February 13, 2003

Writing these journals is like butting my head up against a wall. This analogy works on multiple levels, but in this case I am mostly referring to the fact that I am inflicting pain on myself. Simply put, I could easily go the route people tell me I should go and write journals such as: the other day I skipped personal pt time because I took a nap at 2:30 and didn't wake up until 7:30. This shows how I did not have the motivation to do my duty or improve my physical attributes. Etcetera, etcetera.

That route hardly has any depth. It also hardly addresses reasoning (or lack there of) behind the performance issues that have landed me in SLPD and every other developmental program at West Point. Well, perhaps it addresses one, willingness to play the game.

I've been told by a lot of people to just "play the game." I don't like the game, and I'm not particularly good at it. Whether I don't like it because I'm bad at it or I'm bad at it because I don't like it is beyond me. I just know that if I tell people what they want to hear I get yelled at, and if I begin to tell people what I think I get yelled at, so the result is this rambling that goes nowhere.

I've been trying to read Catch-22, I don't read particularly fast so I haven't made much progress, but from what I've read it seems very true to life. Going down this list of leadership performance indicators, just agreeing with the book allows me to talk about how I'm lacking in all of them.

Yeah, I don't play the game very well. I'll remediate this problem by a) talking to more people that are good at playing the game, and b) making more of an effort to play it.