…but I do suck at keeping a blog.

I can’t even say that I have an excuse aside from the fact that professionally, I’ve more than passed the point where I can’t talk about what I’m doing, and personally… well, it’s gotten to the point where I don’t want to. It’s depressing enough to live it and think about it, let alone write it.

It’s not that my situation is all that unpleasant. I’m on the most interesting border (and in this country that’s saying a lot), on the base everyone in the course wanted to get to, the one I figured I didn’t have much of a chance of getting. But I did, through pure blind luck – I was supposed to go to Allenby Bridge, on the Jordanian border, but it turned out last minute that they needed a guy there. So they switched me with one of the few guys graduating the course with me, and I ended up in the north.

I don’t know what’s up with the people who are in my unit with me, but there are very few of them I feel a real connection with. During the course, it took me about a month to figure out that I was miserable. Why? I had hardly anyone to talk to. I found it almost impossible to join a casual conversation. Every time I made some sort of remark, tried to join in – it crashed and burned. Not that anyone was hostile to me, merely indifferent.

I knew from the beginning that it was my fault – if I tried harder, made more of an effort to be sociable, it would work out. But when I kept trying and failing, I just drew into myself further and further, half-hoping for someone to notice and ask if I were okay or something, but I waited and it didn’t happen. I eventually came to the conclusion that no one was paying attention.

Basic training was not this bad. High school was not this bad. Hell, none of the schools I’ve ever been to (and I’ve been to lots) were this bad. Every other framework I’ve been in, I felt that I at least had the potential to fit in if I’d make the effort. Here in my unit, with the very people I should have the most in common with, I can’t manage to conduct a simple conversation without feeling like I’m pulling teeth – mine and theirs. It was like that in the course, and it’s like that here on base, and I have no idea how to fix it.

Add the facts that the training is grueling, the weather is freezing, the rooms are crowded, there’s no privacy, and that the prospect of the actual work is terrifying…

Well, here I am, sitting at the keyboard on the last night of my weekend off, desperately wanting not to go back tomorrow morning.