Day Sixty-one - Everything counts

I was still just barely nineteen. And for some reason, I thought that I had matured a lot since I'd left school, joined and left the Air Force, and was now ready to take on the world. I could have matured, really, and by a large margin, had I taken things a whole different way, but as we know by now... I did not. So I got back to school feeling pretty much full of myself. During my time away from school I hadn't stopped reading and learning, and both my relationships with friends S. and N., as well as mine with Dora, provided me with enough an intellectual challenge for me to feel like progress was being made. But I arrived back in school not only with an unwarranted sense of self-worth and superiority, but also a gigantic chip on shoulder that, while part of me sensed it was there, I couldn't exactly make heads or tails out of it. And that helps explain just how hard an effort I made not to connect with anyone that school year - I found them all so far beneath me, so brutally childish, whereas I was the erudite scholar who graced their lives with his presence. As you can imagine, that made me no end of friends. And a bunch of idiots at that school, who took an intense disliking to me, tried to get on my nerves every single day. Most of the time, In had my headphones on whenever I was out of the classroom, so I ignored whatever was being said. But here and there, there were some occasions where there were some verbal spats, and one time I even got a physical altercation with one of the other guys, which ended up with me being pushed down to the ground in front of a bunch of other people. One thing about me is that I've never been neither strong nor brave, and physical confrontations have rarely gone well for me. That, I think, was the beginning of the end for me. If I wasn't already feeling like going to school was actually a waste of time and money, I soon started to feel that way. I stuck around for a few more months, but I didn't even finish the whole year, I just quit.  And this takes us into 1997, where I started to formulate a plan for my life going forward. I know this will come as a shock, but that plan? That plan was me going back to the Air Force.

And why did I make that decision? Well, for one I realized that the chip on my shoulder I'd be carrying was due to some unresolved issues inside me about how my life in the military turned out. I realized the major mistake I'd made was accepting the transfer, and my reasoning was that if, indeed, I'd been happy where I had been once, then it only stood to reason that I would be happy again. But would I, really?