The Wishbone

When we have worked hard and succeed at something, we should be allowed to smell the roses. They key is to recognize that the beauty of those roses lies in their transience. It is drifting away even as we inhale. We enjoy the win fully while taking a deep breath, then we exhale, note the lesson learned, and move onto the next adventure. –Josh Waitzkin, “The Art Of Learning”


Saturday FOD: Chen Dao.
Sunday FOD: Hurricane Hands.
Monday FOD: Frolic Of the Five Animals.
Tuesday FOD: Little Red Dragon. 123.5 pounds this morning... eep.
Wednesday did not exist due to shifting work/sleep patterns.
Thursday FOD: Leopard Fist. 122.5


Lunchtime BJJ at Gracie Bellevue. Double-leg drills, ankle pick drills (arrgh, more confusion as to which lapel to grab/which knee to kneel on/which ankle to pick. I wish I could tell my left from my right.) Failed armbar from guard transitioning into omoplata. (Note to "choke up" as far up on the arm as possible, as well as keeping a death grip on the wrist or sleeve cuff) Some positional training from closed guard, then one spar with Sonia and one with John. I got one tap on Sonia (armbar), but she made me sweat for it.

Evening BJJ at Gracie Bellevue. Pat told me to "leave all my problems at the door" (Or "leave them on the mat" or some such thing, I can't recall exactly how he phrased it, but he was trying to be supportive. Another nice hug from Rodrigo.

Armbar-from mount drills (note, make sure to get that knee up far enough- right behind their head- make 'em use it for a pillow), then the same setup only going for a collar choke. I got to drill with Angela, which was nice since she gave me some good feedback and pointers. Those collar chokes where you haul on the pantleg are killer... one of the things I hate about them is that you really have no free limb to tap with- and since you're being choked, it's not easy to verbally tap either!

I drew some vicious competition for sparring tonight- black belt Doug and purple belt Alisson. Doug showed me a handy way of tightening a choke, and also tweaked my (minimal) leglock ability. When you roll with Alisson, you tend to spend a goodly amount of time suspended in the air in hip-cracking Chinese splits. He loves X guard, as well as any sweep that involves making a wishbone out of your pelvis. Even knowing this going in, he still got me several times. Neither of them ever hurt me, though...it's so nice to have a chance to work with good training partners at that level.

Spurred by my re-reads of Julia Cameron- and my desire to keep my brain as busy as possible so as to stay distracted from less pleasant topics- I have started writing weblit. Well, it's not exactly weblit yet because I haven't posted it. But if I can keep at it (Mood is what the cow did; I read that somewhere in the last day or so and it cracked me up... but so true), once I get a big enough chunk, I'll create a blog for it. Still haven't decided if I'm going to connect it to my training blog, or invent yet another persona. There's already some BJJ in it, though. And staff fighting. ;-)

JoE e-mailed me to ask why I haven't been in class. Turns out he might be willing to get together with me and do some sparring and/or formwork from time to time, so that would be really good. God, I miss my Kung Fu class. So much. SK has not even SPOKEN to me for three weeks. Guess I shouldn't hold my breath waiting for him to ever do so again. That's really hurtful. That's COLD, after we've been friends for some five years and trained together 2-5 times every single week; I was his "senior student" (his words, not mine), and by *all* accounts I never did ANYTHING WRONG- aside from my mere EXISTANCE (well, sorry for that, guys)- in the mess that precipitated this situation. He really treated me like garbage here. I thought he was one of those people that one could trust to have one's back- Gods know *I'd* take a bullet for *him*- part of my anger is at myself for trusting him, and frustration that after being this close for this long, I still misjudged him to this degree. I mean, do we EVER learn? By this age I've been fucked over by enough people that I would have thought I could trust my instincts better to spot that sort of lack of integrity- the people who seem to be an integral part of each other's lives and yet are capable of quickly and easily discarding you for no good reason like a used styrofoam cup (You can't even recycle those), and never glancing back or losing a smidge of sleep over it.

It's plain now that he picked that argument- when he texted me and chewed me a new one for letting interpersonal crap interfere with class- in order to provide himself a platform to stomp off in a huff and just never speak to me again- thus relieving him of responsibility to hang in there and try to fix anything. Way to go. Real mature, dude. (Note to self, however... don't ever again get sucked into an argument via texting on a damn Tracfone. I kinda doubt it would have gone much better in person, but I'll always wonder.)

My stew of grief, confusion and anger is starting to congeal with a layer of pissed-offedness rising to the top like that oily layer of fat you get when you refrigerate your leftover stroganoff.