I'm Back

I’m back in chains. The difference is that this time I had asked for it.

Back to seemingly unending lectures punctuated only by toilet breaks, strong mints, and rubbing tap water into my eyes – anything to keep me from falling asleep. Here, important concepts are distilled into their basest forms, one-liners that’ll prepare even the daftest student for the upcoming multiple-choice question exam. (I can only hope that future situations present themselves with four solutions: A, B, C or none of the above.) The air hums, not with the enthusiasm of students thirsty for knowledge, but with the bottled-up energy of young, virile adults itching to be up and away, or anywhere else for that matter. In here, a wearisome voice that has seen thousands of trainees pass through the course, cursorily skips over the walls of text on the PowerPoint presentation. Equally-dreary eyes that have long since lost any trace of a spark comb through the audience for anyone not paying attention, or for anyone actually paying attention.

Back to tediously repetitive impromptu soliloquys on discipline by instructors who can only sing one tune: “one for all, all for one.” To marching, shouting, and generally competing with each to seem the most driven and determined trainee – determined perhaps to make the least friends. We’ve all done the maths. Not everyone can get the vocation that they want. So now begins the silent war of attrition as course-mates judge their colleagues, looking for weaknesses to exploit, for friends who’ll give help without expecting it in return, who’ll dull themselves to let others shine.

Back to the thick of it, to being reminded how we are the smallest of cogs in the big machine. To being pushed around by instructors only a few months our senior, who themselves are pushed around by career men and women whose top qualification might be “Least Charismatic Speaker 2014”, who in turn are pushed around by career politicians whose insouciance in regards to the long-term effects of their categorical policies drives me mad.  Just take it: two of the most beautiful years of our life. Take it and fill it with hardship as you would a naughty boy’s Christmas with coal, that we might be “grateful” for the relative bliss the rest of our punishment-less, long-haired, late-morning, on-our-own-time lives will represent, minus the In-Camp Trainings, of course.

I’m back on course.

#5EMT

“Live to save.”