Three hundred forms

…Their minds are always hyperactive, too caught up in the unstoppable flow of thoughts to pay any attention to the ecstasy dancing in front of their noses. They don’t know what it means to live in a body that doesn’t just serve as a machine carrying the mind from one place to another. -Daniele Bolelli, On The Warrior’s Path



Lunchtime BJJ at Gracie Bellevue.

Armbar from mount, failed armbar transitioning to triangle, then failed armbar transitioning to a different armbar. I was working with some big brand new white belt, and I had to walk him through everything slow and careful (except the triangle, for some strange reason- he nailed that right off).

A little positional sparring. I told him to be very careful, since he was probably more than twice my weight. He was pretty heavy on top of me in side control, and kept trying gamely to force me into keylocks, which I was able to just barely defend. I got one tap on him (armbar).

Among the not-so-obvious perils of being a motorcyclist: if you are dropping weight for a comp and riding your motorcycle to class, you are assaulted by the scents of cooking from the restaurants along your way. The most eggregious offenders are the Romio's Pizza place on Redmond Way (garlic bread you can smell for a block and a half), The Garlic Jim's on Avondale (same scent, slightly less effective penetration... I think Romio's deliberately sets up an industrial fan right behind their stove), and some bakery on Cleveland that was emitting a pastry smell so lucious that I thought I was gonna pass out.



Evening kung fu. I was thinking it was about time to dial up the complexity of the hand strike drills, and had a couple of personal faves picked out- but then Nemesis, who was in front of me in line- picked the Tai Mantis elbow strike drill. I figured that was enough to Tai the new people's brains in knots for one night, heh heh. So I picked a simple Crane-inspired top fist out of forward stance.

After hand strike drills, we did some roundhouse kicks, then Black Crane one- and two-step defense drills against roundhouse kicks.

JM was drilling with Marcy, and instructing happily away. I'm interested to see whether having some new students in class is going to satisfy JM's tutorial drive and make her lay off *MY* case a little, or if helping the newbies is going to make her settle even more securely into her self-important (and self-appointed) TA role.

I was drilling with JoE, and after a bit, we were comfortable enough to start experimenting with the counters. Eventually he commented, "You're not shooting for my groin tonight... are you feeling okay?" Of course after that, there was a lot of groin-targeting to be done... with sound effects. "PING", "DING", "JING".....

Oftentimes, even after taking a step in, my arm was too short to palm-heel JoE in the head- so instead, I started dropping-elbow striking his leg after I trapped it, then adding a kick to the standing knee (and sometimes a zing to the groin, just to mix it up). SK walked over just in time to see me do a really great upward-hooking heel kick right into JoE's groin, and SK winced and covered his face with both hands.

JoE came up with a nice Dragony throw that used the momentum from my own kick to "encourage" me toward the ground.

A few reps of Five Animals. I noticed that JM was doing a different stance than I was during one technique. Instead of just assuming she was right and I was wrong, and changing my own technique, I asked SK, "Is the left leg supposed to be straight or bent here?" My version turned out to be correct.

There was some discussion of one other technique- I forget the name, something about an ape and a cup. There are three versions of this- the "nice way", the "not-so-nice" way, and the "REALLY not nice way". The latter involves thrusting your supported thumbs through the opponent's throat. I suggested that this would be much more effective if one allowed one's thumbnails to grow out and then filed them into points. Marcy stared at me for a long time. I grinned back at her. Stick around, girl, you'll get used to hearing that sort of thing from me.

SK and I were discussing Tai Chi in the car, and he asked me why I seemed content with half a dozen-ish forms in 7-ish years studying under CK in that MA, yet I was always agitating for more forms in Kung Fu (even though I have some 20 forms in five years). I reminded him that I have not asked for any new material since Hurricane Hands- a year and a half. Before that, though, I had always been whining for more new material.

I first referenced the Gummerson quote that I had sent to him and also posted here recently- about the idea that students get a "high rate of return" on their work while they are first learning a new form. It keeps their interest, it's instant gratification, and once you get the form to about 80% perfection, subsequent gains in skill on that material come much more slowly and need much more effort to achieve.

I also mentioned that CK had told me from the beginning of my time with her that it is common in her Tai Chi tradition to only get one form and work on it for three years. I knew from the outset that I had no hope of squeezing any new material out of her. SK commented, "Note to self.... nurture low expectations."

No, that wasn't quite the whole of it either...... My next thought was, "There's a competitiveness- I see other people learning new forms, and I want to learn new forms too." SK opined that he knows people with twice as many forms as I, who aren't nearly as "far along". Thank you. But you just hit on it: Not being able to evaluate how I'm doing, the number of forms becomes one of the few tangible ways to measure progress. I can't feel secure/content with my progress saying, "I have one form, and I'm incredible at it"; so I grope for security/contentment with "Muah ha ha, I can do THREE HUNDRED FORMS, so I'm the shizz."

(pic- Alecia (in blue))