self-revision.

At the end of the day, who we are is a story. We tell it to the world, to tell it how to treat us. (Whether it listens or not.) We tell it to ourselves, to remember who we were yesterday, and who we want to be tomorrow. Our sense of self is a little like cooking: no amount of skill can make up for crappy ingredients. I make a killer salt-crusted roast chicken, but not if the chicken was bought several days past due from Grocery Outlet.

Growing up, I was the nerdy, book-absorbed kid, and Tim and Ben were so profoundly gifted with their bodies, that I always felt like I was also the awkward, uncoordinated one. In the team sports that were prioritized, that was absolutely true. I was, and remain, mostly rubbish at baseball, basketball, and soccer. I’m sure I would have sucked at football. I was dropped into a gymnastics class that was unable to help me. Martial arts were off the table, because that was fighting. (Or something. It’s complicated, and I'm not 100% sure what the problem was. My life would have unfolded differently, for sure.)

It emerged that I was pretty good at tennis. In the violent, traumatic time of 7th and 8th grades, I carved out some space for myself by being good at the ersatz handball played between the two classroom buildings. (We used a racquetball and no gloves, so you needed a baseline pain tolerance.) My boarding school requires you to do some sort of sporty thing every term, so I did tennis, volleyball, softball, soccer, and weights. I was still good at tennis, and I turned out to be quite good at volleyball. (Softball and soccer were still a bit of a waste, but with nobody pretending the game is anything more than a curriculum requirement, who cares?)

For some reason, I joined the swim team as a diver. I wish I remembered why. It was appalling. Incredibly anxiety-provoking. When you dive, failure is painful. I was bad at it. Senior year, a kid broke his ankle, and I was on the varsity team. I did really poorly. I hit my head on the board at an away meet. Clearly I was gawky and uncoordinated.

Except...I'm not, actually. Even before aikido got me inhabiting my body properly, I was naturally good at a whole bunch of stuff:

• tennis
• racquetball
• handball
• volleyball
• sharp objects
• hitting people with sticks
• climbing
• not falling down cliffs

Ben and I used to have these crappy dart launchers, the kind of rubber suction-cup darts that often don't quite fit and are never really straight, and even if they were, they have the aerodynamics of a handful of wet sand. I was pretty consistently able to hit the outside of Ben's ear, from 15 feet away. I knew how the launcher worked, I knew how the shape of the dart affected its flight. Straightforward enough, but my therapist assures me it's atypical, as is being able to grab an insect out of the air. (Even if all I can do is crush it. Not flies, but mosquitos, gnats, and moths.)

Remember that time I made friends by flawlessly throwing a hatchet? I had literally never thrown a hatchet before.

(It's vastly easier and safer than throwing knives, which is why people have been opening axe-throwing franchises for parties, not knife-throwing. I think the difference is in how closely a hatchet's mass is concentrated around its axis of rotation, meaning the blade is not going as fast as a knife blade does. The mass's inertia keeps it in alignment in flight. And, finally, the blade is heavier and has a lot more energy behind it, which knives don't, which is why just getting knives to stick in a target—never mind hitting what you were aiming at—is an achievement.)

So it's not that I didn't get my share of the sporty genes, as though to compensate for getting more than my share of the bookish genes; it's just that, as happens, my growth was asymmetrical, and it took a long time to find the body stuff I'm good at. Oddly, this excludes dancing, which is so hard for me it's not fun at all. Same with video games.

And now I can read and play viola music, leaving me no wiggle room to doubt that I am, inter alia, a viola player. One of the violin challenges is knowing—feeling—where the notes are on the fingerboard.

One of the viola challenges is that the notes are in a different place from the violin.

Guess who doesn’t have a ton of trouble playing in tune on a viola.

aikido!

I did the aikido weapons class on Sunday, with no ill effects! It didn't involve any falling, which is the big test of my energy, but I also have an affinity for weapons, so it was a very comfortable way to get back on the mat.

I miss it. The fluidity that aikido drills into me is diminished right now; at various times I feel myself spoiling for a fight, or wanting to argue, rather than step back and take a deep breath and de-escalate. Sitting Zen is important (though I'm not doing that either), but aikido is more so.

The truth is that by and large I don't fight, and I do de-escalate, in ways that people find really striking, if they notice. Last week I was listening in on a meeting and I took over to defuse it before it became a really harmful and misdirected ragefest, antics that got everyone's attention, up and down the chain. I'm less patient, but I think maybe only Anna sees it. (Lucky her!)

So my perceived lack of fluidity is really about my own internal experience: how long it takes me to bring myself to that creative, constructive space of conflict resolution, how hard it is to let go of my idea of how things should go and find the idea that includes everything and better resolves the issue. It's not that it doesn't happen, it's just that I notice how much longer it takes and how much harder it is.

But! Aikido!

talents.

The Super Bowl just came and went, and with it the usual round of "sportsball" jokes. I make them, too, though in my case it's genuinely ironic because not only have I grown to find the game interesting, I more or less know the rules to football, baseball, and basketball.

I grew up in a sports household. My father played team sports way back when, was at least pretty good at them, and remains convinced of their value, and my brothers are preternaturally gifted at them (it never seemed to matter which one they tried). I don't think it's cynical to say that if you're good at sports, you'll probably find sports teams to be welcoming and rewarding places to be.

I was not good at sports.

Outvoted as I was, sports tended to rule the television. As long as I shared the house with the Patriots, Red Sox, Celtics, or whoever happened to be on, I wanted to at least understand what I was seeing. So maybe Dad and I didn't have the same ideas about sports, but we did (and still do) very well together talking about how the world works, and I learned about free throws and off-sides and safeties and bunts.

(As I'm talking here about how I didn't fit in growing up, I want to give a shout out to Mom, who not only doesn't particularly care about sports as far as I know, but spent decades as the only female in a house full of males. There's a lot I don't know about how that was for her--only that she has been even happier than I would expect to have our wives join the family. Maybe she should start a blog.)

My two older nieces are now teenagers, and of course they're good at sports. So close! I've got a third niece, so maybe she'll be awkward. Probably not, though, since her father is the brother who, in addition to being preternaturally athletic, was also graceful enough to do some dancing.

I was not good at sports. In between having to suffer through sports, I read books and learned big words and things that interested me and coasted through school until it required hard work, at which point I underachieved because there didn't seem to be any point to working hard at things I didn't like. (I know, right? That's a different blog post.)

(Of course, now my son underachieves, and I worry about him like my parents worried about me. But he's underachieving years before I did, so my worrying is totally different. File under "The Great Wheel Turns.")

Funny enough, some years ago I was up in Gold Country for Thanksgiving and started throwing a football around with the teenagers, and I was surprised to discover I was good at it. I could feel the weight of the football in my arm and the roughness of it in my hand, and it gave just the right resistance for me to throw it in beautiful spinning arcs to where I wanted it to go.

This has its limits: I tore a muscle or something--undiagnosed, because why bother, as long as it gets better?--that took a year to fully heal. I still suck at basketball. But after a mere decade of martial arts, I developed a fraction of the sports ability my brothers were born with.

Not to undervalue the martial arts thing. As my niece discovered through ten minutes of trying to torment me in Cape Cod Bay, I'm really good at making people fall down when they're not expecting to.

the growth of wisdom

Yesterday on chat:

James: I have a friend that used to get drunk and then combative. He was a black-belt in shotokan karate. We cautiously went drinking with him again, but my girlfriend and I brought fuzzy handcuffs, in case he went crazy again.

James: Generically, I stopped drinking with that group. Fighty McDrunkerson is supposedly okay if he doesn't get whiskey.

James: Several nights with that guy, he'd get in a fight at a bar, get us thrown out. One time he playfully kicked me in the solar plexus.

Chris: wow. you couldn't pay me to go drinking with a karate black belt who gets violent.

Chris: my black belt in aikido tells me that is a fucking stupid thing to do. =)

Yep.

signs of life

Another aikido class! I did the basics class tonight and didn't feel like a zombie afterward. As with the weapons class on Sunday, I can feel that I shouldn't push myself much past what I'm doing, but wow, what a difference. Tonight I had enough energy left over to make some chicken curry for the week. From scratch. Chicken curry is really heavy and bad for us, but the point is really that I had a work day and an aikido class and still managed to cook something which I'm not exactly happy with, but it tastes fine, and it's sort of a pain to make.

I had a better day at work, too, with various puttering and accomplishing of things. My friend Matt works with me now, and he said about our boss, "I love talking to him. It always changes my week." I told the boss that when I go to lots of meetings, I hate my job.

"So don't go."
"But some of those meetings are my job."
"What do you think your job is?"
"To help my teams work efficiently and happily, and to represent them to the rest of the company."
"You can stop at the first one. Helping your teams do work is your only job. You can scrap anything that doesn't directly contribute to that. All meetings are optional, except interviews."

He and I have had this conversation before, in various forms. It's hard when people are saying they really need you there to participate or offer information. That happened with two meetings on Monday that it turned out I could have skipped. I think what happens is that other people, Product Managers in this case, get OMG REALLY EXCITED about the giant new project that's happening. Of course they're excited. They're Product Managers, and signing a huge customer means they have opportunities to Manage Products. In their excitement, they lose what was already a minimal sense of perspective on whether engineers are or should be anywhere near as excited as they are about the product development coming down the pike. The answers, generally, are:

1. No, we're not.
2. No, we shouldn't be. (We can be, if we want to.)
   
3. Why are you still here? Get out of my office and leave me alone.
   

Everybody has lots of reasons to talk to us, and for non-engineers, it's natural to do this sort of thing in meetings. Engineers are really left out in the cold as the only people who don't want to have a meeting. It feels sort of churlish to not accomodate people at least a little bit. But it's the right thing to do.

We humans are funny this way: we always need to be reminded of how much decision-making power we really have. At work, as a team lead, I have vast, nearly unlimited discretion, so long as my decisions get my teams pushing the company in the right direction. How I go about that, what tools we use, what projects we take on, are largely up to me. I often forget exactly how far that goes, and some of my fellow team leads have never yet flexed those muscles.

We do this with our selves, too. We don't realize how many choices we make every day, or how those choices and responses and reactions shape us in turn.

Irrigators guide the water.
Fletchers shape the arrow shaft.
Carpenters shape the wood.
Those of good practices control themselves. [link]

The choices we make are like a carpenter working a piece of wood. We create ourselves, and through that, the quality of our experience. We have all that power. In the hustle and noise of everyday life, we just forget.

a visit from angry Chris

I don't get full-on angry very much. You probably haven't seen it, at least not recently. I'll get annoyed, which is a form of anger, but the full monty doesn't happen much. You'll know it if you see it. I've speculated for some time that J was eventually going to do something that would evoke that response from me, and it finally happened.

A few weeks ago, I watched J for a few hours while Anna went and did something. The usual sequence goes like this:

1. He starts to be kind of an ass about whatever.
2. You say, "I'm getting frustrated, I need you to do this thing and I'm not sure how to get your cooperation."
3. He makes his well-practiced but unconvincing moaning noises, says "Don't talk about that, it makes me sad," and collapses on the floor in a melodramatic floppy pile.
4. You stuff him in his room, while he simultaneously giggles and gets angry at you.

He likes to push boundaries, and he opened the door a couple times, once to say, very rapidly, "ChrisI'mjustopeningthisdoorverybrieflytotellyouIhateyou" *SLAM*.

He opened the door again, and I went over to tell him to shut it, to discover he was pointing a pair of Nerf pistols at me.

I can be comfortable with toy guns aimed at me when we're having fun. Pointing weapon-shaped things at me in anger is not okay, and out came a voice I've been preparing for years but I don't think I've ever needed.

I used his full name and, for lack of a better word, bellowed. "YOU PUT THOSE THINGS DOWN RIGHT THIS MOMENT."

Stunned, he dropped the pistols and started bawling. I gathered him up and he curled into a very sad ball in my lap, as we explored why I reacted that way and how my getting angry was similar or different from his experience of other adults getting angry (his dad, uh, gets angry fairly often). (Biggest difference: most adults don't let the anger go immediately and give him a hug.) We got it settled, I think, though he needed reassurance that Anna wasn't going to leave me when she suddenly found out I can get angry.

Strange as it was to feel and use that anger, I think it turned out okay. I think if I had exerted myself, I could have avoided yelling at him; it felt like half a decision, as though I recognized I was getting angry and it was a lot easier to let it come out as yelling.

Last week, he was fiddling with my motorcycle helmet and dropped it, both of which we'd already gone through the process of communicating how it was off-limits, receiving explicit acknowledgement, etc. I growled, he did that fast and nervous "Sorry" thing that people do when they're used to being around (and afraid of) angry people. But I didn't yell at him. He yells a lot when he gets angry, and I hope he remembers that other responses to anger are possible.

It seems simple, to recognize that I'm angry, and to pause and choose a response instead of the first thing that comes to mind. You know how hard it is, though: we've all looked back on times when anger seemed to take us over, and we're left saying things we regret. This is why we practice, whether it's Zen or aikido or something else. It's not about becoming some unreachable ideal of perfect calm. It's about caring for relationships. We're in relationship with others, with ourselves, with people starving in Somalia, with stars on the other side of the visible universe. Everything that is, exists in complete interdependence on everything else: everything comes into being together, everything passes away together.

Taking care of our relationships is taking care of other people, taking care of ourselves, taking care of the whole world. That's why we practice.

every which way at once

I'm occasionally not sleeping so much, either waking up at 2 AM, or, like now, taking some hours to fall asleep.

Like Anna, I've been feeling a bit adrift these past few months. I have a challenging job with very few reference points or feedback for gauging my effectiveness. I live with a woman and child, which is, to put it mildly, new. In theory I'm sewing for monk ordination and studying for the GREs, though mostly I do neither. I'm running regularly again (my resting heart rate appears to be about 50), but I'm struggling to participate in my aikido dojo and my Zen sangha. We had dinner with another couple last night, and I realized that it's been a long time since I've made new friends; Anna correctly points out that it's a challenge to maintain the relationships I already have. She also points out that before she and J moved in, I had a much easier job, and even then I dedicated the majority of my free time to aikido and Zen practice.

Running again has been great, and pretty easy because I can do it whenever I have time. Aikido is more problematic, but there are two dojos in Mountain View, and when I'm pressed for time, I can go to the one that doesn't suck. We'll see how that goes, but it's better than not training.

I need to find a way to spend time with J, as well: we had a couple of unfortunate incidents last week that Anna thinks may be his way of signaling a need to connect. My poor underused motorcycle needs an oil change, and he was over the moon just about helping me put the license plate on, so I'll get the stuff ready to do that this weekend and I'm sure he'll be thrilled.

Also, apparently I'm getting married. At least we've moved. We have a bedroom! And an enormous couch. It is glorious.

I don't think I've ever had this much stuff going on, pulled in so many different directions, and feeling like I don't have time to do anything well. I am not a fan.

the varieties of painful experience

I'm always fascinated by the varieties of pain I experience. When I was 13 I tripped and fell while running at full speed playing soccer, landed poorly and broke my left arm--both bones, clean through. May you never see a 45-degree angle in the middle of your forearm.

All things considered, that's probably the most painful thing I've experienced. I remember being largely incapacitated, and unable to see: my vision was just sheets of red, a lot of the time. Then there was a shot of Demerol, and then more pain when the doctor set my arm. It got sort of silly, really. I didn't have any mental training at the time, and in any case there comes a point where pain can just be completely consuming your moment-to-moment experience, whether or not you're consciously attending to it.

Years later, I was crawling to the bathroom with cold sweats from something that is not this but does involve pinching some very sensitive nerves; I found the will to re-arrange everything myself, but the nerves were sore and twitchy for a couple of months afterward. Maybe a year after that my back got all scratched up on a coral reef, and that stung, but the aloe with tea tree oil we mixed up as a disinfectant? that hurt like the dickens.

There was my first concussion, working after my first year in college, and the fractured metatarsal from falling off my bike. Of course aikido has had a lot to offer, with a couple broken toes, a fractured ball of the foot, one or two mild concussions, jabs to the ribs, and one thundering punch that thankfully landed right in the thick bony part of the sternum, leaving me merely stunned and sore, rather than writhing on the floor trying to breathe.

(This all sounds very violent and hyper-masculine, but honestly, my older brother racked up worse injuries playing touch football and kayaking. The longest-healing injury I've had was some muscle tear or something from throwing a football.)

All of which brings us to my current toe experiences. The left toe has been bugging me, but last night during aikido I took a step and in the right toe it was like someone shoving a big splinter into the side of it. Which I assume is what was actually happening, because there's a bone spur on that one, too, so the "splinter" is just on the inside. This was one of those sharp pains that leaves an echo: twinges, mental fear that it will happen again, and a changing feeling of heat and cold on the skin above where it hurt.

This one is actually more bothersome than the soreness on the left, so I started eyeing my calendar for when I could get the right one done.

When you're setting up a new computer server with multiple hard drives, systems administrators check the serial numbers: if the numbers are too close, it means they're from the same manufacturing lot, and you send some back to the seller, because otherwise they'll fail around the same time.

I guess my warranty is starting to run out.

toe-grinding 2: maybe another time

I canceled the surgery today, after seeing the surgeon yesterday. It was turning out to be more extensive and with a longer recovery, and while I was at aikido last night, it occurred to me that I'm not quite ready to give it up for any number of months.

About 10% of humans have an extra bone in their big toe. I'm one of them, and somehow the bone spur is interacting with it? And since the pain is where that extra bone is, there would be an incision in the pad of the toe to grind down the spur and take the bone out. That means 3 weeks on crutches, instead of 2-7 days, and an even longer recovery--even with the regular bone spur on the side of the toe, most patients report it takes at least a year to feel really healed.

I had the surgery scheduled for the 14th, and I'm just not ready to be on crutches for 3 weeks on short notice. Also I live in a second-floor one-bedroom apartment with no couch and steep stairs.

My plan is to stop running: I'll join the local gym and do elliptical or whatever. Stopping running should let me keep doing aikido. And I'll probably investigate some kind of bodywork: I'm not satisfied with this problem suddenly appearing 6 weeks ago, after not bothering me at all for the years since the root injury (fracturing the toe joints). It just doesn't add up, and the doctor didn't seem to have a good explanation for what's going on in there, which doesn't exactly make me want to cut my foot open and start removing bones.

So I'll try this for a few months and see how it goes.

toe-grinding

Something has been Obviously Wrong with my left big toe for a month or so, and it turns out to be a bone spur. A few years ago I had a month where I severely jammed both my big toes several times (aikido, of course), and apparently the reason it hurt so much was that one or more bones fractured. On the left, at least: I expect to eventually have the same problem on the right, which makes me wonder if I should just have them both ground down at once, because...

...while I can go running or whatever 2 weeks after the 10-minute outpatient surgery, I can't do barefoot athletics for 3-6 months.

Months and months without aikido. Hurf.

And yet, the toe is already discouraging me from training, so I might as well go ahead with it. Pfeh.

Stupid impermanence. =)

interview day. ugh.

I had a full day of interviews at Company X in Palo Alto today. 2/3 of them did not go poorly! The other two might be enough to torpedo my chances. I realized that I'm extremely rusty at coding, something that only becomes harder when you're doing it on a whiteboard with some stranger waiting for you.

Coding problems I screwed up:

• Given a sorted binary tree, print out the values, from lowest to highest. This is called an "in-order" traversal, and it took me about 30 seconds to do it recursively. Then it took me 25 minutes to cobble together a non-recursive, iterative version.
• Given an integer, calculate the corresponding Excel column number. For example, numbers 0-25 correspond to A-Z, 26 is AA, 27 is AB, 78 is CA, 79 is CB, etc. This is a slightly different case of an ancient and well-known problem, of converting an integer to a string (itoa(), if you're curious: normally you would be converting the number 25 to the string "25." This took me the entire 30-40 minutes and I did a really bad job.

To be fair, the others were fine:

• Write some code for a build system scheduler.
• Write some Java code for a hashtable. (That was exciting. I've never actually written a hashtable, because every modern language has one that's more efficient and better-tested than anything we would cook up. The interviewer said, "That's good!". Also, apparently I can still write correct Java after 5 years.)
• Model a game of Monopoly using objects.
• Describe how to search a list of objects with given attributes. Make it faster (by adding indexing).

The two problems that I screwed up would have been hard even if I were in coding-shape. With itoa(), in particular, I've never really internalized why it works. Something about it has always blocked my complete understanding.

The Director of Engineering was the last guy I talked to, and he was wonderfully honest and direct: he wanted to talk to me and get a sense of me and my experience, because given the interview feedback, hiring me would be more of a risk than usual. He recognizes I haven't really actively coded in a long time, and they'd be hiring me based on my past accomplishments (which are more important to them), and especially based on my friend's recommendation. If it doesn't work out, the company and I part ways amicably.

Anyway, I feel crappy and incompetent. Which I'm not, really, but my competence wasn't exactly on display today. Either of the guys from those two bad interviews could torpedo the job with their feedback, so we'll just have to see what happens.

I got home late and needed to eat and unwind, so I bailed on aikido tonight. I decided to go to the early class tomorrow--completely forgetting tomorrow is the first Zen sangha event of the year--when I checked my mail and discovered the instructor asking if I could teach the class. I love teaching and she needed somebody, so in theory I'll go for the early part of Zen stuff and then go to the dojo.

Blech, what a day.

the end of teaching

I haven't been writing as much, at least compared to a month ago. Fewer things are happening, as my time here winds down. I'm cleaning things up at school and trying to force myself to plan my traveling.

• Tomorrow is my last day at school, with a good-bye party at a teacher's house at 6:30.
• Saturday I go to aikido one last time.
• Saturday night is a barbecue at Heather's in Quilpue.
• Sunday I go north to La Serena and Valle de Elqui.
• Wednesday the 25th is the WorldTeach End-of-Service, which is a 4-hour meeting followed by a party.
• Thursday the 26th is the English Opens Doors closing ceremony, which will probably be boring.
• Then I go south to Castro, Chiloe, and putz around Chiloe for a while.
• Then I go to Puerto Varas.
• Then I go to Santiago for a couple days, then home.

I have no bus tickets or reservations yet. Need to make some calls tonight.

Meantime, I'm saying good-byes to my students.

This is Elizabeth. Every time we worked with the weather cards, she'd get really excited and say she wanted "Pablo Neruda!", the Chilean Nobel Laureate who wore hats and berets like what I drew (which I copied from one of last year's volunteer's lesson plans). Following my custom of giving things to people who want them more than me, I gave her the card.

Only 1-C and 1-J have thrown me parties, which correlates with how well-organized and studious those classes are, and how well we got along. A "party" at school might involve soda, but definitely involves chips and cookies and other snack foods on plastic plates. 1-J also gave me little presents: a pencil case and little box that say "Valparaiso," and a framed print of a Valparaiso scene. They were working really hard to keep me out of the classroom while they got the plates ready: their stall tactic was to insist we needed more photos, so we have lots and lots of photos.

This is my main souvenir from this adventure: it's a sign for the 702, the bus that runs past the house. It turns out the same guy has been making bus signs for Region V for 27 years, he's really nice, and his shop is a shack about a mile from here, downtown. It was about US$22 to get it done, with both sides painted. It's huge and I don't know where it will go in a small apartment, but I'll figure it out.

I really am just mentally exhausted, and I don't know that that's interesting to read about. I'm not sad yet, because with me that comes later. Right now I'm just...done. It's interesting to watch how I am when I have no resources left: less patient with students being obnoxious, but still listening and letting them know I care. The cold a couple weeks ago really knocked me down, and it feels like I'm not physically well enough to bounce back from it.

Tomorrow's my last day at school. 26 days until I'm home.

communication failure: it's not just me

There's another aikido group that uses our practice space. They're Iwama, the same style as the dojo in Vina and the place in Valparaiso (now defunct again), only they're a lot nicer, and a couple of them, Blas and Frederik, even train with us pretty regularly. (This post has a rundown on aikido styles.)

I've chatted a few times with one of the guys, Rodrigo, and it's illuminating inasfar as he's very much of the "I want to do O-Sensei's REAL AIKIDO that WORKS ON THE STREET RAR" testosterone school. He also doesn't seem to listen to what I say, and carries no memory of our conversations from one weekend to the next. He always smiles slightly (it looks to me like a smirk) and says, "So how is Aiki-Zen?", which I guess is the name for what Jorge does, and I guess means something to Rodrigo, though not to me. Then he'll ask me if I've heard of "Real Aikido," which I think means these Serbian guys, and I say yes, I have, it seems like a reasonable, if violent, form of aikido, but I don't recognize it as anything wildly different from what I do. (Although apparently the guy styles himself the founder of his own art, which I view as pretty egotistical, but whatever.)

Then Rodrigo tells me about Iwama being the real aikido, not like Aikikai's soft flowing nonsense. Today I finally pushed back at him, because he was being an idiot.

"Right, but it's not what O-Sensei was doing for the last twenty years of his life."

"Yeah, but it's his real aikido."

"We have movies of O-Sensei doing aikido more like modern Aikikai."

"The movies weren't really what he did."

Seriously? Do you watch Fox News or something?

"Uh, my teacher visited O-Sensei's dojo and saw him. Another teacher in my association trained with O-Sensei for a few years. That's what he was doing."

"Huh. Well, maybe."

Then he continued on with talking about Real Aikido Techniques That Work On The Street, including demonstrating a technique on Frederik, an Iwama guy who trains with us sometimes. Finally, I stopped him.

"Look, I think you have this idea about what kind of aikido I practice. We've never trained together and we don't know each other well. But I don't think I practice in whatever way you think I train, so I really don't know what you're speaking to. Look."

And then I did the same technique on Frederik, handling his significant strength and force my way (which is not radically different from Rodrigo's way). Rodrigo said, "Yes! Exactly!", which made no sense to me, and I was happy enough for the conversation to be over.

Afterwards I had lunch with Blas, the Chilean Iwama guy who trains with us.

He said, "I have no idea what Rodrigo was talking about."

the news from chrisland

I thought the week would return me to normalcy after my week off, which it has inasfar as most of the week is canceled: Monday was a holiday, today was a half-day due to a teacher meeting (I haven't seen that half of 1-H in 5 weeks), and Friday is off for Teachers' Day. Plus tomorrow night is the Teachers' Day dinner, and then Friday night is another asado at Bennett's in the country, starting at 9pm. I'm hoping to rent a tent, actually, so with my sleeping bag I'll have a place to crawl into away from the party, and go to bed before 5am.

It has been more or less nice to be back in the classroom. I'm essentially teaching the same lesson I figured out last semester, with different material plugged in. The kids were getting bored with it, but having some time apart cleanses the palate, and reminds them how much more fun I can be than their regular classes. It helps me to have a lesson plan that I know works; the kids' response combined with my lack of training has generally discouraged much innovation.

Rodolfo in 1-G is one of my favorite and most talkative students, and started chatting when I went to get them from their room.

"Hey, how come we didn't have class last week? Were you stressed out or something?"

"Kinda, yeah, I was tired, so I took a break."

"You can do that? Just...take a break? For being tired?"
"Well, it was only because Marcela was out. Technically I don't have to work when she's not here." [Not exactly true. I don't have to take the entire 45-student class. I'm supposed to work if there's a substitute or if I can take half the class with Marcela gone.]

He told this to Marcela, who just chuckled.

"But Rodolfo, I have different rules than the regular teachers. They don't actually pay me: I'm a volunteer."

Bafflement. "Wait...what? How do you support yourself?"

Which led to a conversation about my savings, small stipend, host family, and then he asked:

"What do you do in the United States?"

Someone else said, "Duh, he's a teacher."

"Actually, I'm a software engineer."

More bafflement. Rodolfo: "Uh...uh...how did you end up here?"

A conversation for another time. I'm good enough at teaching that they have a hard time imagining I'm not a teacher by profession, which is kinda cool, though it barely survives my self-criticism.

All of Chile is united and obsessed with the miners: people actually got up at midnight to watch the first of them get out, and stayed up watching for hours. I don't follow Chilean news much, so I only know what I get from the newspaper headlines on the street, and from Chileans asking me if I've seen the news. For the past couple of days, the house grandmother has had "Los mineros" as her muttering-of-choice as she goes about the house talking to herself. (She's always muttering something.)

My second aikido class yesterday went pretty well. It's really hard without even one really experienced person. Also, I was teaching in Spanish. Also, a new guy showed up mid-way and wanted to know about the art and then wanted to join the class. That worked out well because whatever his story is, he's ready for aikido in a way that not everyone is. So he fit right in and I think he'll stick. Maybe I should give myself some credit.

Updates are sparse this week because the "wireless" part of the house's wireless router has died again. It turns out I've been pretty dependent on it for feeling connected and busy; hopefully it fixes itself like it did when we got here. Otherwise, I'll see if Anna can bring my spare router when she visits in a couple weeks. Meanwhile, there's...uh...whiskey. And pisco! And cookies.

Oh, fine, I'll go read a book.

aikido class

I taught the aikido class yesterday, as planned. I had my usual nervousness around teaching, plus I was doing it in Spanish, which is...harder. I got good feedback from people though: everyone at their different levels felt it was useful, and appreciated the step-by-step clarity, which Jorge doesn't usually do.

One thing that's nice when teaching is to have some experienced students who you know well enough to predict how they'll respond when you throw them. I had one guy who I knew would respond smoothly, Blas, and then a visiting black belt from the other aikido group that uses that space. In order to do a convincing demonstration, though, I brought up Rafael, who's only been training for a month or two, but he teaches Shotokan Karate and he's built like a truck. He's easily got 70 pounds on me, and he's really, really, really strong (he showed me a photo of him destroying a 5-high stack of bricks at a demonstration last week).

I sometimes feel like the class watches Jorge, who's my height but obviously much more muscular, and they have trouble imagining how they can do what he does; and they know me, and I'm pretty strong even though I'm lightly built, and I see a lot of frustration. I wanted to remind them that there are people far stronger than me, and I can still do aikido techniques on them.

I did chuckle when Rafael grabbed my arm, and I said, "Well, let's see if I can do it." It was actually better than planned, because he was really trying, so by the time he fell down a few times, he was pretty tired.

I'm glad I get another class on Tuesday, to work on some different stuff.

downtime

Llorca agreed to take the remaining 5 classes for the week, since it didn't matter much to her, so I had yesterday and today off, and I don't teach again until Tuesday because of the long weekend. Much like unemployment, I have to be sure to leave the house, but in general it's clear to me that I did need a break, and arranging to take one was the right thing to do. I didn't need lesson-planning time; I just needed to not be teaching. Somehow 6 weeks sounds a lot more manageable than 7 weeks, plus I should give the kids another test, which is at least a 3-week project, so I think I can go back on Tuesday more relaxed.

I'm still really jazzed to teach aikido on Saturday and Tuesday. I really enjoy it, and from the feedback and results I've gotten over time, I think I'm pretty good at it. There are definitely some things I want to help the beginners be more clear about, that Jorge doesn't touch on explicitly.

Finally, I found a way to spew the past 6 weeks of photos to Flickr. Sorry, they're not labeled yet, and who knows when I'll decide to spend the time on that. Not this weekend, certainly.

near-weekend update

Mentally, still not feeling very good. My Chilean friend at school is still pissing me off. After another conversation today which made me angry but she seemed to enjoy, combined with someone telling me weeks ago that she was jealous, I think she's playing a Chilean cultural game between men and women. I don't have any other way to explain the information I have, her incredible level of non-listening, or the looks on her face at various points in the conversation. Obviously I don't know what role I'm supposed to play, so I'm going to start ignoring her pushing. If her feelings are actually hurt about something, to hell with her, she can figure out how to talk about it like a North American.

But, hey! I get to teach aikido! Jorge is going out of town for the long weekend of the 9th-11th, so I'm teaching on Tuesday the 12th, and if I'm not busy, Saturday the 9th. I love teaching aikido, and I don't get to do it very often, because Aikido West has approximately 762634672 people with higher rank and more experience, in line to teach ahead of me. Seriously, it's absurd. In most parts of the world a 4th-degree black belt will be giving a seminar and it'll be a big weekend thing; at Aikido West, we'll have 3 of them discussing which of them takes over the Sunday morning class if the instructor doesn't show up.

Some people don't like teaching aikido, which seems as strange to me as people who like teaching Chilean high school students. (There aren't a lot of those. It should be clear that I love my kids, but even the Chilean teachers are regularly pretty frustrated with their work, and you know how it is for me.) Some folks hate being the focus of attention, or feel they don't have anything worth saying, or don't feel they can teach in a way that works, or who knows what else.

Tomorrow makes 7 weeks until I'm done teaching, and today is 4 weeks until Anna visits. The time is ticking down.

it works both ways

I had a nice couple of classes today, where I tried teaching articles ("a" and "an") in a couple different ways: 1-B had already learned the jobs vocabulary ("lawyer," "carpenter," etc.) and I added the articles onto that, and then 1-C hadn't learned jobs yet, so I taught them articles on top of the new words. I learned two things:

1. Learning articles, as such, doesn't take very long. I break the "no explaining things" rule because with 3 sentences of Spanish, they get it, and then it just takes practice.
2. It's really challenging for them to learn both the articles and the new words. 1-C is really focused and good at school, and they had to work pretty hard to learn both at once in 45 minutes. 1-B is kind of disorderly and learns more slowly, but they had articles down in 30 minutes.

Hopefully I can design an effective one-hour lesson with that.

The other interesting thing was that I almost cracked my most obnoxious Javiera in the head.

(UPDATE: I just remembered 2 of the 3 Javieras in 1-G. 1-B's Javiera doesn't come close.)

Now, I'm a little twitchy sometimes about my personal safety. I had really violent childhood relationships with my brothers, and then I went to a violent junior high school, where my quality of life suffered from the delusion--common in my family's demographic--that fighting is never the solution to conflict. It's true that there's almost always a way not to fight, but that's a complex and mature set of skills, and if you take fighting off the table entirely for all time, what you get is being punched in the nose. Aikido has brought on a lot of changes, but I still have pretty deep-seated reactions.

I was passing out candy to 1-B for having an awesome class and for the two teams tying the game we played at the end, and Javiera made a full-body lunge for the bag. Even though I knew she was going for the candy, this set off my safety alarms, and I:

1. Dropped my arms, pulled the bag away, and guarded my body.
2. Threw an elbow towards her oncoming head, in a combination block and strike.
3. Realized what was happening and stopped my elbow a couple inches from her head.

Obviously a good thing for everyone that I didn't clock her. What's really striking for me is that the same training that gave me the "elbow to the head" response also gave me the awareness to notice it wasn't appropriate and stop it.

when I look up, I just trip over things

New Zealand had an earthquake. Here's some pics.

I've been getting my geek on by learning about discrete-event simulation. That's a fancy technical term for "making a computer model things like banks and fast-food restaurants," with independent events (customer arrivals) that take time and require limited resources (like cashiers). There's actually a large and important branch of mathematics for this, called queueing theory, but beyond me having a hard time and no interest in learning math on my own, the kinds of systems I'm interested in actually get too complicated for formal analysis. We saw all kinds of nutty stuff in Danger's backend system, for example, which (so far as I know) has too many moving parts to divulge its secrets in formal analysis. So you simulate it and see what happens, and it's faster and cheaper because you don't need 3 weeks and $8 million worth of computers.

We desperately wanted a simulation at the time, and one guy started writing one, but writing your own discrete-event simulator isn't a small project. Like so many things in software, it's not that it's hard, exactly...not simple, but mostly tedious, and a pain to get it right. Fortunately, other people have already done this, many times, and I'm playing with a thing called SimPy. It's pretty cool, and I'm not sure if it wasn't up to snuff in 2005-2006, or what. I want to use it to model something like the Danger system and see if I can produce the screwy behavior we saw, so I can think about what caused it and how to do things differently in my future projects.

Programming is unfortunately more fun than teaching, and way more fun than lesson planning. I'm trying to work on the planning anyway, though, since then I can enjoy my Sunday.

We had a lovely aikido class this afternoon. Jorge says he may add 2 more classes, in the evenings at a different location, which would be pretty awesome. It's a fun group for me to train with, because they're all really nice and Jorge studies aspects of aikido that interest me. It's also fascinating, though, because I'm far and away the most experienced student there, and it turns out that my training has been really good. Although we don't talk about it much, the standards at Aikido West are really high compared to many other places: partly because of the impossibly high level of accumulated experience in the students there, but also on purpose, so that when we go out into the world, we can acquit ourselves well and represent our teacher and our association. We've all had the experience of training with someone and thinking, "Wow, you're a second-degree black belt? Really? Because you're not very good." Aikido West intends that one of our students should never be that person.

From what people say and how they respond, it seems like they're pretty happy to have another experienced person around, someone who's maybe a bit more willing to show details of techniques than Jorge is. It seems like they're interested in how a more experienced person trains with Jorge.--he's bigger than me (about 6'1", 200lbs), and while he doesn't use any strength in throwing you, it's quite another thing for you or me, at our level, to throw him. Many of the students are smaller women, so it may be helpful to see that scrawny little me can throw him, without breaking a blood vessel with the effort. And I think Jorge likes having someone he can fling around a bit more fearlessly.

Odd side effect: despite the lack of training, I think my aikido has improved, and will continue to. Manuel (the teacher in Santiago) and Jorge both teach styles where relaxation is important, and I just don't have the physical strength and endurance I'm used to having, so I'm finding out to do things the relaxed way.

Short version of everything: I'm excited to be home, which makes it hard to focus on being present here and focusing on what's needed in each moment. Just like normal, only more so.

(The title is from Ani diFranco's excellent song "As Is": "When I look down, I miss all the good stuff / When I look up, I just trip over things.")

aikido place #4: finally.

It only took me four months, but I found a place to train that's less than 2.5 hours from my house! It doesn't have a name, exactly, and the website is delightfully nonspecific, but the teacher is Jorge, a 4th dan from Argentina. He's really nice, and the classes talk about movement and blending and relaxation and everything (among other concepts completely absent from the Iwama places I went to).

It sounds like Jorge may end up being Aikikai Chile's representive in Region V, because there just isn't anyone else: it looks like it's all the Aiki Shu Ren association of Iwama style. Jorge finds this amusing, because he's been away from Aikikai for a couple decades, practicing Ki aikido, tai chi, karate, and a few other things he apparently has black belts in.

Did I mention people there actually move? And they smiled, as though they were enjoying themselves! Madness.

We all seemed to get along well, and I felt like I slotted in pretty well. There was only one other black belt there today, and my style is similar enough to theirs to be recognizable, and different enough to be interesting. Jorge reminds me of Neville, back at Aikido West, with his smiling commitment to study and his laughing semi-respect of aikido organizations. So, Tuesday and Saturday afternoons, I have a place to go.

As you've no doubt learned from my previous adventures trying to find a dojo, the cultural state of aikido in Chile is weird, at best. Tragic, at worst. Today I got some more detail about the relevant laws, explaining why GFU needed me to have a teaching license from somewhere "for the police" before I could teach there: if you teach a martial art, you still have to be licensed like you did during the dictatorship. And you still have to be licensed by the Army, which explains the certification letter from the Army that I saw in framed in a Brazilian jiu-jitsu dojo earlier in my quest. So any martial art, like aikido, tai chi, iaido, karate--

Oh, did I say "karate"? Sorry. The law carves out exceptions for karate, tae kwon do, judo, and kickboxing, calling them "sports."

To clarify: to teach aikido, which normally focuses on peaceful conflict resolution and is remarkably useless for wanton violence, you need a license from the military. To teach something that involves breaking boards with your bare hands: go to town! No restrictions.

But whatever. Yay!