Whacked

The observant browser will have noticed that I have no idea what purpose this blog serves any longer. It started as a means for keeping friends and family up to date on what the heck I'm doing here in faraway D.C./Reston. Along the way it morphed into sort of a clumsy effort to practice posting my opinions about things and stuff in anticipation of freelance gigs writing for MSNBC (which, thank God, hasn't managed to scarf up Yahoo! just yet).

However, I think we can all agree that no matter what the purpose of a blog is, it's always entertaining to learn about how completely and thoroughly I've been whacked in the arm during a kali class. We were practicing a particular drill that includes throwing an elbow at your partner's head. They evade/block and meanwhile bust up the arm you're throwing the elbow with.

In retrospect, I should have tried harder earlier in the class to keep from banging my partner's hand with a stick. Turnabout's fair play, I guess.

However, it was the practicing with the instructor that really beat me up.

I don't know why I like getting whacked during martial arts classes, but boy it gets the blood pumping (interstitially that is). Perhaps it's like when Samuel Johnson's responded to Bishop Berkeley's solipsistic view of the universe. Berkeley suggested that empiricism was fundamentally problematic because all you could know of the world was through your perceptions and so nothing existed but in your mind. Johnson gamely kicked a stone and cried, "I refute it thus."

The same sentiment was echoed more recently toward the end of Drugstore Cowboy when Matt Dillon announces that "there's nothing more life affirming than getting the shit kicked out of you". Perhaps it's true.