Ow

I just got finished being manhandled by a much smaller dude. Granted, he's my martial arts instructor, but still, wow.

I was the only one who showed up for class today so we did some trapping. It's a very particular range of fighting that you use to bridge the gap between punching and either grappling or more punching. It's elegant and artistic and doesn't work very well if the other guy is throwing boxing punches.

However, it transitions really well to take-downs, so we did some of those. Well, once you take a guy down a few times, as any male friend will tell you, you have to wrestle. Those are the rules made up in the time of Adam or Jesus or someone and there's no way around them unless someone gets hurt. Even then there'd better be some blood.

Anyway, wrestling at a dojo quickly becomes ju-jitsu.

I'm not very good at ju-jitsu.

I'm a fair wrestler because of all the time Dad spent throwing me and my sisters around during our youth, but I have talent rather than skill. I countered a couple of his maneuvers thanks to being about 8 inches taller and 30 pounds heavier, but now my ribs have bruised ribs and portions of my lower back seem to have seceded. Seriously, is it possible to prolapse your spine?

Man I miss being young and made of Nerf.

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.