if you want to be a hero:

then stop being a dick.
this phrase just popped into my head wednesday, i don't remember what i was thinking about at the time.

army bureaucratic process: i'm waiting for final authorization. it cost me two traumatic hours yesterday morning to get that far. come sunday i'm planning on printing out all the forms again (i really should have made photocopies) and writing a how-to guide for everyone else. it's not right that there's only one person on base who knows what to do and she gets irritated every time she has to explain it.

one of the forms required me to extend the length of my service by 32 days. only that value was filled in in the wrong column, and i'm really glad i caught the error before signing on for an extra 32 months.
uh-uh :/

drugs: it's the army's "war on alcoholism and drugs" week coming up. this always upsets me, and we began arguing about it within the team. this is a really difficult argument to get involved in, and every time it takes a few minutes of discussing drug qualities until we get to the meat of the issue.

a) alcohol is a really bad drug, whose general influence is an increase in aggressive / violent behaviour and road deaths. most of the rest of the drugs are just dandy compared to that.

b) in the case of drugs not including alcohol, the cost of prevention far outweighs cleanup and infringes upon personal freedom, rights and dignity. amsterdam is a shining example of how to deal with drugs, their only issue being with foreigners and that's only because the rest of the world insists on remaining five miles behind them.

oops of note: apparently i told my team-mate not to touch something a few days back, and he didn't (i don't remember exactly what i said). it turns out it was what needing touching in order for him to get his work done. swak.

the girl from upstairs... she's, like, becoming an issue. i get the feeling that she's not picking up that although i like her, i don't like her. i'm worried that this is going to turn unpleasant at some stage. :(

toilet scare: beginning to worry about diabetes... i know i consume way too much sugar, especially since discovering my allergy to the desert and not smoking. for a few hours yesterday, i desperately needed to relieve myself every fifteen minutes - like clockwork. this was frustrating, time-wasting, and disturbing. luckily i managed to hold out between leaving the base and getting home, and since then i've been alright. i'm seriously considering requesting blood tests on sunday.

sammy came to town for coffee, and i have to mention something from an odd conversation regarding the process of producing a cup of coffee: i referred to the beans as embryos, which was off the mark.
the coffee bean is comparable to an unfertilized egg, which would make coffee grinding the equivalent of sex as far as your caffeine fix is concerned.

i received a small envelope in the mailbox: a 2gb sd card surprise! now i can chill about the backup battery being wonky.

sammy gave me a ride to the shitty ars-hole of a club that my ex-team-mate's farewell party was at. the company was great, and most of the night the music wasn't awful. specifically, all the 80's remixes went down well. some of the house remixes were just plain offensive, original tracks based on awesome beats have had crap ones tacked on instead.

i hadn't been feeling good, but beer & rum don't hurt. i'm amused that i ordered captain morgan's spiced gold, and received captain morgan's with sprite. israeli bartenders. speaking of incompetence: i really despise shoddy, sleazy waitresses who demand a tip. i was busy calculating it when she looked at me and shouted "you'd better leave me a good tip!".

in the word's of hardea - mr f*cker: "****ing bitch".

a strange incident popped into my head: once upon a time, in a club called spyce, i was on the dancefloor wearing a the who's - tommy t-shirt that said "see me feel me touch me heal me". a really pretty blonde girl walked up to me, looked me up and down, felt me up and kissed me. i was really, really awkward about this, and responded in a way that embarrassed me almost immediately afterwards (it was a silly response, not too bad - but still).
...
it turned out that she was a friend of a friend, and i ran into her a few days later. i thought i'd made a fool of myself so i kept my distance, and that's a shame.

one of the girls got really drunk on absinthe last night, and apparently this isn't the first time. the kid, piles and i made a hasty exit.

piles and i had a long talk (a continuation of the last one, really), and i got home, showered and crashed.

i woke up rough a couple of hours later, unable to talk after last night's smoke inhalation. i went to the post office to pick up a package. i was certain that it was the wireless card, so i was a tad disappointed when my three awesome books arrived. i'm a lot more excited about them now :)

i went with nystire and his brother for coffee. the reason for the link is that he was annoyingly talkative about nothing this morning, and i wasn't feeling good.

i bought cake on the way home, which turned out to be a far more complicated mission than i'd anticipated. and expensive, too.

i tried to sleep for an hour or two, but eventually gave up and got up agitated. i went shopping with the new flatmate, a guilt shop because she couldn't carry everything herself :S

i went to meet lake for breakfast, and i gotta say it was nice but weird. meeting lake, not the breakfast. the breakfast was alright. i was a bit concerned by the photos i saw of her on facebook, but they're just not particularly good photos. she's not quite as pretty as i remembered, but then about six years have passed and we're both a little older.

she gave me a hammock chair for my birthday. that was a surprise.

i walked home, and put on stephen king's it. it's a long bloody movie [sic], so i've been pausing and doing stuff* and returning again.

* i'm not happy with it, but it was more or less spontaneous. i'm now deciding whether or not to paint over it... i've never considered that a possibility before.