You know how you can be doing something and rephrasing it in your mind thinking "wow, what a great blog post this would make!" and then you sit down in front of the computer and just can't put it out, for some reason?

Yeah, I'm having that now.

Suffice to say that if I had to sum up two days at mechanic training in one word, it would be "yawn".

Two weeks from now, it would be "shit".

Two months from now, it would be "almost".

Three months from now, it would be "Charged".

Seriously, putting me in charge of anything remotely technological is a mistake. Ecspecially a vehicle that carries people around.

As it turns out, I have been posted to a unit I know next to nothing about! But then again, cleulessness is part of the fun, and when people tell you that OETI stands for Only Eat, Talk, Idle, I don't really think I'm in a position to complain, ecspecially since other people get stay-in units with -gasp- actual physical training.

On a darker note, it seems I'll be having to work with vehicles, probably big ones. As someone who's had multiple bad experiences with vehicles, it's not exactly something I relish. Lazing around seems to be the activity of choice anyway. Unless, of course, the army has secretly been hoarding Gundams and transformerbots and are looking for unfit people to pilot them.

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At some point in every person's life, he finds himself on the warrior's path, being faced with the unthinkable. And it is at this point where he finds himself faced with painful choices to make, forced to tiptoe along the line that separates what is technically, or morally, right or wrong. Cliched as it may be, we live in grey world, where around every corner there could await an unspeakable act of injustice or violence that threatens to twist your life. And it is the choices made, when faced with the unthinkable, when one wrong move could mean that your world became so dark, and so compromised, that every hope of happiness or solace would be gone. To put things into perspective, some people turn to crime as a way of getting back at the world that has been so cruel to them, while others with similar origins struggle to live their lives with nobility and grace, eventually working their way up the rungs of life.

In my search for the greatest influence of my life, these words from my father stood out from the rest, and it is these words that I know I can live by and hold my life up to, and it has served me well : That I am my own influence, because only I, not my family or my friends, know truly what I want and what would make me happy.

Ironically, with those very same words, my father was influencing me as well.

Well. It looks like I can forget about getting into NTU communications now.

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In an unexpected turn of events, yours truly has been called down for an actual interview. Apart from the hassle that is my first meaningful action of my unit life being asking for leave, I am absolutely terrified, believe it or not. I'm not very akin to people trying to probe my mind through the orifice known as my anus, and it's probably even more uncomfortable when we do it in groups. I don't even think they look at the application forms past the name, just call everyone in and chiong.

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Coming soon : The end of my university hopes, and the start of my mechanical life!

I'm sure many of you have noticed this before, but people like to ask redundant questions. Some of the questions you heard before are "can you hear me?" , "Do you speak English?" and "Are you still alive?" In case you haven't yet realised, the common trend lies in the fact that if the answer to any of these questions was "no", then the guy wouldn't have been able to answer anyway. The problem then arises when the asking party decides to go by the "silence means yes" rule, and for some reason the chao recruit, er, answering party is then at fault for believing that the sergean- I mean, asking party was spouting random nonsense like the other 90% of the time. It isn't immediately obvious, but people ask stupid questions all the time.

I mean, why are there even surveys asking people for their ideal salary? To make them feel worse about their lives?







And then, there are questions that people ask without really wanting to know the answer. Temptation is the ultimate weapon, and to follow that, curiosity kills the cat. Curiosity doesn't care if the cat has nine lives. Just ask the guy who complied when his wife asked him to "Just give me(her) the truth. I promise I(she) won't get angry."

You'd realise that the people most likely to ask questions like these are girls. Girls will at some point of time ask their boyfriends about their past relationships, first with an adoring glint in their eye. At this point, it would benefit the guy to keep the conversation as short as possible, because that little glint, when stoked with stories, will turn into an inferno. People can be silly like that sometimes.

This is also why ignorance is bliss.




Ah, yes. Rhetorical questions. Questions not meant to be answered. While it does come with a certain amount of required wit to come up with one, it does cheat the natural balance of nature. Just like rules are made to be broken, questions are made to be answered, the loophole being if you're setting an exam paper. And even then there'll be some smartass who will answer it anyway. The strange thing is, when the guy who can't tell it's a rhetorical question gets called an idiot for not recognising it as such, the asker is in fact the idiot for asking a question that didn't want an answer.

People are such idiots sometimes. Me included.

Humans are typically creatures of comfort. To go through one's entire life in cruise control, doing everything at a speed of choice, would be the idle ideal of most people. See, most of the time, comfort equals control, and people like being in control. This isn't to say that the average generic person is a control freak ; Rather, he is one by necessity, because the alternative is not being in control, which basically means you're helpless.

It's actually rather apparent ; While it's widely acknowledged as a necessary evil, nobody likes trying things for the first time that he or she or it does not think he has a natural aptitude for. Ask me to live in a bunk with eleven other guys for seven weeks, and handle weapons of mass destruction along the way without injuring any of them, no matter how much I feel like it, and I'll grumble, grouch and whine about it till your ears decide to elope to a faraway land.

Nobody likes venturing outside their comfort zone. So what happens when they're forced to do so? Some people go after it with a vengeance, some curl up in a corner and refuse to do anything, some reach out for help. Yet, some people, in rather oxymoronic fashion, are comfortable outside their comfort zone. While the ability to adapt quickly may be all fine and dandy, the sad fact of life is that people learn to adapt, and in the long run, everyone's pretty much the same damn grain of sand. Most uni grads end up doing stuff outside their field, not by choice. But they just go on with their lives and get used to it.

On a side note, scholarship forms are a bitch.

It's over.

It's amazing, but I have absolute nothing to say about the army. I could regale all three of my blog readers with stories of how I miraculously avoided having my asshole decimated by some rather fruity recruits in a neighbouring bunk, how we have a 25-year-old with all the maturity and intelligence of a five-year-old and about half as much common sense, or how I didn't know we were shooting live rounds at the range till the end of the day, but the army has to be looked at as a holistic experience, rather than a string of isolated incidents.

Somehow, though, you just have to look at things that happen and curse under your breath.

Like how it almost never rains at Pulau Tekong, only to have it rain continously for two days at field camp. Lucky for me I didn't have to sleep in the disaster masquerading as a tent I built. I don't think tents are supposed to act as emergency water basins, right?

Or how the only other time it rained heavily was on POP day. How embarassing for the poor guys in the parade square. I mean, I don't want my parents coming to see their son as a speck in the crowd, or a stalk in a broccoli. Running and screaming randomly doesn't exactly help matters either.

I don't think I'll ever forget about BMT, even if it was like a holiday camp without any highly-vaunted trials by fire. Besides, I'll only get to be a caho recruit once in my life.

I wonder where I'll be posted to next.

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On a somewhat unrelated note, I am still unable to reach a veritable conclusion at my A level results. As it turns out, I'm not the artsy-fartsy Terry-Pratchett-understudy I thought I was. Hmmm.

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With every end comes a new beginning.

But with every new beginning, it means something has ended.

It's amazing how time passes so quickly.

It just seems like yesterday that I was wondering how many pieces my exam papers would be in after the Cambridge markers were done tearing through them with their red pens of inevitable doom.

It also seems like just yesterday that I was still working at a bakery, contemplating baking as a permanent job.

It also seems like just yesterday when I had to sweep my fringe away from my face just so I wouldn't get spaghetti in my hair, and could wake up only after everyone else had eaten their lunch.

It makes me unsure if time really does pass that quickly, or that time is really an illusion. As time passes, more memories get packed into our brain. As a result, these memories start to occupy a smaller and smaller proportion of whatever part of our brain stores memories. And the more memories you have, the faster time seems to pass. It's only because our brain only remembers the most impactful memories, and as people we tend to have very little of them, that makes our lives seem really short. I mean, in no time we'll all be old and spotty and still clinging on to these few memories that we have. And it is these few memories that really end up defining our existence as we know it.

Life is meaningless, yes?

I have no idea what to say. It's not that my results are bad, they're just.......Silly.

It should've been better.

Almost there, never there.

Story of my life.

Field camp was kind of weird.

I mean, I built a tent which I didn't sleep in. 5 weeks in Tekong and it doesn't rain, and when it does it has to be during field camp.

And, well, we kind of reminded ourselves why we're PES C in the first place. When you hear more "IA IA!" than gunshots you know something's wrong.

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Hmmm, A level results. I don't really have anything to say that anybody else hasn't, other than that signing on might actually be a viable option after I get it, right up there with suicide and getting myself imprisoned for free meals.

Hmmm, free meals.