Cheese Day/Old Maid's Day
2007-06-04 @ 11:11 p.m.

Finished reading Psycho Shop by Alfred Bester and Roger Zelazny in camp, which was a bizarre romp through the imagination of its authors. I think the action was way too compressed towards the end, and the descriptions of the fight scenes was kind of painful. Started on David Foster Wallace's Oblivion, but didn't get very far because I was interrupted to do really important things like teach NSmen. I can't believe I walked around in the rain fixing up two vehicles for their upcoming exercise. If I didn't have guard duty tomorrow, I would wish to fall deathly ill. Okay, maybe not deathly, but sick enough to warrant another MC. Heck, if I wake up tomorrow with a fever, I'm getting an MC, guard duty be damned. Actually, teaching NSmen isn't so bad, because they kind of want to get things over and done with as much as you do. It's just the whole expectation that you're supposed to provide them with all the necessary equipment that I find really ridiculous. I mean, so what if we're a training institute? It's not like we're an active battalion or anything. Our equipment is hardly in the best shape compared to other units. We joke among ourselves that it's the least serviceable stuff that gets dumped to us, because it's just for trainees so it doesn't have to work that well. It's not that much of a contradiction if you think in terms of having to deal with more faults. This way you get trained in the whole contingency plan thing, although it's always us that has to figure out the contingencies for them, working on the fly as it were. What a crummy start to the working week. It sounds so petty to complain about such things, but I can't help it if the greatest adversity I face in my life right now is dealing with the unreasonable demands made by people in camp. Everything tends to get magnified. So far, the good days have been just enough to balance things out. Being resilient is not the same as wanting to be tested to one's limits. I don't think I've ever been in danger of snapping, but I think it would be pretty ugly if I ever did. So between repression and sublimation, I say sublimation's winning for now...