It is 1:50 AM now. I could sleep, and I should, considering that I have what nonsense reflection trail later at 0815, but I am not in the mood.

Life is too short to be wasted away sleeping now. Tekong may finally be over, but the SAF will never stop taking my time from me, time that has now become precious and scarce. The Army will win you over not through NE, not through the numerous talks that your officers will give you, but simply by taking your time. By forcing you to make the best out of your time in camp, you are forced to invest in a life as a soldier ; by taking away time outside camp, they wash away your life as a civilian.

Rush to wait, wait to rush.

When I book out these days I feel like driftwood when I walk down Orchard. The people seem strange and foreign to me, I walk into people and bump into them, and then I just bumble along without a polite sorry. Sometimes I forget to stop at traffic lights, and someone has to pull me back. I no longer walk with the sense of direction and purpose I once had, and by that I mean that I no longer know exactly where I want to go, what I want to do there, and who I'm going to meet. Somehow I just feel that I've lost touch with so many things, with fashion, with music and books, and most importantly, with people.

Each book out lasts approximately 28 hours, give or take 3 hours.

Social interaction with people often involves an activity. The most common of these is, of course, breakfast, lunch, or dinner. Cancel breakfast due to the paying back of sleep debt, and we are left with two - dinner on saturday, lunch on sunday. These two windows are, to put it simply, insufficient. It is insufficient to meet all my friends, spend time with my family, and settle my own administrative matters. And so the solution is to cast away people - the judging process occurs, I decide which friends are be cut loose, and then proceeds to allocate priorities to those left. Right now I am able to comfortably allocate time for everyone (I hate the phrase - it is as those these people are nothing more than units that I must allocate resources to, when they are worth so much more than that), but I resent that I had to give up so many just to retain these few. I am left with less people in my life.

Admin time is 2130 to 2230

Administrative time is given every night so that the soldier can attend to his daily matters. These daily matters include the washing of clothes, bathing, sleeping, and other necessary day to day activities. It is said that a busy man is a happy man - only because he is too busy to think. Morale is high during route marches because the songs take your mind away from the fatigue. I am not depressed in camp - but that is only because I have not realized how miserable life as a soldier is, and what a shallow, unintelligent human being I have now become.

But I digress - my point is that I have too little time now, too little time for friends, for love, and for self.