Discipline

When I was 12, I got this whacky idea that I should be in the army.

I saw this movie about a kid who went to military school and thought he looked so regal. I asked my dad if I could go to military school when I started high school the next year, and his response was to tell me that if I went in, he wouldn't take me out--even for summers--for the next four years.

In short, he said no, but I'm pretty sure that if i'd asked harder, he'd had said yes.

Now why such a dumb request?

In the early days, I wanted to go navy because of the uniform. Then later on, I wanted to get in the army because I wanted the discipline.

I knew even then how hard it was to push myself. That if I really didn't like something, there was no way in hell that i'd be able to do it. I'd go nuts. But I thought that if maybe, just maybe, if I went in the military, i'd be forced to do even the most basic shit that I absolutely hated to do.

Stuff like making an incredibly neat bed, being obsessively organized and clean, being on time, sitting ramrod straight and eating in under ten minutes. That i'd learn how to take orders and respect authority and all those small things that the military requires out of your common soldier...stuff that I couldn't do unless you told me point blank that my fucking life depended on it.

Now I feel like laughing at the whole situation.

Twelve years. If I hadn't been rejected for being underweight at that military academy, I could have been a lieutenant by now, probably entering my second year of law school after wrapping up my two year tour of duty.

Or I could have been an enlisted soldier, or just a counselor in the Psychiatric Services center.

I still want it sometimes, though for the life of me, I think I would have gone crazy had I gone in. There would have been a point where i'd be tearing my hair out if I had to put on that uniform for another fuck-ass day.

I still think about it...what would my life be like, had I chosen that path. A career soldier. What are the places that I would have been, what are the things that I might have seen, what would I be like?

Would I have lasted long? Would I really have gone nuts? Would I be successful at it?

A professional soldier makes less than 20 grand a month. A lieutenant probably makes the same amount I do now and does double the amount of work. There would be tons of things I couldn't buy, and even more things I wouldn't be able to experience because of my schedule.

...

I just find it amazing to think that my life could have been incredibly different. That I could have gone in an entirely different direction become someone else.

I wonder sometimes, about all my decisions. So many of them are big things. I could have gone to any direction, done so many different things, that I could have been...a whole different person by now.

I could have been a soldier, a lawyer, a profiler, a psychologist...so many things.

I wonder how I would have been like if I'd chosen a different path.