I am feeling uncharacteristically pleased with myself tonight. I'm not usually displeased, but I tend to keep a healthy "things could always be better" attitude going. That's still true, but just for now let me be happy.
1) I've gone to the gym the last three days, after slacking off and going just once or twice a week for a few weeks. It's been hot, we've sweated a lot and worked hard in Kali Tues/Thursday night, I was out of town in San Diego and doing a lot of yardwork there, etc. All excuses, and I decided last week that I'd work out every day over the weekend. And I have, and it's been fine. It's actually cooler in the air conditioned gym than it in the condo during the late afternoon, so even though I'm sweating, I'm sweating in cool air. Which makes a difference, somehow.
There was some worry Friday, when as I neared the end of my series of weight machines, I felt something tweak on the
back of my right arm. I couldn't really tell where, and it didn't hurt to the touch, but it hurt when I belt my arm to touch the back of my head, and it felt weak when I tried to finish my weights session. So I did more situps and leg machines instead, and walked home hoping I hadn't torn something.
Apparently I hadn't, since it felt okay that night, and while I skipped the arm weight stuff Saturday, it felt fine Sunday when I did my usual full workout and all of the weight machines.
2) Entering chapter five in my ongoing fantasy novel, I was a little unsure about it. I knew what main events had to happen in this chapter, and I knew how it was going to end, but I wasn't quite sure how to catch the reader up on events since the end of chapter four (five starts off 3 months later). That problem resolved itself pretty easily, and as I worked on the opening and filled out the outline for the chapter and the rest of the novel, I kept getting good ideas for the small details. Why no one else can go down into the ancient tunnels below the city, why they have the leave the city in a hurry, how they get out of the city without being pursued, what happened to the strange creatures they were traveling with at the end of chapter four, and so on. It sounds immodest, but I guess I'm feeling reassured by the fecundity of my imagination, at least when it comes to my own novel.
I really enjoy it when a novel has more to it than just the essential elements to move the plot along. Many people have remarked that what made Tolkien's Lord of the Rings novels so great was the backstory. Even though you didn't have to wade through the appendixes of begats lists and elf language primers and ancient legends and such, you could tell they were there, and that he knew far more about the characters and their world than he put into the actual novel(s). I'm not going to that extreme with my fantasy world, at least not yet/not this one in my first novel/series, but I like to put in interesting tidbits all through and through. They're mostly throwaway lines that don't advance the plot, but they're fun to write and fun to read. Even for me, since I usually forget writing them and rediscover them when I reread a chapter months later.
I don't want to spoil any now, but just for instance one character reveals their magical armor in chapter two, and then tells a quick story about how they found it on a man who had been long buried in a deadly trap... and how the man wasn't quite dead yet. The armor's origin could have been left completely out of things and it wouldn't have made any real difference, but the background tidbit was interesting and I thought it added some depth, both to the world that the story takes place in, and to the character who tells it (in terms of why he relates that info and how he goes about doing so).
3) The one thing I'm not especially chipper about lately is Kali. It's not going poorly or anything, but suddenly I've reached an intermediate stage where everyone else who is a regular student is much more experienced than me, and they're better at all of the intangibles. Intangibles I wasn't even really aware of just a few months back, but that now seem all important.
It's all about movement. At first you strive just to keep up and learn to land your hits with open hand and stick, and then you refine them in control and accuracy, and then you work on your form and style, and that's the really tricky part I'm at now. The other stuff can be done merely with practice and timing, but the form and style require you to really change the way you move (at least the way I move). It's about flowing and staying loose and being "water." You don't punch by jerking your arm, you do it by sending a wave through your body from the other shoulder and up from your hips, and then flinging out your arm with the roll of movement. It's sort of like the dance move where you stand still with your arms out, start by doing a little dip with your left hand, and then roll up that arm, through your shoulders, and down the other arm. It can be done through multiple people; Dr. Evil does it while holding hands with Mini Me in
Austin Powers 2, and the wave travels through him and into his homunculus.
The form they had in the movie was terrible, and we're not standing around practicing break dancing moves in Kali class, but that's basically the theory of the motion. It's all generated from the hips and goes down the leg with a kick, or up and out the arm with a punch or a stick or sword swing. We obviously don't do that every single time, and it's usually far too small of a circle or wave to see it flow through you, but once you grasp the concept of the movement a lot of things begin to make sense. I can now see why the Gura and Tuhan look so fluid and flowing when they move, and how you can punch them on one side of the body and get hit by the hand or foot on the other side an instant later; they just transfer the wave of motion through their body and lash out when it reaches the other side.
This is probably all very vague and hard to follow from my words, but in practice it means that Malaya and I are spending a lot of time walking around the house with our arms waving like the branches of a sea anemone, or standing still and swaying so our arms swing freely as our torsos and hips move. The hard part for me is separating the movements; my hips and torso always want to turn at the same time, and to start a motion down low, turn my hips, and then let it go into my shoulders and then down my arms is very awkward.
The motivator is that it translates into superior Kali almost instantly. Just last week we were doing a series of moves (blocking a punch with the right arm, then swinging that arm into a sort of clothesline, then flowing into several punches to the side) that we've done before, and that I've always been far slower and less precise with than the Gura. While doing them, I tried to stay loose and let my shoulders roll and my hips move, and I suddenly realized that I didn't need to do the sidearm block, stop, then curl it into a throat strike, stop, then swing my arm over and hit them in the ribs. I was doing each move with decent form, flowing from my hips and torso to give it power, etc. But I was stopping between each portion of it, since I couldn't think about doing one thing with my hips while my shoulders and arm did something else at the same time. I tried it though, and suddenly I was able to start with my hips, throw my arm sideways to block, and while my arm was still going I swung my hips to the left, let the wave go out my arm, and used that to change my arm from a downward swing into a sideways one, to the throat.
I don't know how perceptible it was to my partner (he was an occasional student and not one who is very flowing so I doubt he noticed), but it felt so much better to me, and I realized that I was doing it far faster than I had before, and with far better form and power. It's basically what we do with stick; you don't swing it left, use muscle to stop it, and then more muscle to bring it back to the right. You turn your straight swing into a circle at the end of it, and use the momentum to keep moving quickly as you come back to the right. It's faster and harder, while requiring far less effort. Easy and simple with a stick, but far harder with the body. And of course as I learn more about moving I realize that my initial stick swings were almost all arm and muscle, and that if I flowed them more they'd go faster and I'd have more control and power.
One of the humbling things about Kali is that you're constantly realizing just how awful you were a few months ago, and how limited your understanding of the martial art was at that time. Everything I thought I was good at in January and February I now know I was barely adequate at; in form if not results. And I know that will be true in a few more months. At least I hope it is; if not I'll realize that my progress has stagnated, and that would be truly depressing.
3.1) A tale of two students.
Student #1 has been doing Kali for about 3 years, and is good at most everything we do in Kali, but he's got very little of the flow or wave movement the real experts exhibit. He just does everything with muscle and speed and reflexes, much like me, though he's better (at
everything but kicking) due to much more experience at it. Student #2 has been taking Kali for a couple of years and was pretty similar to me in results a few months ago. #2 has really been working on movement and flow though, and he's recently had some breakthroughs in his form. He can't quite work them into his Kali all the time yet, but suddenly his stick work is vastly improved, and it's scary as well as inspiring, seeing how quickly he got so much better. #2 isn't yet better than #1, but you can see huge potential for continued improvement, while #1 has basically been stagnating for 6 or 12 months, as he learns new tricks and refinements, but hasn't changed his basic movement enough to really make a big difference.
I hope it doesn't take me a year to get to where I can move like #2 is now, but I'd certainly take that over being #1 in two years. And even though I'm not either of them now, I'm happy to just see clearly enough to realize where they are relative to me. (And yes, I'll probably look back on this in 4 or 6 months and think what a completely clueless noob I was now. That's par for the course thus far, at least.)
