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!

jumble of thoughts

I had a phone screen today! It went poorly, but apparently that's not unusual with experienced candidates at that company. There are some...internal discussions happening there, so we'll see if I'm actually out or not.

I get occasional little flashes of anger when things aren't quite right. Anna has done a stellar job of clearing out space for me in the apartment, which is why the flashes are only occasional and little. On Friday I went to make challah for a party; cooking, and especially baking, is a really grounding thing for me. I went to get my measuring cups, and of course, they're not quite there: some in the dishwasher, some adventuring elsewhere in the kitchen. There were a couple of Anna's measuring cups, but of course I wanted my measuring cups. RAR!

But only for a second. Anna is very patient about helping me find things, and in reality most stuff is still near where I left it, because she merged our kitchen stuff, rather than box mine up. (Partly due to time, partly because I often have nice stuff.)

I've got clean clothes in my space in the closet, and I've brought up some books, so I'm feeling a lot more at home in the apartment. It's still too small for 2.5 people, but we're going to be here a few more months, so we'll make it work.

It's very strange to just...be here, with Anna. In the same space. Like, we leave, we go do stuff, and we get home, and there's the other person! Like magic. I have a bit of a clingy urge to always be in contact somehow, always involved or communicating or something, with her; but that's not helpful for either of us, not what we need or want. We rely on sharing space quietly, leaving each other alone for stretches. It's just a little harder when we've been apart for 9 months and we live in a tiny apartment.

I guess more generally, it's hard to relax and unwind. I saw the hippie chiropractor again today, and enough of my body released that I'm starting to get some perspective on what a tight, curled-up little ball I've been for 9 months. My body remembers feelings of being relaxed and open and flowing, but my mind forgot.

Periodically in books and essays I see someone quoting their grandmother as saying, "You can get used to anything, even a turd in your hat." We adjust our habits of mind to our circumstances, and with time we can lose track of what's possible. Feeling relaxed is something I've been carrying around only as an intellectual memory--"oh, I'll work back to that when I get home"--and now that I'm finally putting it back into practice, it's just as awesome as I told myself to remember it was.

*creak* *stretch*

I went to yoga last night! Right downtown, not too far from home. Unlike the other yoga place, this one has proper mats, and is also cheaper, at CH$1000 per class (about US$1.80). I could do it 5 times a week and it would still be cheaper than joining the YMCA, and more convenient.

Now, yoga is usually good for my body, and the reason I don't do it much at home is first because my evenings are taken up with aikido and Zen, and second because I don't like it all that much. I have to work hard to keep my back muscles from spasming during some poses, or to keep myself from accumulating tension anywhere for the the entire class. My arms, shoulders, and upper back get worked to the point of exhaustion during the seemingly endless initial half hour of Downward Fucking Dog.

Today I'm sore, and my hip muscles are crabby (because my hips are already out of alignment). So I'm a little on the fence about whether I like it or not, even though I was able to feel more clearly the different imbalances of my body right now--my left side is a lot tighter than my right.

On the other hand, I'm desperate for some kind of body-movement practice, and this seems to fit the bill. I've always had this theory that persistent yoga would be really good for me; now I guess I'll find out.

bleargh

My little bit of sick turned into a full-on sick. I made it through the first couple of classes with some croaking and a lot of water, and then I figured I'd power through the afternoon, but Oscar basically sent me home, and I won't be working tomorrow either. I feel bad for the kids, especially since I'm starting to develop a vague idea of what I'm doing, but it's hard to conduct a speaking class (especially a rowdy one) when my voice doesn't work.

I've got nose congestion and an incoming hacking cough. But for now I get to sleep as much as I need.

This opens up a new vista in the family relationship, though, which is them trying to take care of me, and how I respond to that. They have some ideas of what I need to do to get better, and why I got sick: for the former, stay in bed all day, and for the latter, the change of temperature from my classroom to the teachers' lounge (compounded by not wearing a scarf, and if I walked around without shoes, that would also be culpable).

I resist people taking care of me, and I especially resist someone specifically telling me what to do. So that's interesting.

I'm trying to think of how I could teach aikido at the school. The big problem is a surface to fall on, since proper mats are too expensive, but I think some heavy carpets would do reasonably well, maybe with some layers of carpet foam.

exercise

I hauled myself to the Y today after school, because it's been another rough week and I needed to get the stress hormones out of my muscles. I'm on the fence about the Y. It's expensive compared to just running (US$50 vs. zero), and actually not really convenient. It's about a mile away from my school, and I don't want to leave my school stuff at school, so I'd be left lugging all my stuff either on the walk, or on a micro or colectivo. So the couple times I've gone, I've gone home, changed into street clothes, gotten my Y clothes, and gotten back on the micro. So if I'm taking an extra trip up or down the hill, I might as well go down the hill, run some miles on the flats (there's a fantastic running path along the water all the way to Viña del Mar), and then come home.

I did the rowing machine for 21 minutes, which sort of felt like a warm-up. Then a little random weight-lifting, Then 25 minutes on some fancy computer-controlled auto-adjusting exercycle thing. I set it for "cardiovascular workout", and I'm in the middle of the hard part, sweating and all, and this nice guy comes over.

"You need more muscle mass."
Okay, I'll bite. "Why?"
"You're so skinny!"
"So?"
"Farmacia Ahumada has a GNC kind of thing..."
"Protein?"
"Yeah! To help you build more muscle. Have you always been skinny?"
"No, for several years I was fatter. My body has two modes: fat and skinny."
"Mine too!"

He was really nice. But such a weird cultural value. Why does muscle mass matter? It's more that the muscles I have aren't conditioned for bicycling. I don't want more muscle mass. I like being compact and flexible.

Maybe he missed me doing 20 minutes on the rowing machine as a warmup.

that was awesome

I saw a new chiropractor yesterday, a woman in Oakland that Ann recommended when I mentioned how beat up my hands were. (Both thumbs have been jammed multiple times, and I have a couple of dinged fingers, and some of it has never quite healed, so my grip is pretty weak relative to how strong my arms are.) I haven't read the background on what she does, but the way she described it, it's a chiropractic modality that treats the body as a giant tensegrity structure (which it is), where pushing on one part causes other parts to move. She does some fairly light pressure on one area, and releasing that pressure causes that area to press back like a spring, and sets up a wave of motion in the body that triggers release in some other area.

It was amazing. For a couple hours afterward different stuff would loosen and unravel, and it's still unwinding a bit. She also does bony adjustments when needed, which she did on my right hand, which has been a bit jacked up for months since jamming the middle finger, and on my left thumb, which I think has been wanting to click back into place for several years.

(I know, aikido sounds dangerous, right? But none of my aikido injuries has ever needed a doctor's attention [because doctors are only good for acute problems], which has me comparing favorably with pretty much any other American doing any other physical activity. And in the realm of martial arts, you should hear the stories from the karate and tae kwon do and Krav Maga people. Holy crap. Those people are nuts.)

Luckily, I'm supposed to go back for a follow-up, because of course tonight that middle finger got jammed again. =)