A Place To Hide

hey peeps. im currently hiding at eetse's place. on liaison officer duty, which means i have to keep on going to the airport to receive foreign naval officers, and then send them to their hotels. fucking shitjob. just picked up philipinos this morning, but they missed me at the belt exit. in the end, i had to cab to their hotel (they cabbed to the hotel themselves) to arrange with them their schedules for the next few days. and tomorrow morning, i have to go to their hotel and pick them up, and them send them to the seminar in town. fucking hell. and i cannot claim my transport costs! im waiting at eetse's place because i have to go back to airport later at around 7.50 to pick up a peruvian colonel. i really hope he wont miss me this time. kinda hard to miss, with me wearing no.3 with peakcap.

anyway, my sailing schedule is as follows-

09 Feb - 18 Mar = Midshipman Sea-Training Deployment (MSTD)
09 Apr - 02 May = Overseas Exercise
06 May = ORD

for MSTD, will be sailing to Jakarta, Kota Kinabalu and Bangkok. if you have a wishlist, do give it to me soon.

for our reunion dinner, i duno about you guys, but i suggest we go eat zichar this year. since its approx. 10 of us, we can open 1 table. i know all of you are gona kaobei when i suggest eating at the zichar place next to my house. but seriously! its cheap and good. and variety too. so do consider!

ok, now to a more serious issue.

i believe only some of us are in the recent spate of emails that have been sent around, regarding our scout group. allow me to give you a brief account of what has transpired recently.

at the last aspire, a new band of results for grading candidates was introduced - Conditional Pass (C.P.). Essentially, those who fell under this band will have the opportunity to be re-assessed on areas they fell short in during the actual test. by the way, there were no TCHS ventures who passed this time round.

this new banding matters because it opens a potential can of worms- candidates can now simply aim to secure a conditional pass, and then return to be assessed on the weaker areas later on. this really defeats the purpose of aspire. as you all have experienced first-hand, attempting aspire requires much preparation, which is time-consuming. in our time, candidates are limited by the number of times they are allowed to attempt the test. it's either you succeed, or you don't. now, however, a test-smart candidate can choose to be an average joe in most aspects of the test, which would guarantee him a C.P., and then return to try his luck again.

i would also like to add that it is rather certain that the new assessment rubrics for aspire might not be well-thought out, and thus be unfair and incomplete. this ultimately results in at least another 2 batches of candidates who will fail the test due to an unfair assessment system.

if we choose to look beneath this new direction that the aspire testing team is taking, i believe there is ultimately only one outcome that introducing C.P. will lead to- that is, augmenting the number of PSA recipients. However, the end should never justify the means. if the mode of assessment for aspire was meant to be as such, it should have been made this way long ago. increasing the number of passes this way decreases the prestige that is lauded on the award.

while that is on HQ's side of events, i hope we, as the new elders of the group, should step out. i do not think that we are up-to-date knowledge/skill-wise, but these are things that we can pick up easily again with some effort. what we do possess, is experience of how childish and myopic our opinions on the world once were, and how we would re-do certain things, if we could. during our stint of NS, whether intentionally or not, we picked up bits and pieces of knowledge regarding manpower manangement leadership, and most importantly, how to be a gentleman and act that way. this, i feel, is really, the most precious gift of all. imagine if the person you are now, was the person who attempted PSA back then. would you not agree that it would have been so much more of a breeze to pass? or even been the envy of your fellow candidates, because you really have the demeanor of one that is so skilled, so knowledgeable, but yet humble and popular? i feel this way.

now imagine if our juniors were like this. they can be, with our coaching. it will not be easy, but i am certain that with dedication, it can happen. it is not an understatement when i say that we've shed blood and tears. so it is this place that has brought us together to become better people (most of us, anyway, less jianan) the unit is now entering a twilight zone, and frankly, it's heartbreaking.

i will be returning to the unit to help out fulltime after my post-ORD holiday. hopefully, i will be able to commit even after school starts. till then, we can only cross our fingers that the PSA drought does not continue, even though it appears that will be the case.