Recirculating Cheese

T: Monday night, I taught meditation. (By which I mean I led the meditation group, because Andy wasn't there, and Ken didn't feel like it, having done it the week before. Okay, sure, no problem.)

L/T: Tuesday night was square dance. I took the course last semester, but this semester I'm an "angel" (club member who dances with class members), because, hell yes I need the review.

T: Thursday night I taught aikido, because both of the regular instructors were down in Providence, where Sensei was teaching at Brown U. Lacking any better idea, it was all tsuki (stomach punch) all the time, but we have many techniques against that. And I remembered I actually like teaching - helping the beginners get the feeling of the technique and the feeling of their own power, and helping the more advanced students get some of the subtleties of the technique.

T: Friday morning, I was a new-volunteer mentor at Nevins Farm, teaching a couple of the cat-room volunteers about life in the barn (mucking stalls, cleaning the chicken coop). A couple weeks ago, I trained one of the other volunteers to be a mentor ("just talk through the stuff you're doing anyway").

L: Saturday morning is figure skating. We don't have the really awesome coach this time, but this one's okay, and each coach picks up on (and picks on) different things, so I suppose it's all good. I've been doing this for 13 years, and am starting to not suck at it, but I'd kind of like to suck even less. Skating, aikido, and square dance are all things I've done mostly once a week for the time I've been doing them, so testament to the power of Just Showing Up.

L: Friday and Sunday, I went to the MIT Kokikai Aikido fall seminar with Sensei. Sunday afternoon, he taught all the "secret" techniques, including one Dave hadn't seen in about 20 years. Cool stuff. The classes were more than half black belts, so really super good practice. It was after last year's seminar that I decided to join the Charles River dojo, after being mostly off the mat for 6 years. So good. At the end of this afternoon's class (while the Juijitsu class was patiently waiting to take the mat), Sensei called up selected black belts to demo freestyle, including me (to my surprise, but we'll roll with it). So somewhere there's video of me tossing around Jay, my current instructor. Cool.

+ Went to aikido on Monday night, and received my shodon certificate. Each one is hand-calligraphed by Shuji Maruyama Sensei, president and founder of Kokikai. My impression has been that it can take up to a year to get the certificate, so this is pretty speedy. Now I have to frame it, which can also take considerable time...

- The head cold started Monday afternoon, and there's no way I would have gone to aikido if it wasn't for the certificate. The gym is unbearably hot in the summer, and I was thoroughly beat by the end of class. I slept for 11 hours, called in sick yesterday, and am still under the weather today.

++ Four days on, and the quail chick seems to be happy and healthy. It's in a brooder (cardboard box with heat lamp) in the kitchen, and is endlessly amused with its friend, The Hand. More baby pictures when I get the chance.

- The other egg stopped developing, so this one is all alone (except for its friend, The Hand).

--- We lost one of the hens to predation. The dog came to the back door with the decapitated, eviscerated body of Millie, the mille-fleur d'Uccle, the less devoted of the two broody hens, but the one who sat the one surviving quail chick. Anyway, the dog didn't kill the hen, just found her. We have hawks in the neighborhood, but Francie (who dealt with the carnage) thinks it was a member of the weasel family, since the head was found halfway down a hole. We're keeping the remaining hens in the (enclosed) aviary, which is proof against hawks, but not against weasels.

Today I rode Stjarni, aka Golden Lord Fuzzy, aka Ponykins. lyonesse ran away to join see the circus, and my horse just had his teeth floated, like this morning, so she suggested I ride him. Pushed me on him, really.

He shed approximately enough to knit both of the new barn kittens (who haven't arrived yet). And it's not even shedding season yet. Shylo (may he rest in peace) used to be a champion shedder, but Golden Lord Fuzzy looks to be a contender.

We spent a while walking around the ring, breaking the ice. It was abundantly clear that no one had been riding in the previous 48 hours (since the snow began).

I don't get the trot/tolt thing. I asked for each one exactly as Lyo instructed, and he moved, but I'm still not sure a) if I got the right gait, and b) how to tell the difference. But we had fun playing in the snow.

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Yesterday morning, while we were shoveling the driveway (by hand, because the snowblower clogs up instantly with that heavy wet crap), Kylie took it upon herself to make muffins. We came in to find her portioning the batter into the muffin tin, and trying to figure out the oven controls. And this is a recipe that involves creaming the butter and sugar together, then alternately mixing in the dry and wet ingredients, in about six separate additions. I can't tell you how proud I am of her.

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Friday I received my hakama in the mail. Now I have to figure out exactly how to put it on, move in it without tripping, and fold it in the approved kokikai way. Woot!

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Thursday I took Kylie and her friend Izzy climbing at the rock gym, and signed K up for Youth Clinic, starting next week. Then took the kids home, fed them quickly, and rushed them back to school for Bring A Parent To School Night. Really, that's what it's called. It's a chance to see what the kids are working on, how it gets logged, get a chance to talk to the teachers, etc. A chance conversation with a teacher about some nautical maps led to my saying that the only US map we have at home is a water resource regions map, with no roads and very few cities; now they want to borrow it for an upcoming unit on rivers and oceans.

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Wednesday lyonesse and wereterrier went Beach Riding. I had work that I couldn't really put off, and I've been once already this season (December maybe). But glad they got to go.

I went to aikido, and received my black belt. Now I can unequivocally say that I have a Black Belt in Aikido, because now I have this belt, and it's black...

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Tuesday, I don't remember, stuff happened.

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Monday, I'm the world's newest black belt, and I don't even have the belt or the hakama, and I'm asked to lead class, because our regular Monday instructor has family obligations of some sort. So there are 5 "students" there, 3 of whom rank me - our 4th dan senior instructor, a 2nd dan, and someone who got 1st dan two years ago. I taught a number of techniques we practiced at camp, or techniques I'd used in testing at camp. The one time I invited commentary from our senior instructor, he showed how Sensei was doing it these days, and all I could think of to say was "Well, now we have a number of options; please practice in pairs."

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Sunday afternoon, iabervon and I tested for black belt at aikido Winter Camp. All brown and black belt testing is done at camp, under the personal supervision of Shuji Maruyama Sensei, but history has shown that he likes to do most of the black belt testing on Sunday. There was some shodan testing on Saturday, but it was some of the most uniformly flaccid testing I've seen in a while; I mean, not one of the six in that group was equal to the brown belt tests that preceded them.

iabervon posted extensively about testing here. For me, it's not exactly that it was a big blur - I was very focused at the moment, but all the mental rehearsal, all the techniques I'd planned to do but hadn't practiced endlessly, went out the window. The technique part of testing is attack after attack, and you're expected to do a different technique for each attack, cleanly and calmly. I did a lot of sankyo and kotegaeshi, which is funny because I remember my last two tests being mostly about the ikkyo.

I didn't do many unusual or flashy techniques, but the one that came off cleanly was the ushiro katatori (shoulder grab from behind) that we call the "airplane technique" - lead forward in a large circle, duck back with your head and arm between your uke's arms, take the slack out, and throw him sayo-undo. Okay, that didn't make any sense, but it's fun to do.

The other one that didn't come off so well was intended to be a tsuki leg-lift. Having run up to uke on other people's tests, I can say that uke will generally follow whatever technique you're doing without undue resistance, but you have to be clear in your technique - you have to put them where you want them to be. And I was over-excited and under-precise. My bad, that one didn't work, no time to think about it, move on to the next one.

For knife techniques, the only notable thing I did was for ushiro kubishime (choke from behind, this time with the knife at your throat). The usual technique for this would give the attacker too much opportunity to slit your throat, so I opted for the sankyo variation, which in this case involves driving the knife right back into the attacker's stomach.

Freestyle against 5 attackers went about as well as could be expected, considering that we never practice this in the dojo. It's all about throwing, avoiding, lining up the attackers, and doing this one peculiar big throw when you get 3 or more hanging onto you. It's not very Jackie Chan at all. Sensei says it tests your heart.

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Usually we go to camp in a group, at least 3 of lyonesse, iabervon, loravarnion, and me. This time it was just the two of us (and we probably wouldn't have gone either if we weren't testing). We took my car, which meant I did all the driving (about 300 miles each way, plus to-ing and fro-ing down there), because iabervon doesn't drive stick.

Neither of us are big talkers, so most of the trip was filled with radio or mp3. The whole NYC metro area, about two hours from about Newark to New Haven, was taken up with a single Indian rag - something I might find insanely monotonous under other circumstances (say during the drive down, when we hit the same area during Friday rush hour), but which I found meditative and soothing at 9pm on a Sunday.

We had our big celebratory sushi dinner (followed by homemade ice cream next door) the night before testing. The celebratory meal after testing was at the Montvale rest stop on the Garden State Parkway - mmm, Burger King.

After enlightenment, the laundry. Two gi are all that will fit in my washer, so I picked the least smelly one for teaching class the next day.

That's not much of a wrap-up, but it's late.

lyonesse and I went to her regularly scheduled aikido class tonight (as in, she was supposed to teach), and, predictably, no one showed up. But you never know who's going to be around and bored the day after Thanksgiving.

Anyway, we talked about the philosophy of aikido, and the things that don't make it onto Sensei's Four Basic Principles. We made a list, and left it on the chalkboard in the wrestling room, as a gift to whoever walked in. And I'll probably work some of it into Monday's lesson (which I'm teaching).

AIKIDO WISDOM: WORDS TO THE FOOLISH

• Don't be there
  
• Stand like a normal person
  
• Bunny hands
  
• Tripod spot (not)
  
• Breathe every day
  
• Don't escalate
  
• Take out the slack
  
• Don't stiffen up
  
• Fingers are tender (Plan B)
  
• Avoid the force (you are not a Jedi)
  
• Practice the demo'd technique
  
• Give appropriate attack

"Aikido is Love"
-- O Sensei

This evening, I witnessed the senior instructor of our dojo break the leg of one of his senior students. It was an accident, to be sure, but he was doing something he really had no good reason to be doing.

The context is that Sensei, the founder of our style of aikido, conducts a weekend-long seminar here every year. And one of the things Sensei really likes to do is to demonstrate a technique on D, and then call other black belts up to do the same technique on D, who utterly resists being thrown, then Sensei drives D into the mat to show how easy it is.

Sensei never really explains the point of this, which I take to be that proper technique, applied properly, works even against D, whereas improper technique doesn't work. But the subtext is that D is better than us, and Sensei is better than D. And we wonder why our dojo has a reputation for being hard-asses.

Anyway, Sensei called up E to do tsuki kokyunage against D, even though he out-masses her by 50%, is 2 dan levels above her, and made fools of the last 6 black belts Sensei sent against him. And D, rather than simply resisting being thrown, decided to counter-throw E, and she landed in some particularly bad way. I don't recall exactly how it went down, but I recall vividly how she got up and hopped one-legged back to the line, sat down next to me, and pulled back her hakama to reveal a bone visibly broken and displaced right above the ankle.

The athletic center med crew was summoned, with their band-aids and ace bandages, and they summoned the campus police (in the same building) and the campus med center EMTs (a quarter mile away), and E was eventually whisked away to MGH. In the interim, Steve from the Northeast Philly dojo took charge of splinting her leg, and endorphins took charge of her pain. Nancy from...I'm not sure which dojo she's from...appointed herself to gather up E's things, and accompany her to the hospital. D pretty much stayed in the background.

I must say, parenthetically, that I feel weird anonymizing friends and fellow practicioners by their initials. You know I usually name names (or at least LJ IDs), but this time I feel a need to be vague. Because it's unseemly to criticize your sensei publicly. Because it's unseemly to criticize Sensei publicly. But really, Sensei condones, and even encourages, this sort of behavior from D, and it's a wonder no one else has been badly hurt before now.

It puts a pall over the whole seminar thing, and I'm thinking of skipping tomorrow's classes, and going riding instead. Cheyenne's another one who will injure you unintentionally, but he's a horse, and I can handle horses.

Went to aikido tonight (heavy cotton gi + no air conditioning + aikido = sweaty stinky gi). The two senior instructors were both there, and neither of them said "yes, you and iabervon are testing for shodan [black belt] at camp this weekend", so that means the answer is "no, you and iabervon are not testing for shodan at camp this weekend". Which makes me much less inclined to drive 6 hours to work out in a heavy cotton gi in an un-air-conditioned gym (and watch other people take their shodan tests). But really, at this point, I'm not mentally (or arguably physically) prepared to have a Good Test, and really, I want to have a Good Test.

At the dojo, it may appear that the 4 of us (lyonesse and her boyz) run in a pack, but we just seem to be on the same wavelength regarding things like the utility and attractiveness of going to camp. If none of us is testing, and there's no other compelling reason to go to camp (other than to bask in the glow of Sensei's majestic presence), we'd just as soon stay home. The one downside to skipping this particular camp (other than the glow of Sensei's majestic presence) is that we'll miss E'beth's nidan test, which is totally going to kick ass.

0. I won't repeat everthing lyonesse said about aikido camp in her journal. This is just my own wanking, mostly random.

1. I tested for ikkyu, and she tested for shodan. Go us!

1.1 In aikido (and probably other martial arts), the point where you get your black belt is the zero-point in rank. That is, we count down to it, from 6th kyu to 1st kyu, then count up from it, from shodan (1st dan) to nidan (2nd dan), sandan (3rd dan), etc.

1.1.1 WRT the zero-point: Traditionally, getting your black belt means that you are now qualified to be a student. The closer I get, the more I grok this.

1.1.2 Counting down the kyu levels means you can adjust the starting point. As I understand it, styles with kids' classes start at 8th or even 10th kyu, so the kids can test more often, and have concrete proof and reward of their progress.

1.1.3 In contrast, Kokikai Aikido tries to conserve fabric by using the same belt for every two kyu levels, so orange is 6th and 5th kyu, blue is 4th and 3rd kyu, and brown is 2nd and 1st kyu. So I advanced a level, but continue to wear the brown belt I got last year.

This is probably of no interest to anyone, but I realized the wife and child were unclear about what test I was taking, and what it all meant. So there it is. I'll be testing for black belt at summer or fall camp next year.

2. I took a bunch of pictures of lyonesse's shodan test, but most of them are far too blurry to be useful, not least because I had just come off the mat from my test, and my hands were shaking like crazy. In a couple cases, the results are at least amusing.

Introducing uke to the ground, abruptly.


This is freestyle. It feels a lot like this looks.


3. They back-loaded most of the testing to the very last class, on Sunday morning. But of course they didn't share the testing schedule with anyone. I have two gi (uniforms), and I was determined to wear the good one for testing, so I ended up wearing for 5 classes in a row. Even with a t-shirt on underneath, it was pretty skanky by the end of the weekend. I just ordered a new gi.

4. Now I want to go to fall camp, in San Francisco. I mean, why not, I've got the frequent flyer miles.

In fact, I want to prioritize in favor of more aikido in the coming year, so I can be ready to test.

Yesterday, special aikido class with Dan McDougall, our sensei's sensei. Real good stuff. He spent a lot of time talking about the Principles. Usually class is about technique, and Dave will talk about this or that aspect of the technique, and sometimes about the feeling you're trying to capture, but not so often about the principles in and of themselves.

Today, I passed Freeskate 2. The instructor gave me the choice of staying in FS2, but thought I might benefit from trying the more advanced moves of FS3 (salchow? I can't even spell it). I have to agree, up to a point. We spent most of the last 10 weeks working on back edges and back spins. But I feel like what I really need is remedial Freeskate 1 - scratch spins, waltz jumps, toe loops, half flips, and backward 3-turns, all of which I feel really unsure about at this point. Guess I need to spend some time down at the park at lunchtime.