Sing Out Day/International Goof Off Day/Roller Coaster Day/World Water Day
2006-03-22 @ 9:02 p.m.

My amount of free time is crazy! I've been free since dinner, which was just under three hours ago. If I told this to the guys in command school, they'd be green with envy. The only thing irritating me now is a nagging ENT infection. It developed on over the weekend, but I think I'm taking a turn for the better now after some sleep. Even the PT here is way more relaxed. I thought Raven was quite slack about that, but now I've seen 5BX that ends after warming up. The only way to describe the prevailing mood in Stagmont is educated. That's actually a word that one of my instructors used today. That he wasn't exactly highly educated himself was an irony no doubt lost on a good deal of the platoon. Anyway, signals is a vocation that requires education, no way around it. Keeping my fingers crossed that I won't get this weekend's guard duty. We have to do it a certain number of times each month, so there's really no escaping it. I just don't want to do it on my first weekend! I probably should use some of my free time in here to do some writing, which is what Wilson's been doing. He's more of a prose writer, which I admire because I think it takes a lot of patience to do prose. These days, you can get away with almost anything in poetry. It's just a matter of whether anyone realises you're actually producing bad work. Is it cheating if you cannibalise your own work? I sometimes do that, recycling phrases because I like them but can't fit them into that single poem that will convey what's in my head. Writing is difficult. Communicating is difficult. Simultaneously doing both well is the Holy Grail of creative writing.