A good 7 days have whizzed past in a flash but the idea of being a week-old second lieutenant still hasn't fully sunk in. Or rather, the knowledge has taken root but the young bud has yet to sprout any form of detectable fruits. In pure brutal honesty, nothing much has changed since my last few days as a cadet, which in my defense hasn't been that long ago either, and yet I'm supposed to believe I'm set up for success from here on given the rigourous training I had undergone in the past three quarters of a year. But instead of fretting over such undue concerns, my mind drifted to something else: I recalled glancing through my wing's Commissioning magazine a couple of days ago in which a poll posited that a good third of the wing concurred that Exercise Centipede was the worst exercise in our entire tenure as an officer cadet, trumping the likes of Exercise Scorpion King (really?! 5 days of endless digging with minimal shuteye?!) and Exercise Helang (maybe the mud got into their brains). Exercise Centipede is more than just the age-old virgin 8-day outfield torture every cadet has to endure, because not EVERY cadet has to go through that kind of pain. Rumoured as one of the veto factors to commission, I stand here to tell you it sure as hell isn't. While Centipede haunts the living souls of almost every other cadet, it remains an illusion to me, mainly because I wasn't physically there. But in spite of missing out on this "milestone", it has become a revered trophy for me, one that serves to tell me I am much better than I always imagined myself to be and even more so, a constant reminder of who I am.