First day of school yesterday!

Marketing is a very interesting subject. I don't say that because I can't find a better word to describe it or something. It is really interesting. Maybe it's my professor, whom I thought was good though he's from India and his accent might pose an issue. Maybe it's interesting so far because we were doing some case studies. Did you know that the symbolic image of Santa Claus in a red and white coat was created by Coca Cola in 1930? Or that companies like IBM actually hold official corporate meetings in the virtual world of Second Life?

Met some not so interesting people, formed a group with one fellow NSman Special-Termer called Irving and three SMU old-timers, of which 2 are ladies. The laojiao guy dispensed some interesting tips about SMU-first-day-must-dos, one of which is that when you go to class for the first time, spot the chiobu and immediately sit as close to her as possible, if not beside her. This is because usually the more good looking, charismatic and, thus, confident guys would try to sit near her too to get to know her, and they'd eventually make better groupmates for projects than the quiet loner ones sitting at the corners so you end up sitting near them too and can eventually establish better connections as early as possible.

Went to SMU today though I had no lessons cos I wanted to study my text (crazy huh), and ended up meeting Leon for dinner. And Leon said something funny.

Actually Irving yesterday mentioned about the locally-flavoured proverbial '2 years of not using your brains in the army'. I'm fucking sick of hearing this because it's quite nothing more than some stupid excuse most people like to use for zoning out during NS. I have to assume that such a statement is made out of a need to complain (cos if it isn't objectively so then it's sadder in my opinion), which leads me to think that if it really pained anyone to have their brains rot in the army, they could have easily done something to prevent it. Nobody stopped anyone from bringing books to camp to read during those admin times in bunk rather than do anything and everything else that was unproductive and then bitch about it.

I personally made it a point to capitalise on the learning freedom (with regards to mental stimulus in this sense because there wasn't anything else you needed to cram your mind with, although as a specialist and sea soldier I had a shitload of SOPs to familiarise myself with) to read up on things I won't bore you with and worked on some other stuff such as art during my free time. It just kinda pisses me off to hear someone else whine about how stupid the army has made him, simply because he let it.

Maybe being a 2SG platoon sergeant purely out of responsibility (with no extra pay) gave me work that enabled my mind to leverage on to prevent itself from idling too much, but I suppose I'll never know what a 'man' (as in soldier man, non-commander) really thinks of. This notorious 'man mentality' that people talk about.

So Leon was telling me about a stupid colleague (whom I had the pleasure of bumping into and immediately developing a disliking for) and I said that maybe he really has that 'man mentality'. Then Leon exclaimed, "please, he has ULTRAMAN MENTALITY!"

Haha!

We both later wondered why nobody has ever thought of such a term and decided that if either one of us had thought of it during NS, it might've become a part of fond army lingo.




The tragedy of life is not that it ends so soon, but that we wait so long to begin it.

Today's Listenables:
Breaking Benjamin - The Diary Of Jane