Gotta wake up at 5am, don winter clothing and have a march in the sun tommorow morning, but I can't get to sleep.

It feels a little strange, showhow, as though I'd been extracted from an everyday life that I had grown used to and dropped into another life - a life that existed more than 3 years ago. It's a little jarring, but the contrast seem to help put things into sharper focus.

Often, I found myself staring into the green grass, and appreciating how different it is from the urban sprawl that we live in. The hot balmy air.. a little sticky, even suffocating at times but somehow cleaner than the air conditioned environment of the workplace.

At the firing range, the bits of lalang floating in the air, possibly stirred by the rifle rounds wheezing past.. lit by the morning sun, felt quite serene. In the truck, the bits of sunlight streaming through the gaps near the roof, highlighting our tired, sweaty faces against the shaded interior. The long stretches of open road, the trees, the water..

It's such a different world, so distant that when I'm at either side, I find it difficult to imagine myself back at the other. And yet when it happens to seem to occur in the most natural fashion, of being plucked and dropped into another space.

My cousin came to visit yesterday. I haven't seen him in years. I'm surprised by how different he seemed. And yet when we mentioned our shared childhood I'm surprised by how easily we broke the ice.

I was such a crazy kid, really. Most of us are. Until we enter adolescence, and the rules change. Abruptly.