Dudes, I am so sore and tired!
You know what’s really, really unpopular? Being joyful. Just being happy with everything. Because if you tell people that, they come back with a list of 15 different ways their lives suck. Not to go all hippie on you, but wouldn’t it be nice if we spent some time appreciating good things? Just a THOUGHT. Yesterday morning, I started bodyshaping again. It’s the circuit weight training class that really got me into weight lifting in the first place. As I’ve mentioned, I wanted supervision while starting to work on my arms again. That neck injury thing is miserable sometimes. Unfortunately, Sandi doesn’t teach Saturday mornings, but this instructor is just as awesome. Also, I already love the other people in class. There are three other women who are just as chatty and excitable as I am. One of them was telling me she was taking a poi-spinning class in St Paul (it’s that Polynesian dance with two objects spun around the body on the end of a rope, usually lit on fire). How awesome is that?? She wanted me to get her info about FEMA and Iaido, too. Nice. I started with 6 and 7lb weights. I used to work with 10 and 15’s. Haha. Starting slow! It went really well, and though I’ve lost a lot of my arm muscle, it’s going to be really easy to rebuild. It only took me about a month to get my thighs back to their rocklike state. It’s kind of amazing. Also, I’ve lost a ton of flexibility again. That’s not at all surprising, considering stretching is my weak point. Yeah, I’ll just take another year to stretch out my hamstrings. Blech. After class, I got that huge rush of energy that I get after a really hard Iaido class. You know, the kind where I want to run. But I did not, because that afternoon I had IAIDO SEMINAR. So, the deal with seminar is that Michelle Sensei, Kore’s mentor, comes into town and teaches us way more stuff than we can really absorb, but that’s OK, because Kore Sensei and the Sempai (the black belts, like my instructor Aric) are responsible for remembering it all and teaching it when it becomes appropriate. Therefore, it’s really fun, because you get to do fancy advanced stuff and feel the samurai-hotness without having to be judged on it. I thought I’d be intimidated by Michelle Sensei (like I am by Kore, because she’s so unbelievable), but I wasn’t. I have so much respect for her skill and power. She’s amazing to watch, and she’s a good teacher. We reviewed basics, practiced cuts and the first kata (which changed for the second time since I’ve started; Iaido is an extremely evolving art, as I’ve discovered), did some practice attacking and blocking with each other, and then she taught us two new kata, where the fancy stuff came in. I loved it. Man, I can’t wait to get a katana. Whoosh! The sound is so much more satisfying than the wooden sword. The class didn’t wear me out as much as I expected. Mostly I was just excited. I came home and showered other people’s sweat off me (it’s the joy of the martial arts), then headed up to Myth with my sister to see Live (with annoying, very-popular local band Skywynd). Live isn’t a band I’d have really picked to see, but Stephanie loves them. I liked them a lot back in their idealistic college days when they were trying very earnestly to be R.E.M. junior. I haven’t paid much attention to them since. But the show ended up being awesome, as did the crowd. Since every single show I’ve seen lately has been incredible, I probably shouldn’t be surprised anymore! So, we were malingering before the show, and a guy at a table near us grabbed my wrist and said he and his friend were wondering about my tattoos. We got to talking and they told us they were from Winnipeg. When Stephanie pointed out that my tshirt (which was unreadable in the dim light) read CANADA ROCKS, they were our new friends. They couldn’t believe we had been to Winnipeg recently, and one of them apologized personally for my sprained ankle. He spent most of the show dancing next to me and singing in my ear. We practiced blocking maneuvers for when people tried to barge up to the front (I HATE THAT, FUCKERS). His extremely-hot friend (the one who wanted to know about the tattoos, and had a barcode with his birthdate on the back of his neck) hung back drinking, but after the show was still there hanging out while his countrymen wandered off. I asked him if they were leaving that night, and he said no. He asked where we were going next, and I told him we were going to stay and see if the music they played on Saturday dance night was better than Thursdays. They decided to stay and dance, too. OH MY GOD, I had fun. They pulled platforms off the stage onto the dance floor so girls could climb up and do the cage-dancing thing. So ridiculous. The music was terrible (probably 20% hiphop, 20% other top 40, and 60% really bad industrial). One of the Canadians apologized for being Canadian, because apparently that related to how they danced. They were the most-fun guys on the floor, I thought. I love people who just let loose and don’t care what anybody thinks. They’re just into it. Leaving later that night, I was laughing at myself. I’m just not a one-night-stand kinda girl, as fun as it sounds. The hot boy made it clear I could’ve taken him home. I’m sure it would’ve been great. But what if I found out the next morning he’s a shitty speller? Or has no sense of humor? Or is a conservative? AAGH! I couldn’t deal with it. This morning immediately following brunchfast, I went back to seminar to finish my 5 hours of intensive samurai-training. While doing drills, I realized that I was there with Kore, learning. Like, the new kata were new to her, too. I don’t know why that struck me as so amazing, but it did. I love that about martial arts: there are no experts, just different degrees of experience. I think this dojo especially is good at perpetuating that concept. After Iaido, I came home and baked. I had promised a bunch of people cookies, so I put together two kinds of cookies and scones, baking them all in an extremely efficient assembly-line process. After they cooled, I put them in enough small-baggies inside large-baggies to kill an entire rainforest of fake plastic trees, and got out the cookie-delivery van. Adrianne gave me a jar of homemade sugarfree applesauce that she had made today, too. Dudes, we should trade good food more often. Not that Luce doesn’t do a decent job of making it for us. So now I’m off with two more bags of cookies, to make dropoffs on my way to Xcel to see Foo Fighters. Wait, I wonder if Dave Grohl likes scones? Jenni