I don't like the term "blog". The idea of having an online journal first occurred to me when I was thirteen. I was about to implement it at seventeen - and right then this new blog trend came, and suddenly everybody was doing it. It was just like tattoos. Six months before my eighteenth birthday it suddenly got really hip and the full back tattoo I had wanted since I was twelve broke into shards of a shattered dream. In a way I deep down inside believe the "blog" stole my concept. I will always be a bit bitter about that.
Still, it doesn't excuse the fact that I haven't written here in quite some time. A ridiculously long time, to be honest. Nowadays time seem to pass by like cars on the Autobahn. It scares me everytime I realize how much I am like my mother already.
I have shortened my hair now, even though it is still blonde, and I bought a new set of glasses that makes me look like a lesbian literary critic from one of those snobby morning papers. Everybody keeps asking me if I am a vegetarian. I have spent the last four weeks basically living at the gym, trying to get in as good a shape as possible. In less than a week I am going back to Sweden to visit - but also to do the physical tests at the Army Defence facility in Nsby Park, Stockholm.
Yes, you heard me.
I have applied for service as a specialist officer in the Swedish Army.
Now, this might come as a shock to some of you. Most of my friends' reaction has been something inbetween disbelief and disgust to frank horror. Only my dad and an old friend of mine from Lund showed a bit of enthusiasm. The rest of the reactions mostly boiled down to something down the lines of:
"The army? Are you stupid?"
I can see their point. Most people wouldn't think a career within a organization of violence can do anybody any good, and, as some of my friends put it, it does make me go "a bit fascist pig". Francly, I don't know why I am doing this myself. All I know is that it feels like a chance for me to do something lasting, something important, and something I can actually hold on to. A job where I get to move around a lot, work with the latest technology, be responsible for people's lives on a daily basis (not to mention the fact that it would look good on my CV). Mind you also, I would not get an everyday officer post and "lead the boys into battle". I would be one of those who kept the logistics running, the flight tech officer.
In Battlestar Galactica, I'd be Chief.
I got the email three weeks calling me to do the tests, and ever since I have been busy trying to get into shape well enough to at least make some impression on the judges. I called them up to confirm the appointment, and took the chance to ask how grand the competition was.
"Well, let's see...", she said as I could hear how she looked through the papers, "...we got over eleven hundred applications... I can't remember exactly how many was called in for the tests, but it was a funny kind of number like four hundred and eighty-three or something... You were among the flight technicians... Yes, here it is. You are twenty people competing about four places. All in all we take in eighty-one people this year."
Eighty-one spots for eleven hundred applications. I have to beat sixteen for all I know big muscular fellows to get one of them. One out of five. 20% chance. Then again, so far I have lost at least two dress sizes, and I can't stop touching my thighs when I'm on the gym bike. Also I do believe that I can score some points at the psych test. I am old enough to do that well.
Either way, cross your fingers for me on Monday 20th.