Greatness recognizes greatness, and, sitting here in my office at work insanely bored and more than a little frustrated at this week’s earlier happenings, of which I will get back to later or over the weekend when I am in the safe solitude of my own zen abode, I am forced to quote some great soldiers who came before my time.

Though I myself, as a soldier, am the very personification of garang-ness, I must salute of the group of the greatest soldiers of all time: a childhood role models, and acknowledge not only their heroic bravado, but also their understated, underestimated and enduring wisdom…

“Knowing is half the battle.”
- GI JOE

And so we get to today’s point:

Mister Joel’s Greatest Weakness

Every superhero has a weakness: Superman has kryptonite, the Green Lantern needs to recharge his batteries, Robocop has his OCP programming going against his conscience… and Mister Joel is no different.

Recognizing his weakness is the first step to overcoming it, and as a future Nobel and Pulitzer Prize winner, Mister Joel realizes the lofty standards he has to set for himself.

And his weakness is: independence… he can never spell the word correctly. I just looked back a coupla posts and I found out I misspelled it. And I realize that he’s been spelling it his entire bloody life, despite COUNTLSS marks taken off his essays in secondary school, in this way:

I N D E P E N D A N C E

Now, having moved on to auto-correcting word processor typing, Mr. Joel realizes that this Achilles heel might follow him to the grave and beyond… since he might never ever be penalized ever again, linguistically, for this grave and glaring error.

Amen.

As of yesterday, I am now a full-blown civilian.

I went back to camp and got my papers signed, said goodbye to my superiors and underlings. Bought one last kopi-bing from the canteen, sat down in my beloved platoon 1 bunk for the last time.

a poignant moment it was – taking out that pink ic from the envelope. just like it was taken from me two years and two months and one day ago, i got it back – just like that. you dont think about shit but it just happens. and two years flies by just like that; the craziest roller coaster ride of my life, and i think – cliche alert – that ive cough grown up a lot cough in this time splutter splutter.

for the record, thank you SAF for instilling into me a tremendous set of values which i will take to my grave. knowing when to stand up and take bullets for my men… and when to lay low. knowing how to step the thin line between malingering and fanatical zeal.

oh man am sneezing like a motha now. why the heck.

goodbye camp and fear of getting charged!!! one day ill write a book about the army, a complete expose with like every single damned thing that no one dares to voice out inside.

bounded no more am i, by this horrible hiearchy of ineptitude and BOCHUPNESS!!!