eyes. I see considerably better at night then most people, which I hate driving at night in the rain, my eyes catch so much glare. Doesn't help matters any that in the Army, we did everything at night, nor my last job that we worked very often before the sun came up or just as the sun was setting.

I know he's made comments to my mother to the fact of my reluctance to go hunting anymore. I am by far from a vegetarian, but I'm to a stage in life that the prospect of killing no longer appeals to me. I get the feeling that he's enjoyment of hunting isn't so much getting meat as it is the power of taking a life.

I won't bother explaining why I won't to him, he won't understand, nor will he try to understand. He's made up his mind and that's that. When you've trained to be a sentry stalker, one of the many duties I undertook, you get very up close and personal with taking life. What's really bugged me the most is not what I trained to do, but what knowledge I corrupted to become better and more efficient.

I joke very often that I knew how to deliver a baby way before I knew how to conceive one, I'd spend a good deal of time growing up reading and studying my father's EMT manuals. Between the knowledge of first aid and the human anatomy, combined with my training putting my emotions behind a wall, I was extremely efficient about that job. Efficient enough that I was given two nick names, "Ghost" because of my uncanny ability to seemingly appear or disappear without a sound and "Alaskan assassin" because I was so effective at the job and was from Alaska.

You can't unsharpen a knife and I dislike the similarity of stalking a deer and stalking a sentry. Not that I'm a powder keg waiting to go off, by no means, just that there's just some things in life that you shouldn't become too proficient at doing.

I wouldn't trade the experience nor time in the Army for anything, but I definitely wouldn't want to do through all of that again. You definitely learn to appreciate a whole lot more afterwards.