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.”