Uniforms

This is a pretty funny video if you actually can take the vulgarities

it gets me (shocked, surprised, empathetic, disgraced, pissed) when I see the that troops of other countries get to do stupid things like that and nobody gives them any flak for it. i mean we are all people, just because a guy is in his uniform doing stupid things, doesnt make everyone wearing uniforms a retard.

and while sometimes the things that SAF people do are actually pretty stupid, there are times when it actually gets funny and yet we still treat them with the incredulity (i don't even know what that word means) of a kid.

and then there will always be some joker in the background asking, why is there a camera around when there shouldn't be any cameras in camp in the first place.

I do sincerely and humbly ask for and wish that our people grow up a little, and then maybe, just maybe the Saf guys can grow up a little more and maybe do things that are actually funny, in uniform.

You don't deserve to know what happened to her

You dont deserve to know what happens
Its times like these that make me wonder if it is or ever was a good idea to make friends.
I wonder how many of my friends are willing to be honest with me. And if those who are not should i consider them my friends at all. I think i have the maturity of a fifteen year old when it comes to times like this. Like people treating you as if youre just a small kid and dont deserve to know anything. I getthat sometimes people may be guarded and they dont want to share secrets. But i seem to have friends that believe im retarded. And that i cant handle information. You know that feeling sucks.
I understand that most of the time i dont give a shit about whatever goes on with people that are two social connections away from me. But when your own friends withold information from you. Its time to think about why you consider them friends.
I used to think that i have friends because there are people i care about. People i would switch places with in an accident, in a heartbeat. i would jump in front of a train if it meant i could save them. But i found out that its hard to care for somene when you dont know anything about what goes on in their lives. Surprisingly its because you care about them. That you give a damn about their mundane details of their humdrum lives. I would never in a million years thought that not knowing about what happened to my friends when im not around would affect me ths much. But apparently it does. And its pissing me off.

I hate knowing the feeling that somebody's attitude changed and i don't know why or what happened to cause that change. I hate knowing that if it ever came to something drastic that might or might not happen and i would attend the funeral and when his parents or family ask me what happened i can't answer them.

Maybe im the asshole here. Maybe im not doing enough to find out about my friends. But how do you get more information when nobody seems willing to part with it.
Fuck tt shit.

Maybe this is all the alcohol talking but i dont feel any level of high before. Ever. Not once.

I wonder if alchol makes you more pissed.

I think smoking changes the mindset of people. People start changing theirworldview that they have somehow become bad and that the way they perceive things changes. That they start to separate people into different groups where they always appear to be agreeing with wrong people. Or maybe its the other way around. Tt they start thinking of themselves as bad or rotten apples and tts why they do the shit tt they do. I think those who actually feel guilty about what they do still have some chance of recovering from this unconscious segregation of the society around them.

Because at the end of the day, would you be able to sleep soundly at night is all that matters

Financial Planning

So I had this existential crisis in the middle of a financial planning talk yesterday. For those of you who don't know what that is, it's essentially asking yourself why are you here but in a much more panicked manner, probably hyperventilating if you're into that sort of thing.

Here's the progression of events.

We go for a talk about the importance of financial planning and why we should start early. He starts going on about the costs of living such as the most obvious for us which is to further our studies. Then he talks about getting married and owning a car vs public transportation. Nothing really peaks my interest except that its quite refreshing to see actual numbers on things that always seem to be just vague concepts. Then he goes on to talk about retirement. That's when the shit hit the fan. He talks about his past clients wanting and thinking they are able to switch lifestyles dramatically after retiring like giving up a car. He also talks about how much it takes to live from 65 to 83, i cant remember exactly what numbers he used, but it was precisely the point where he said the age in exact numbers that i start thinking that i actually planned to live til 40 and give my money to whomever was still living. Then i started thinking about dying. And whether or not it was just like a long blackout like sleeping or it was more like going to hell or heaven or whatever. I actually pictured the chinese version of afterlife which was a bit strange but i imagined drinking that cup of teat and reincarnating into a kid all over again after living through so much. I wondered if my interests and viewpoints in that new life would be similar. I also wondered if i would live halfway across the world from where i was. Then it got a little overwhelming and i hyperventilated a little. Just a little.

It was a little strange to think about dying so nonchalantly. I think it simply means that there is nothing to live for. Or rather i havent found somethign worth living for yet. Maybe i will someday in the future. Who knows. But i know now. My grasp on my life and my future doesnt extend beyond year 40.

30 70

my throat's pretty fucked up.

been quite sometime since an actual update on my life. so here it is.

3 weeks ago I went on AOAC Full Troop support. If you were an outsider looking in, you could think of this as a few trainees using a batalion as real live practice on the ground. Chess pieces if you will. If you were an actual soldier on the ground, you could call this

a normal batalion exercise with a shitload more old guys with heavy ranks looking down on you and tsking loudly. they also tend to talk loudly, at us.

I can't remember much about it, except that my vehicle was down for the first half of the day and then being the enemy forces for the rest of the exercise. my troopers were pretty irritated with the fact that they have to be enemies, again.

then came 2 weeks of rest/prepping for the next exercise. that passed pretty quickly, because on one of those weeks i had to fly back to Penang for a funeral. oh i forgot to mention, my grandma died.

It was quite surreal for me, because she cared about me more than all my other related by blood grandparents. She lived with my family once and she would always asked if i ate my lunch or what i did that day. and yet i didn't feel sad that she left. i didn't cry, id didn't even whimper. i'm not sure if its' because i've went to too many funerals, or that i'm actually genuinely relieved that she left in peace. Still, there are a few problems in the family area that my mum and her family is trying to resolve and she won't tell me about any of it.

So i came back, and it was exercise time. this time, it's a pre-assessment exercise to see how deep in the shit hole your batalion is. and boy is my hole deep. that didn't come out right.

to cut it short, we had an umpire who pretty much has no clue on how artillery works, and pretty friggin stringent on what armor is supposed to do, which we had no training on whatsoever. So, in reality we were being tested on what we didn't know and what we actually knew was not being tested.

and my pc is pretty much dying from all the extra work he has to do, which is i don't know what exactly.

anyway, our performance is bad enough to warrant a re-shuffling of the commanders. in other words, we need to switch around the roles and responsibilities of some of us, because it's simply not working.

So i became the new detachment commander of Det 6. my pc and ps refuses to call it upgrading or demoting, but whatever. Don't make this into any problem, my ps says. thanks for the pre-warning.

anyway, i heard from him that, the initial reaction from the announcement was quite big from my det, so of course i got worried. and then the vehicle ic and my other spec junrong also told me that the driver remains very stubborn to "accepting" me as a commander, because he, along with pretty much everyone else likes to pull up my old first time impressions. which if you've been anywhere close to me in the past 15 years would know, that it sucks.

so i had to get my det down and explain a few things and find out a bit about their SOP (standard operating procedure). i also needed to in a sense bring down their expectations of me, not only as a detachment commander but also as their leader. because our platoon functions in such a way that during component training we seldomly interact with others, so we have very limited ideas on how others work, which i personally find a bit disappointing. so i needed to tell them 2 things, which was that at times they may see me as a bit of "trainee mode" which is because i'm trying to catch up with the det comd things and also managing people from another point of view. I also needed to explain my working style and my (especially important) tone of voice. i needed to tell them i was straight forward and i said things that were on my mind without beating around the bush, which was different from the way they worked in the past. i also told them that because i have this problem of being a lot louder and harsher than i actually think i sound, so i always come off sounding very fierce. So they needed to focus on what i said as opposed to how i said it. which is what i honestly believed.

then one of my guys, Mahesh, says this, "sergeant ar, i think that you cannot say that it's because you can't change, like i mean your tone of voice this kind of thing, because they say ar that what you say is only 30% of the conversation and then the other 70% is body language."

and that struck me a little. i wanted to explain that, in the field, we don't have time for niceties and pleasantries, but it felt like i was making excuses. all i could say was that i am actually trying to not be so fierce especially in the admin time, but again out in the field i can't make this kind of promises and if they hear me talk like an asshole, it is to be expected and don't take it personally.

i think about what he said, that this kind of thing that can be changed. i guess i've been trying to change this behaviour of mine for the last five years, its an estimate but its' roughly when girls started becoming interesting, which was in sec 2 i believe. but yeah, what you see of me now, is actually 5 years in the making and there is still a hell of a long way to go, so if anyone ever tells you otherwise. Yes, Women have made a difference in the world.