silver

I went back using tags on my LJ to see if I had recorded names (my physical journals are still boxed and inaccessible) and ended up reading through some of my entries. I usually avoid this. Someday I will write things and not be embarrassed to look at them again - fiction is especially bad. My old fic is still available, it even gets comments once in a blue moon, but I can't look. Even though I probably should remove some of the notes on it, and maybe see if the site has messed up my formatting - nope. I can't do it.

My journal entries of two years ago were okay, even if they were publicly posted and I usually get embarrassment squick from public entries more than anything. If I wrote about CLACSTC's flight line today, I'd probably borrow some of that phrasing.

I really miss my physical journals, actually, especially the entries I made of exceptional events (that is to say, not the entries written during say school, or routine events.) When I went to summer camp for the first time, I wrote nothing. The second time, I wrote one page about arriving, and the chaos of it all; looking back later, I was incredibly frustrated, because a lot of things happened in three weeks and I had recorded nothing. The one entry about arriving was tantalizing but there was no follow up. Time was a problem - I was doing things with the flight all day, then doing homework or working on my uniform during my off-hours, and then lights out was pretty early - but I was bitterly disappointed nothing had been properly recorded.

The third time I went to summer camp, I brought my new, nice journal and was determined to write things down. And I did. I had to sit in the bathroom (they were ensuite) most nights, because the patrolling staff could see the lights in the room, but not the lights in the bathroom, after lights-out. I would write really fast because lights-out was eleven, but we had to get up at five or five-thirty just to get ready, despite our regulated wake-up timing being six o'clock*. I do have records for those six weeks, but, as I said - they're still in boxes, and I hope they aren't mildewed yet.

I keep straying from the point. I'm not sure that journal writing is cathartic or anything for me, but it leaves a trail behind me, which is what I want. My parents made me write a journal from the age of five or six, and they're full of strange things I haven't thought about in a long time. In the beginning, when I was in French immersion they had things like "elle regarde l'oiseau" and then English printed below it, with illustrations. Other parts are repetitive and "I went swimming today" repeated on different days, because I went swimming that day and evidently couldn't think of anything else to say. They are very tame because they were read, but it's fascinating to go back and immerse myself in who-I-was. At some point I got tired of trying to find things to say and started a serialized story about my stuffed animals.

I give up. Despite wanting this to have a cohesive point, I've managed to go off on tangents anyway. *posts*

*(I see waking up at five-thirty as a blessing, because technically we were not allowed to get up before six - the boys, quartered in the barracks, weren't allowed out of their beds til six exactly - but the amount of things we had to do in the morning was ridiculous. I mean, be outside in C-4 with room tidied and bed made within 20 minutes? Scratch that, ten minutes, because we had to be early by ten minutes? Are you kidding me?

To be fair, I think they were mandated to have us sleep for seven hours minimum, but it was still ridiculous.)

I think it was Harry Potter first.

I read it at ten or so, and for the longest time wanted desperately, desperately to go to Hogwarts and learn magic. In the daytime, I knew that I was being silly, but I would think: "Well, I'm not eleven yet--maybe I just might get that owl when I'm eleven..." No owl arrived, I went on with life with a tinge of disappointment, but by then I'd found other books that I could immerse myself in.

I used to live in a prairie town--big town as far as the prairies were concerned, but no more than fifty thousand people at the last count. I read Laura Ingalls Wilder's novels, the almost-autobiographies of the author when she was a young girl on the prairies. I identified with her, and knowing that she'd been real was astonishing: there was a real, live girl who used to live in the same general area (never mind I was in North Dakota, and she lived in South Dakota). She lived almost on the land, with her family claiming a small homestead far out west, while I was living in an apartment, but her life was fascinating. For years after, I would comb through atlases looking for the town she grew up in.

After I read particularly good books, I would walk around in a daze. Only part of my mind was on the real world around me--most of me was still in the bookworld, fighting alongside characters, or just imagining what would happen if....

Many of those childrens' books I read: Lord of the Rings, Chronicles of Narnia, Chronicles of Prydain, Earthsea Trilogy, A Wrinkle in Time--they were beautifully detailed worlds with realistic characters, and I loved that. That's the thing about reading: the more you read, the more worlds are opened up, and you can carry them around with you, escape into them when you like. No-one can take those away from you. That song from the Reading Rainbow sums it up: "Butterfly in the sky, I can go twice as high/Take a look, it's in a book/A reading rainbow."





(I'm afraid my internet connection isn't working quite well enough to link it to the actual song, but a quick Youtube search should bring up plenty of hits).

At Cold Lake Air Base, the airbase that defends all of Western Canada and Northern Canada, they have a massive, massive flight line. It's an expanse of concrete, cut into big squares and can hold dozens of planes at a time. The land around is quite flat, and the trees are not close; your view is quite good. A couple runways are less than a hundred meters away; the CF-18s and Tutors and other planes take off frequently.

It's also practically sacred for the cadets that are on course. One flight sergeant shouted at us that thousands of cadets had graduated off of that flight line; like all parade squares, it must have seen its own fair share of sweat and blood. If you've ever seen people in uniform standing without moving, even to move their eyes, for hours on end under the sun, it is inevitable that some will fall.

It's not pretty, and it never will be. Because it's drill, looking around is not allowed, so the first indication that someone's fainted--heat stroke, exhaustion, dehydration, locked knees--is the sickening sound of flesh on concrete. The next is a sensation of staff running, dropping clipboards, water bottles, everything, to reach the cadet. The parade doesn't stop, the reviewing officer doesn't just go away. At that point, my heart is thundering, and there's adrenaline running through me; I sneak glances to check. When the parade's outside, there is often a wind, and people sway. I'm always alarmed at the swaying, because there's no telling when that ends in a faint.