It turns out that when the Army finally does get into gear and start training a person, they don’t mess around. Yesterday started at 0800 and ran through 1500. Today started at 0730 and ran through 1700. Oddly, I handle this kind of busyness a lot better than I do the previous idleness. I had always assumed that I was a lazy bum who’d like nothing better than to be paid to sit around and do nothing; it was kind of startling to discover that this was not, in fact, the case.
One of today’s major topics was fatigue, as it applies to the aviator: its adverse effects, how to recognize it, how to avoid it. I’ve spent a lot of time operating exhausted; my circadian rhythms are experimental jazz, and it takes some work to integrate them with the steady beat the world operates on. Luckily, I’ve been practicing that skill since high school. It comes with some cool perks: I’m more or less immune to jet lag now, and my life actually seems to run easier if I just ignore the position of the sun when integrating my sleep, work, and social schedules.
Powerpoint lectures may be efficient ways to educate some people, but I find that almost any other method of instruction is more useful for me. Unfortunately, Powerpoint is the lowest common denominator, so it’s what the Army uses for pretty much all classroom teaching. That leaves me with a lot of idle brain cycles to waste. Many of mine today went into reconstructing an incident from several years ago.
My memory of the incident itself is unremarkable: my girlfriend-at-the-time and I were conversing before falling asleep. I didn’t think much of it. The next morning, however, she told me that I had clearly fallen asleep during the conversation, except I didn’t stop talking; my responses to her statements just got surreal, as though I was responding to dream input as much as hers. Apparently, this wasn’t just a random sentence or two; she kept it up for several minutes, curious as to what would happen next.
Eventually, of course, she got bored with my increasingly nonsensical replies and just went to sleep herself. If my life more properly followed the rules of fiction, I would have been uttering prophecies, or perhaps channeled some spirit otherwise unable to communicate, but that wasn’t the case. Occam argues strongly against the possibility that I actually was doing something like that and she hid it for reasons of her own. Even so, I’m glad that I had the chance to be a mystic, even if it was only for one night and I never properly remembered it.
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