correct me if i'm wrong but recently i've been talking to my budds and i've realised how mellow our conversations were as compared to the hearty chatty chats that we would use to have in the most ungodly hours. marie, the new smu undergrad, mentioned to me before that the guys she knew in school told her that they 'sorta' became more mature after army; simply because they 'had too much time to think about life'. there are implications to this. at the personal level, maybe the suddenly-changed mellow conversations are a result of this "maturity"; maybe as we all "mature" we lose our laughs and just that bit of our personality gets lost in the fray as well. or maybe it has made us hide a certain portion of ourselves from the public eye. i miss those days where we used to have 'hahahaha-s' all the way throughout the conversation or even the random LOL that we used to throw in once in a while. not forgetting the very subjects of school, life, love or work in our daily conversations. does the army really make us mature in this aspect then; make us grow up; or make us any better humans in this society? right now, i'm left wondering whether those who read this, agree with the statement at hand. then again, would this even be considered as "mature"?