Been Meaning To

I've been meaning to post again, I really have. I just haven't had much time. I've been desperately trying to figure out what else to do for my dissertation (without hearing a peep from my adviser, which is making me nervous again) and therefore chasing wild tails that go nowhere but take a long time, doing tremendous side research because my wife's planning to have a surgery in May, and, of course, training. Thanks to a little "detox" tea (involving senna), I have time right now that I can't use for training, I figure I've researched up enough for my wife, and I just don't know what else to do for my dissertation. Thus, I'm finally posting.

Here are some of the posts I wanted to make but didn't:

• Turning With the Saber: After finally getting access to the saber basics dvd, I learned to do this properly. What a tale.

• Proxy Saber Under the Worm Moon: I went outside near midnight on the night of the full moon this month and turned in the bright, pale moonlight, carrying my proxy saber. Then I did some drills with it. Then I turned without it, but only for a few minutes. It was late.

• It's Not Cold Now, You Pussies: Now that spring is arriving, I was considering changing the small online ad for our study group to include this line based on the fact that our group has grown essentially none through the cold months, though some interest was expressed until people found out that we practice outside (even that one night when it was 12 degrees F out, which kind of sucked).

• No Sleep Till Saber: I'm feeling the itch and burn for the real saber I'll have in hand in about three weeks, after Bradley comes back from Chink-a-Chink-a-China. In the meantime, I'm burning up my proxy to prepare for the training I want to do that will do justice to the Silver Snake once I have it.

• Yijing: This would have been the exciting emotional rollercoaster that tells the tale of how I spent a long time compiling a nice list of how the sixty-four hexagrams of the Yijing might correspond with or lend theory to each of the forms in YSB, even though I'm totally ignorant of the vast majority of those. It was long, it was interesting, it might have been worth something (or not), and my computer ate it after I finished it. All was lost. There was almost crying, but I laughed and let it go instead. I might redo it piecewise (instead of all at once) in a more secure way.

If I gave a different title to today's post, it would have been along the lines of "Kicking it Up and Branching Out." Besides the increased practice with the proxy, loving some of the drills from the video (and hating others!), there's been a general increase in all things training. There has also been an increased emphasis on practicing three-strike drills with applicability and intent foremost in our minds, some of which are borrowed and some of which are o.g.'s (i.e. original), designed particularly to help our new guy (note: singular) develop with the Lion basics. That covers the "kicking it up" part.

The "branching out" is partly in reaction to the posted curriculum from Beijing and partly in reaction to something I read on our forum that indicates that a stronger feel and understanding for the Lion system comes from tasting the other animals a little. Since I have all the basic-drills videos now, the idea was to start learning some/all of the basic strikes from the Dragon, Phoenix, and Bear systems, though not making those a foremost part of our practice. I've only done so up until now with one palm in the Dragon and one palm in the Bear, but I have four palms total (2 Dragon and 1 from each other) that I want to look at this week. The new drills are making me sore in new ways and forcing me to think about emitting force differently, which is interesting. It's also already changing my approach and thought about the Lion System, which is rocking cool, though slight at this early hour.

Another post I might have done today might have been "The Fifty-Six." Bradley and I have decided that it's high-time that we sat down with the videos (figuratively sitting) and learned all 56 Lion System forms. At our peak, we knew roughly 30-35 of them, but we've forgotten most because we didn't know how to train them properly and didn't make time to practice all of them frequently enough (we often wonder how it is that one is able to do all of the training that we should as well as "maintain" 56 forms while drilling certain ones really hard to get good at them.. then we realized that there are certain forms that we'll probably never forget now and are getting better with.. realizing that what made that happen is intense drilling with intention and analysis). We've realized we can probably intensely drill two or three forms at a time, maybe per week, which should get us all fifty-six within a reasonable amount of time. We've also conjectured that we can speed this up and benefit more (win-win or two-for-one) by focusing on one attacking method at a time and working those, since in theory, at least, there should be some overlap.

That gives some idea of what's been going on and what will be going on. With luck, I'll have time to keep updates on here. With more luck, I'll graduate soon and no longer have the fear of a dissertation hanging over me and will have more time for all things good. In any case, Bradley leaves for China in less than a week, and so I'll have to figure out how to deal with my separation anxiety while he's gone. So ronery....