Morning Update

First off, please welcome smrgol_t_kirin to LiveJournal! A cooler, nicer, and more mechanically-minded guy you couldn't hope to meet. :) (Engineers take note!)

Second off, I'd just like to mention here that I love my car, Bruce. :) He got Laurie and me to work through the slush and the sleet beautifully with no trouble at all. He's a trooper!

Third off, I had to shovel the walk today! Since when does that happen in December? Usually this month is just cold and gray until the 26th! Not complaining ... just wondering!

-The Gneech

EDIT: Fourth off, snagged from satyrblade: Five Geek Social Fallacies. Useful to be aware of!

Snagged From katayamma

( Characters. )

Yeah, What He Said

His technique is not great—clearly he will not win one of the top three prizes—but he moves with a certain grace. As he slowly moves the pudao around his body, pacing up and down the mat, his back bent, it occurs to me that he has been practicing this form for at least the last 60 years, which means he was practicing it during the Japanese invasion, during the Civil War, during the ban on kung fu, during the Cultural Revolution, and during this capitalist explosion in wealth. From the roughness of his hands and the deep wrinkled tan of his face, he has been either a farmer or a manual laborer his entire life, a tough, dusk-to-dawn, back-breaking life. But somehow he has found the time to keep at this form.

All this rolls over me in a wave of unexpected emotion. And as I take his picture, I find myself having to keep the camera against my face to hide the flow of tears, which, loosed by the baijiou and mixed with the emotion of seeing my master again, won't stop. When I was 21 what I admired most was the tremendous skill of the monks. I wanted to be that good at something, anything. But as I watch this old man, what I am most impressed with is the devotion. It is what has allowed this culture to survive (and now thrive) despite the traumas. As he finishes his form, what I want is to love something, anything as much as he so obviously loves Shaolin kung fu.

-The Gneech

Speaking of Kung Fu...

Great class tonight. :) Students of Shaolin Chuan aren't about to let a little thing like slushy roads get in the way of our training! ;)

I've been going to the intermediate classes on Saturdays, for various reasons that I don't want to go into now, but really the curriculum in those is over my head. While I'm not a total novice any more, I really still belong in the beginner class, but the problem is that those are held at times that are very inconvenient for me to get there, so I've been sorta slacking by going to the Saturday classes instead.

Really, I have no business doing that, even if Sifu said it was okay, because I'm not getting as much out of the intermediate classes as I do from the beginner classes. So I've started being more diligent about sticking with the lower level classes until I am ready for the more advanced stuff -- which is why I went out into the sleet tonight. There's no point in dedicating myself to the art, if I'm going to do it halfway, right?

On a semi-related note, if you know much about me you probably know that I've been overweight my whole life, ranging from not-terribly-overweight, to being really quite badly overweight. Now, with the Kung Fu and the Bowflex, I am probably in the best shape I've ever been in relative to my age. I had more energy and endurance ten or fifteen years ago, perhaps, but I'm a lot stronger (and have a lot less flab) now.

One of the side effects of this improvement in my shape, is an enhanced awareness of my own anatomical structure -- that is to say, now that there isn't a thick layer of fat making me the same tone of "flabby" all over, I have become aware of where my muscles, tendons, and bones are, and I am occasionally fascinated by watching and/or feeling the sensations of them working.

The backs of my hands are an area that particularly catches my interest. Until about ten months ago, my hands had always been on the pudgy side, big pillows of flesh that just sorta moved with very little external change. Not so, now! Now, flexing my fingers, making an unmaking a fist, or making little flourishes cause the structure of my hand to visibly contort, contract, and shift, causing wonderfully complex ripples in the skin. I find myself like Jack Sparrow, twiddling his fingers in the moonlight and saying, "That's interesting ... that's very interesting..."

If you're lucky enough to have kinder DNA and always been in decent shape, this may be old news to you; but to me, still learning what it's like to have a body even this relatively fit is like learning how the world works all over again. It's a great adventure! Of course, I've still got a long way to go before I'll be doing the cover of Men's Health, but it's still quite a thing to watch that long-despised flab melting away after all these years.

I sure was a fool to avoid living in my body for all those years. I don't regret the effort I spent on mental and spiritual development for a moment ... but I do perhaps regret all the time I wasted in front of the TV as a kid.

Anyway, that's all for tonight ... I'm tired and need to hit the hay. G'nite!

-The Gneech