Here's the last two days. Man, it feels like I haven't sent you an email in weeks, but it was only the day before yesterday.... So depressing....
Oh well, must move foreward!
October 24
The verdict: 105 situps, 47 pushups, 9:59 run. Beat my record in each area. Would love to celebrate BUT I only managed to do this by manipulation. Knowing that the DIs are NOT correcting bad form nearly as bad as they used to, I did relatively bad-form pushups to get to 47. It was so weird, normally I’m absolutely dead around 45, but doing the poor-form pushups I bet I could have gone clear to 60. I stopped at 47 because that’s the minimum requirement for our next PFA. I took the gamble to look around and as it turns out, NOBODY is doing perfect pushups. That’s how everyone else is doing so many… (My pushup score is in the bottom 5 in the whole class). However, situps max out at 105 so I got a perfect situp score and a pretty damn good run which made my overall score above class average.
I had really hoped to get studying done today but that didn’t happen. Instead I sat in class unable to stay awake in the morning, then in the afternoon we had 4 solid hours of class with the senior chief who can’t teach worth a damn. Her voice lulls everyone to sleep. I stayed awake well, but even then, sitting front and center, I couldn’t follow the lecture because she’s such a terrible teacher. She reads the powerpoint slides and then attempts to explain them but it’s clear that she doesn’t understand it all herself. The slides are too incomplete to be self-study material, so now I have no idea how I’ll learn this stuff for the final at the end of this week. Just another thing to stress about.
The class officer spent the day pulling us out of class one by one to talk to us. Not normally done at OCS, but he just wanted us to know where we stand as far as class team is concerned. He told me I was just above average, which is exactly where I’m happy to be.
6th week PI prep tomorrow, we spent the evening preparing and studying. I snuck off for a few minutes to do more research into IW on the internet, but didn’t find anything helpful at all. I’m confident in my uniform and bearing, but my knowledge isn’t quite there so I hope to pull it all together before the inspection tomorrow morning. I got more letters today, again thank you all so much for writing to me. I don’t have the time to reply to them but I really wish I did.
October 25
Woke up to more screaming and sharking from class team. Breakfast was tense as hell, everyone was getting yelled at and threatened. One of our classmates has a beating coming from Bomba, he must be terrified…
6th week PI was a huge success for me. A perfect score is 30/30. The inspector couldn’t find anything wrong with me at all, and I answered all of my questions clearly and correctly, so he just stood there for awhile staring at me then finally said “Nametag, minus one” and walked away. My nametag is perfect, even our class team said so when I asked. They just don’t want anyone to have a perfect score because it makes them look bad as an inspector, so I got a 29/30. Rather flattering.
Had a minute to chat with Aziz. He’s doing much better now, he’s off whatever medication they put him on. He said he had a seizure/some sort of heat stroke. He blacked out, doesn’t remember the panic attack at all, but woke up in the hospital and right-hooked one of the medics before realizing what had happened. Interesting story, really.
After lunch it was back to class, we had another long lecture on “leadership self-assessment”. They did a briggs-meyers personality test, got INTJ which is what I got last time I took it if memory serves. Then again they proceeded to hammer us with impossible moral questions and made us feel terrible for our answers and told us that we need to become different people, etc. I hate it all so much, they’ve already crawled up into our heads and now they’re infesting the deepest parts of our minds. There’s a fine line between training a person to perform a job, and just full out trying to change a person. The latter is surely happening to us. I want to perform my job to the best of my ability, but I will not change who I am as a person for a job. Ever. I can be the best officer my community has ever seen WITHOUT becoming heartless. I just need to survive the mind games and make it to the other side…
The evening passed with more victory run practice, then some group PT, and some study time. Got on the google page with Amanda while everyone was at Mom’s birthday dinner (Happy birthday!), boy it was just SO WRONG to think I could have sat and chatted with everyone over Amanda’s phone. It hurts too bad to switch from OCS to normal chat and then back to OCS again, I learned this from our phone calls. Few feelings on earth are lower than having a wonderful conversation Amanda for a couple of hours on Sunday and finally feeling normal again, only to hang up, turn around and remember where I was and how much longer I have to be here. I would love to just dive into that family dinner conversation and catch up with everyone, but it’s not worth the pain, or the risk.
On a side note, it’s also pretty sucky to think about all the wonderful food they are eating while I’m here looking forward to my next peanut butter sandwich because that’s the tastiest thing I get out here. I’d kill for a cheddar biscuit…
Anyhow, now that we’ve passed 6th week PI (after writing that statement I had to look at the beginning of this entry to double check that it was TODAY that the inspection happened. It feels like it was so long ago…) we’ve earned the anchor on the left collar and the anchor on the cover. We can’t wear them until Friday though, when we become the senior class on deck and class 03-12 become the candi-os. When that happens we’ll move to another pway again, and there’s no telling if I’ll be lucky enough to get an “unlocked” computer again. Can’t remember if I ever mentioned it, but this computer is unlocked, meaning the security protocols are mostly missing and I can access a lot more of the internet than other computers can. This one can go to google hence the trick with google pages, other computers can only go to navy.mil and the training email. They say there are 8 or 9 unlocked computers in the pway we’re about to move into (out of about 60). If the computer is a standard locked computer I won’t be able to use the google page trick anymore and it’ll be back to weekend-only communication. I hope I win that lottery twice, I really lean on that secret line of communication with Amanda.
On the UPSIDE (hah, there is an upside every now and then!) once we become the senior class on deck we move tables again in the chow hall. The final set of tables we move to have CONDIMENTS on them! Now, there’s no guarantee at all that our DI will let us use them, but if he does, man I’m going to eat so much hot sauce that they’ll need to order it by the keg to keep supply up. It’s pathetic, but I’m SO excited!
Time for bed. Victory run will be at around 0500 tomorrow, hope it goes well. I’ve heard the DI’s RPT the crap out of the junior class on the run (us) regardless of how well we do on the run, so I’m just going to go into it expecting.
Goodnight.
Oh well, must move foreward!
October 24
The verdict: 105 situps, 47 pushups, 9:59 run. Beat my record in each area. Would love to celebrate BUT I only managed to do this by manipulation. Knowing that the DIs are NOT correcting bad form nearly as bad as they used to, I did relatively bad-form pushups to get to 47. It was so weird, normally I’m absolutely dead around 45, but doing the poor-form pushups I bet I could have gone clear to 60. I stopped at 47 because that’s the minimum requirement for our next PFA. I took the gamble to look around and as it turns out, NOBODY is doing perfect pushups. That’s how everyone else is doing so many… (My pushup score is in the bottom 5 in the whole class). However, situps max out at 105 so I got a perfect situp score and a pretty damn good run which made my overall score above class average.
I had really hoped to get studying done today but that didn’t happen. Instead I sat in class unable to stay awake in the morning, then in the afternoon we had 4 solid hours of class with the senior chief who can’t teach worth a damn. Her voice lulls everyone to sleep. I stayed awake well, but even then, sitting front and center, I couldn’t follow the lecture because she’s such a terrible teacher. She reads the powerpoint slides and then attempts to explain them but it’s clear that she doesn’t understand it all herself. The slides are too incomplete to be self-study material, so now I have no idea how I’ll learn this stuff for the final at the end of this week. Just another thing to stress about.
The class officer spent the day pulling us out of class one by one to talk to us. Not normally done at OCS, but he just wanted us to know where we stand as far as class team is concerned. He told me I was just above average, which is exactly where I’m happy to be.
6th week PI prep tomorrow, we spent the evening preparing and studying. I snuck off for a few minutes to do more research into IW on the internet, but didn’t find anything helpful at all. I’m confident in my uniform and bearing, but my knowledge isn’t quite there so I hope to pull it all together before the inspection tomorrow morning. I got more letters today, again thank you all so much for writing to me. I don’t have the time to reply to them but I really wish I did.
October 25
Woke up to more screaming and sharking from class team. Breakfast was tense as hell, everyone was getting yelled at and threatened. One of our classmates has a beating coming from Bomba, he must be terrified…
6th week PI was a huge success for me. A perfect score is 30/30. The inspector couldn’t find anything wrong with me at all, and I answered all of my questions clearly and correctly, so he just stood there for awhile staring at me then finally said “Nametag, minus one” and walked away. My nametag is perfect, even our class team said so when I asked. They just don’t want anyone to have a perfect score because it makes them look bad as an inspector, so I got a 29/30. Rather flattering.
Had a minute to chat with Aziz. He’s doing much better now, he’s off whatever medication they put him on. He said he had a seizure/some sort of heat stroke. He blacked out, doesn’t remember the panic attack at all, but woke up in the hospital and right-hooked one of the medics before realizing what had happened. Interesting story, really.
After lunch it was back to class, we had another long lecture on “leadership self-assessment”. They did a briggs-meyers personality test, got INTJ which is what I got last time I took it if memory serves. Then again they proceeded to hammer us with impossible moral questions and made us feel terrible for our answers and told us that we need to become different people, etc. I hate it all so much, they’ve already crawled up into our heads and now they’re infesting the deepest parts of our minds. There’s a fine line between training a person to perform a job, and just full out trying to change a person. The latter is surely happening to us. I want to perform my job to the best of my ability, but I will not change who I am as a person for a job. Ever. I can be the best officer my community has ever seen WITHOUT becoming heartless. I just need to survive the mind games and make it to the other side…
The evening passed with more victory run practice, then some group PT, and some study time. Got on the google page with Amanda while everyone was at Mom’s birthday dinner (Happy birthday!), boy it was just SO WRONG to think I could have sat and chatted with everyone over Amanda’s phone. It hurts too bad to switch from OCS to normal chat and then back to OCS again, I learned this from our phone calls. Few feelings on earth are lower than having a wonderful conversation Amanda for a couple of hours on Sunday and finally feeling normal again, only to hang up, turn around and remember where I was and how much longer I have to be here. I would love to just dive into that family dinner conversation and catch up with everyone, but it’s not worth the pain, or the risk.
On a side note, it’s also pretty sucky to think about all the wonderful food they are eating while I’m here looking forward to my next peanut butter sandwich because that’s the tastiest thing I get out here. I’d kill for a cheddar biscuit…
Anyhow, now that we’ve passed 6th week PI (after writing that statement I had to look at the beginning of this entry to double check that it was TODAY that the inspection happened. It feels like it was so long ago…) we’ve earned the anchor on the left collar and the anchor on the cover. We can’t wear them until Friday though, when we become the senior class on deck and class 03-12 become the candi-os. When that happens we’ll move to another pway again, and there’s no telling if I’ll be lucky enough to get an “unlocked” computer again. Can’t remember if I ever mentioned it, but this computer is unlocked, meaning the security protocols are mostly missing and I can access a lot more of the internet than other computers can. This one can go to google hence the trick with google pages, other computers can only go to navy.mil and the training email. They say there are 8 or 9 unlocked computers in the pway we’re about to move into (out of about 60). If the computer is a standard locked computer I won’t be able to use the google page trick anymore and it’ll be back to weekend-only communication. I hope I win that lottery twice, I really lean on that secret line of communication with Amanda.
On the UPSIDE (hah, there is an upside every now and then!) once we become the senior class on deck we move tables again in the chow hall. The final set of tables we move to have CONDIMENTS on them! Now, there’s no guarantee at all that our DI will let us use them, but if he does, man I’m going to eat so much hot sauce that they’ll need to order it by the keg to keep supply up. It’s pathetic, but I’m SO excited!
Time for bed. Victory run will be at around 0500 tomorrow, hope it goes well. I’ve heard the DI’s RPT the crap out of the junior class on the run (us) regardless of how well we do on the run, so I’m just going to go into it expecting.
Goodnight.
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