Get out of camp as quickly as possible

Today I managed to catch one of my superior's car to the mrt station. This is the second time I accomplished this feat ever since Ive been posted to the workshop I am currently in 2 months ago, and it is a feat because you are going to need to sprint 50 metres, climb 4 storeys, change, jump down 4 storeys, and run 150 metres to the camp gate in under 5 minutes after fallout, which is the time he would take to change and warm up his engine. The main problem I have with this is the changing part, and I realised the only way to meet the timing is to unbutton while dashing up the stairs; the 4 storeys fly-up is a killer too and we are going to need to improve on that.

Another fellow can do it faster. He hates the army more than me, and I assure you that is already a feat in itself.

Taxpayers' money

Ive got a monster for a section IC. He curses and shouts vulgarities at every single thing in his sight, including us, he orders us around like a slave overseer with his voice as a whip, he places irrational demands on us and lashes out at every fault we make (not taking out an engine in 2 hours, for a single guy, is a fault too).

Yesterday he made the 6 of us stay back to clean the entire workshop and, as we stood at attention while he railed and railed on, I wished my section commander and section commander second-in-charge were there to absorb the damage and throw it back at him. Or the fellow who's on 1 month MC. He doesn't like people shouting like that so rudely, and he would have literally shouted back there and then if he were with us. But no, all 3 meatshields weren't present last night, the 6 of us took the brunt of the damage-- one even took the brunt of a rod thrown his him--, and when he said he would talk to the big boss to cancel our offs I thought enough is enough, Im going to call HQ for an artillery strike on him. You don't bloody mess with my off-days.

Not that telling anyone else would help, really. What will happen is that HQ will listen to our case and try explaining things from his perspective. "We must understand that he is not so highly educated.." Or they would adopt a wait-and-see approach and wait and only see. At best he will get a warning letter but I doubt that's going to wipe that monster out. After all, he is an invaluable asset to them because of his experience and skill in arc-welding.

Nothing's going to change, and it will be a very miserable 8 months ahead indeed.

Last night as I was slurping up my eggs from yakun toast a guy seated beside me was saying to his friend, both of them having just arrived: " I wouldn't come here to eat this shit actually. I mean, what's so nice about it? I wouldn't bring my date to a place like this ever." How Anglo-Chinese-esque. I wanted to put down my plate and glare at him but realised I was too tired to do anything but continue eating my shitty meal.

The game ended in 2 hours

Played risk with some first-timer friends, noticed how different the game was from the usual. What they did was scatter their initial armies almost evenly across their territories, making it hard for any one side to conquer any of the major continents. The result? Hard-fighting skirmishes and attritional mini-battles everywhere on the map. Which is so much in contrast with the organised armies pouring forth from their own respective organised continents dont you think, that being the case with veteran players who concentrate their forces in 1 or 2 areas from the start. The map looked so much nicer with a riot of colors than with clearly divided compartments where the colors hardly mix.

Sometimes experience and calculations ruin everything dont you think. I dont know if this is the case elsewhere, but when my -veteran- friends and I play the scenarios we have hardly vary from game to game. Someone gets S. America. Someone gets Africa. Someone gets Australia. Some fighting happens over N. America and Europe, sometimes Asia. Here it splits down 2 tracks: 1) either N America and/or Europe are held or 2) no one can hold onto them.

Then it splits again. 1A) People reckon N America and Europe are getting too powerful and they gang against him/them. 1B) N America and Europe fight. 1C) N America fight S America or goes into Asia/ Europe fight Africa or goes into Asia.

2A) 1 or 2 players get seriously compromised in the fight for N America or Europe and no one bothers about them anymore untill they grow to a sizeable force. Meanwhile S America Africa and Australia pour forth. Eventually they will meet and fight until they are depleted and then those hitherto compromised players take advantage of the carnage. 2B) Australia grows and grows and grows and steps out to Middle East to join in the fun. People realise he's too powerful and beat him back to where he came from.

All 5 scenarios may come in any order, but chances are most of them will be played out in any game of risk. It has become too predictable and it has become stale whether you are on the winning or losing side. Whichever way the scenarios develop the game will reach a stable system where any disturbance to the equilibrium will be eventually rectified. There will be a global gridlock until someone, with the help of cards and luck, breaks through another's fortress and manage to consolidate the position. But it hardly matters because the other players are going to gang against him anyway. The only way to win in such situations is to have extreme luck on the battlefield or hope your opponents are too sleepy to bother about you. In any case I have played 6 hours in such matches and still be nowhere near a conclusion. In fact it may have reverted to a state which was uncannily similar to the state it was 10 minutes after we had started.

My first-timer friends saw things differently and the game panned out differently. In fact I thought it panned out beautifully, in large part because of its unpredictability that was derived from inexperience. Im sure, though, that as those friends play more often they would eventually realise it's more rational to concentrate and grab continents, and it's back to the 5 scenarios again.

I guess that's what they mean when they say studying the subject ruins the subject itself.

Cast in words

I have often noticed that we are inclined to endow our friends with the stability of type that literary characters acquire in the reader's mind. No matter how many times we reopen "King Lear," never shall we find the good king banging his tankard in high revelry, all woes forgotten, at a jolly reunion with all three daughters and their lapdogs. Never will Emma rally, revived by the sympathetic salts in Flaubert's father's timely tear. Whatever evolution this or that popular character has gone through between the book covers, his fate is fixed in our minds, and, similarly, we expect our friends to follow this or that logical and conventional pattern we have fixed for them. Thus X will never compose the immortal music that would clash with the secondrate symphonies he has accustomed us to. Y will never commit murder. Under no circumstances can Z ever betray us. We have it all arranged in our minds, and the less often we see a particular person the more satisfying it is to check how obediently he conforms to our notion of him every time we hear of him. Any deviation in the fates we have ordained would strike us as not only anomalous but unethical. We would prefer not to have known it at all our neighbor, the retired hot-dog stand operator, if it turns out he has just produced the greatest book of poetry his age has seen.

- Lolita, Nabokov.

Literary characters are wonderful in that they are both full and inadequate at the same time. To us they are little more than what the writer has strove to show us. Transport them to reality, however, and we find them stupidly predictable, their script, their character configuration, all fixed in black and white and nothing else. Does it follow that if we wrote an encompassing script for them, an epic, life-sized script, they would mortalize into humans, our peers, our friends? Is there anything that differentiates us from typewritten characters whom we can predict the actions of in every instance, provided you've read the script of course. Is there a master script? Or do we write our own scripts?

We must not let God or Fate ordain our lives. They dont write our lives, we write it for ourselves. We are all unethical in this respect, which is the only way to appreciate the instability of life and of life itself.

Noticed that the majority of army regulars' cars are on manual drive.

Update

Won a book voucher prize in some minor writing competition, it looks like The God Delusion for me, havent been reading non-fiction for a while. In fact havent been reading anything for a while.

I went to the prize presentation event and after hearing an excerpt from the first prize winner as well as the judge's comments I realised I havent been creative enough, which is quite a pleasant revelation because this would mean I can talk aloud in the next piece.

Last week has been good with no regulars around. I found some pleasure doing mechanical work on one side of the vehicle while talking to my partner who was on the other side, and if such sketchy contentment can be achieved while still being in the workshop doing very uninteresting stuff (how does changing the shock absorbers of a land rover sound to you?) then my hatred with the system must lie with my superiors. Or rather, lie with the concept of regimentation. Or rather more generally, lie with the concept of slavery and corruption and, above all, mind-bursting inefficiency.

This coming week would be a tough one with no breaks in sight. You have no idea how 5 days in the workshop feels like. The following week would be the reward for emerging from this testing period safely, because they've given 3 days off in conjunction with the cny break. After that and the end of february is in sight, and it would be eight more months from there, just eight more months.

There was a scuffle in the workshop with no superiors around. Why do guys like fighting so much?

The Last King of Scotland fell below expectations. It was average and I believe it got such high ratings only because of some stalwart acting by whitaker. Hotel Rwanda is still the standard to beat for films centering on Africa.

I need to have more discipline when it comes to writing. Hit rate has been pretty good, with the majority of competitve efforts yielding results in some way or the other. Efficiency too, with the last assignment yielding a rate of $25 per hour for ten hours. If I could only just find the time and energy to just sit down and do more work...but how to when all I want to do after a day at the workshop is to rest and recreate?

I see your truuuuuuuuee colors, shining through
I see your truuuuuuuuee colors, and that's why I love you
-- The next big thing on MRT stations. Catchy eh.

Babel

I lost touch with literary tragedy ever since I left junior college and put down albert camus' the plague. Babel re-established that touch while at the same time reproduced the entire notion of tragedy. Far from hyperbolically cardboard characters, dramatic scenes and grandiloquent abstractions, far even, from tears itself, the very original and staple expression of tragedy, it had 4 very realistic stories that intertwined but were each exceptional in their difficult moments.

Difficult moments there were. As a woman and her two charges stumbled in the inky darkness of a desert with nothing but a prick of torchlight illuminating their way I felt such overwhelming despair I closed my eyes and shuddered, and this was one of those few times I felt such immense relief with a positive resolution, the likes of which I would have found obscene in other contexts with all their usual improbability.

Hate the army (II)

Got 2 days mc from the camp doctor. Ain't so hard after all.

I may be weak for not gritting my teeth and pulling through these dreary days. Escapism, so it is called. Or I may be strong precisely because I want to, and am able to take control of my life.

Whichever perspective you choose to take, Im very tired, and I hate the army enough to make me feel both weak and strong at the same time.