Back to bored

Finally. A proper entry after so long. For the past few days, I've been reminding myself tirelessly to find a good time to sit down and write, before I forget all the things in February that I want to remember. After all these years, I remain a professional procrastinator. Old habits die really, really hard. They may even be immortal, for all I know.

There won't be anything much for us to do in camp for this week and the next, because most of the company's currently away in India for military exercises. Before they left last weekend, I was half-wishing that I could join them, yet I dismissed that thought almost immediately. I guess this ambivalence stems from the fact that I will no longer be flying overseas with the army during my 2 years in NS. It's good because India has never been a place I've been itching to visit anyway, let alone getting posted there for military exchange. Also, I've been to India before (and I consider myself very, very lucky to have had a great experience there). Nevertheless, the flip side to all this would be that 1. they will be visiting the TAJ MAHAL, the architectural wonder I unfortunately didn't get to see during my last visit, and 2. with the news that we won't be flying to Australia near the end of the year, I feel kinda sad that there'll no longer be an all-expenses-paid trip to Down Under, though I keep telling myself that Queensland's where we're going and there's probably absolutely nothing there besides deserts that stretch in all directions as far as the eye can see (and even farther), and an unhealthy abundance of kangaroos.

Moving on, I went for my first ever running event on Sunday - the 2XU Compression Run. We ran the half-marathon (21.1km), and I have to say that I was pretty glad with my timing of ~2 hours 31 minutes. It's really slow compared to my usual pace (my fastest so far is a timing of 9 minutes 18 seconds for 2.4km, but that's 2.4km after all), but considering the fact that I haven't trained much at all leading up to the run (the farthest I last ran without stopping was 5km during TJ days, and for my trainings this time I clocked at most 4.5km distance-wise), it occurs to me as a reasonable timing. A main reason behind why I didn't really get to train properly was the field exercise in mid-to-late February, but it's mostly because I didn't have much will to. Condemn my logic if you must, but I've never really wanted to focus on cardio because of how skinny I am. I guess I signed up for the 2XU Compression Run this time because I was just in for the experience. I know it's kinda bad to not take it so seriously, and even now I'm questioning myself if that was the right thing to do, regardless of my physical circumstances. All I know is now, I really need to lay out for myself a gym regime if I want to gain the much-needed couple of kilos. I can't believe I'm saying this, but I feel lousy for eating like an average person and not gaining weight. And on another note, I intend to try for either the Adidas Sundown or Standard Chartered full marathons next year, and this time, I'm gonna train up. So yes - from now, I'm gonna go all (moderately) fitness-crazy for the weekends where the weekdays were pretty easy.

Since there wasn't going to be anything much going on in camp this week, I took an off-day on Monday as I was planning to stay the previous night for my mom's birthday. It turned out to be a pretty good decision because... (try not to judge) rofl I could queue with Sheryl for the Taylor Swift tickets right at the time when they started going on sale on Monday morning. Even now I'm not really sure if I can pry myself off army duties that Thursday night and take leave for both Thursday and Friday to attend Taylor's and Ellie Goulding's concerts, but screw that for the time being - it's still better to be certain that you've secured the tickets you need...!

Also, I've recently got to watching 'Her' and finishing the two similarly-themed books of 'Fahrenheit 451' and '1984'. To be honest, 'Her' was a tad too long for my liking and quite a number of parts bored me to the point where I would pause at those parts or skip over them by doing something else. I appreciated the film's premise though - the lesson learned at the end, if anything, made film-sense (if that's even a word). I feel utterly pretentious now that I'm saying this against previous Tumblr posts of quotes and music from 'Her' (I genuinely liked them), but I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one around who does this sort of cherry-picking... ha ha ha /assures self. As for the books, I found 'Fahrenheit 451' pretty bland with its lack of characterisation, unnecessarily descriptive prose and markedly shorter storyline, so you can say I didn't really enjoy it, though there were a couple of takeaways language-wise. On the other hand, I really enjoyed '1984', and I recognise how it's often considered a modern literary classic. George Orwell is just amazing with his words. The final section of the book was simply chilling, and I really appreciated it for the genius that went into the construction and sustainment of this alternate society. And if you haven't read 'Animal Farm' by him either, I highly recommend you do so - it's a really good book by him as well. I'm also contemplating whether I should give his lesser-known essays a chance, but I'll leave that to next time for now.

In other (equally boring) news, smh @ how just passes so slowly in here - I can't believe it's just Thursday. Friday, just come soon and make everything alright.