Another day, another nervous breakdown...

I figured out yesterday why I've been having such trouble with the finer details of adjusting to military life (as opposed to the overall adjustment -- which was, as I mentioned in my bootcamp posts, relatively successful) when so many of my peers seem to have had less:

I know better.

I didn't come here right out of high school or a strict parental background, nor directly from a very liberal parental background. I didn't party my college years away and realize how I need to settle down now, or find myself a father-to-be and decide to step up to the challenges, financial among others.

I lived in the real world for 23 years, lived on my own since I was 17, had several jobs in the civilian sector, and know through-and-through exactly how much of this would never fly in a company that actually earns its ability to pay its employees, who in turn thus have to earn their ability to be paid by the company.

This military thing may be easier for people who come here without knowing any better, or out of even more desperation than I was facing the first few months of this year. But I know better. I cannot settle for those over me doing things incorrectly when it affects so many people, especially when the incorrectness is a simple matter of organization that really wouldn't take much to fix. If I offer to help (being a very organized person in most areas and in any areas in which I choose .. even those that have known my more cluttered side may have seen glimpses of the organized chaos that side produced), I'm given a half-hour speech on what life will be like in the fleet; a speech that reflects only what life would be like in a bad or hectic command that happens to be deployed/on a cruise at that time, so that you actually do have 12 hour watches and few duty sections. As a TAR PN, I'm unlikely to find myself in such a situation, but even as an undesignated deck seaman I would only have found myself there so often. I am then given another half hour speech on what it takes to be in the Navy and if I didn't want to do my duty, I shouldn't have joined (oh, Lord, if I had known I could've backed out once I got my old job back after enlisting before reporting to boot camp), and that I need to just suck it up. And then, the obligatory parting comments about if I still have a problem, I can just take it up my chain of command.

Sometimes, I wonder if people actually want things taken up the chain of command, perhaps in the hopes that if the chain of command finally realizes how bad they are at that particular job, they wouldn't have to do it anymore.

All I know is 18 year old kids at boot camp do a better job of rotating the watchbill than some who have been in for half as long as said kid has been alive.

My teacher still holds out the notion that I'll have a 100 average or very near to that by the time my class is done. I figure I'm capable under the best circumstances. But when I'm being woken up to suddenly replace someone on the watchbill for a 3:30 am watch without enough prior warning to have, say, gone to bed earlier so that I still would have had enough sleep .. I've fallen asleep in class several times today, and am making all kinds of very stupid mistakes on the classwork we've done, because I'm so tired that my brain isn't functioning.

16 more days and a wake-up 'til we're gone, as is said among my classmates.. if I get out of here graduation day, that's only 16 more nervous breakdowns before I leave.