Part Five: Please Make Him Stop Writhing, er… Writing! (Section One. Section Two is in comment One heh

<p>Part Four covered the how and why behind studying in china.  now ill discuss the important and controversial reason why the study involves nose knowing (i.e. why my nose is now more crooked than it was before).   reintroduced at the very end of part four was the smell of smeared grass which represents the sometimes unforgiving but always genuine physical experience itself.  now, here, im forcing myself into a physically experiential situation where the mental state in question, <span class="caps">SAM</span>, is required to manifest.   yes, there are other was of exploring these things. no, they cant substitute for my work here.  no, it isnt merely studying one of those chinese  things which carry a requirement of psychophysical unity. yes, it has to be fighting.  yes, of course i can tell you why.  </p>

<p>there are three main reasons why the fighting approach is irreplaceable:</p>

<p>first, the reality and threat of full-contact creates a situation unable to be duplicated in other training atmospheres. my very first response to the consideration of  a  total absence of self under full contact or life threatening circumstances was that:  if i dont perceive anything because my self is absent, then id have no self-care, no will to survive. without my self or my me wanting to resist death or loss, how could i possibly live or win?  thats the real crux of the phenomenon in this arena:  you do survive. in fact, thanks to <span class="caps">SAM</span>, your chances are better at surviving while in <span class="caps">LRC</span> for all the reasons previously mentioned: the lack of both emotion and controlled conscious thought provide a mental state allowing for heightened physical capability.  when the <span class="caps">LRC</span> does take over under circumstances of explosive, violent action, its a serious achievement bordering on the mystical and it indicates a degree of ability unable to be explored in meditation rooms with incense or while doing tai chi in the park. </p>

<p>the second  reason why this approach is important is because it involves a direct antagonist.  unlike other methods of sinking into <span class="caps">LRC</span> (from target shooting to yoga), in a fight, as mentioned in reason-one above, there is the threat of violence and harm, but, in addition to causing harm, the killer/assailant/opponent (cool, new acronym: <span class="caps">KAO</span>, pronounced &#8220;cow&#8221;, now to be written that way) is also specifically trying to prevent you from being able to obtain that silent fluidity.  unfortunately, losing your self doesnt happen the instant you step on the platform. it happens completely unannounced and unacknowledged (because your self is not there to regard it happening) and usually in phases, if it happens at all.  as mentioned, even under agreeable circumstances, this level of refined consciousness is elusive. but now, there&#8217;s actually someone trying specifically to render you unable to <span class="caps">SAM</span>ize by getting you riled-up, and otherwise emotionally involved.  the <span class="caps">COW</span> (kill me now before it starts, please) is doing whatever it can to get the psychological advantage in the confrontation before attempting to grind you into hamburger. but youre utterly confident (oh god&#8230;it would behoove you to stop reading now);  you know that if you can just shift into <span class="caps">LRC</span>, you won&#8217;t be subject to their cowardly attempts, and, that physically, by milking the benefits of <span class="caps">SAM</span>, your chances of winning (surviving) are good. but, you also know that if you consciously wait for a shift to happen, it never will.  if you want it to happen, it wont. if you <span class="caps">NEED</span> it to happen, it still wont happen. and then </p>

                ********////BAM!\\\\**********

<p>you get nailed, and it just mooooved twice as far away as it was before because now youre upset, maybe confused, probably herding  and</p>

                        ********////BAM! <span class="caps">BAM</span>!  <span class="caps">KABOOM</span>!\\\\\*******

<p>&#8230;now  youre lying on the platform looking up at  twenty fingers, oh ok, there we go, only 5, now 6, now 7, now wait&#8230; is this a&#8230; but its only been&#8230; hey, i feel like eating lima beans. oh hi coach. what are you doing here? why are you speaking chinese?  i&#8217;m a misslefish. oh hi coach. wo ye shi zhonguo ren ma? hen youyisu, wo hui shou hanyu. oh, hi coach, hanyu nihongo de iieba chyugokugo. pomplemousse? </p>

<p>the point here is that you cant talk yourself into refined consciousness even if your life is at steak. if you try, you end up merely helping the <span class="caps">COW</span> to keep you distanced from it and the <span class="caps">LRC</span> wont even graze you.</p> 

lani was up for the weekend.

<p>friday night we somehow ended up at a biker bar downtown drinking with a bunch of russians (lani&#8217;s russian housemate and his friends from princeton came into the city for a bachelor&#8217;s party). </p>

<p>on saturday, in a rare showing of ambition, lani and i didn&#8217;t sleep in all day (our usual weekend activity). instead we actually went out to see the <a href="http://www.whitney.org/exhibition/biennial.shtml">Whitney&#8217;s Biennial show</a>. then we wandered around st. mark&#8217;s place for a while. after dinner, we watched Mulholland Dr. then went out for a drink with julintip.</p>

<p>today, we again made it out of the apartment for dim sum and bubble tea with julintip, adam and some of adam&#8217;s friends.</p> 

i accumulate change like no one i know. every night i come home and dump out a big handful of change that’s accumulated in my pockets. i’m not really sure where it all comes from.

<p>over about the last year, this has built up to about half a cubic foot of change that i&#8217;ve dumped in a box in my apartment. last night i had a slight <span class="caps">OCD</span> moment and decided to sort and count it. i simply didn&#8217;t have the time or energy to completely sort it though so i settled for just seperating out the quarters (the only coin with any practical value whatsoever as far as i&#8217;m concerned) and counting those.</p>

<p>$100.50 </p>

<p>just in quarters. i was pretty impressed.</p>

<p>while that was kind of entertaining, i&#8217;m really looking forward to the day when we can use digital cash and smartcards for everything instead of having to deal with heavy and inconvenient coins.</p> 

Part Four: Cry Dry Your Eye Sweet Bess (TBH)

<p>because i think that splitting these parts up (due to the why8k? bug) makes them ugly and confusing,  i&#8217;m going to <span class="caps">TRY</span> to write smaller parts if i can, which means, of course,  more parts to waste your life reading. hey, at least you&#8217;re not paying to waste your life like at school. so, while keeping your patience meters in the red, onward we trudge.</p>

<p>part three introduced sanda and <span class="caps">SAM</span> and the fact that the <span class="caps">LRC</span> in fighting may approach a meditative state. part four is a linking section hopefully clarifying why being in china is necessary, and why i must have the kind of involvement that i do in order to accomplish essential components of the study, while at the same time satiating the crucial requirement of authenticity. </p>

<p>&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;</p>

<p>it should be said right off here that searching for <span class="caps">SAM</span> didn&#8217;t just coincidentally land me in china.  as mentioned earlier, the principle has been written about, studied, and practiced much more in the far east than in the near west.  it is, in fact, a quality not limited to the realm of combat or sport here, but is actually pervasive throughout asian culture itself, perhaps less so in recent times, but present nonetheless.  this is probably because the various philosophical doctrines  typically had a way of ending up in some sort of governing or guidepost roll here.  </p>

<p>admittedly, my <span class="caps">SAM</span> infatuation probably has its origins in a samurai movie or something. but, whatever it was that started things turning, soon i was funneled into thinking about the aimless baseball pitch of yesteryear, and from there it has evolved into a more comprehensive curiosity encompassing the territories of philosophy, history, and the very important cultural grounds from which both develop. <span class="caps">LRC</span> can&#8217;t be relegated into the restricted Occidental senses of biodynamics, or psychology, or physiology. in my estimation it can&#8217;t be seen as anything less than somewhat of a union of the three.  unity or &#8216;oneness&#8217; or whatever you want to call it has historically been an almost strictly asian philosophical principle (as you all know). </p>

<p>if we accept the above, that the <span class="caps">LRC</span> has a more involved history and emerges more noticeably in asia and in various asian things than in their western counterparts, then it naturally follows that our investigations should utilize the compiled knowledges which our eastern brethren have been housing for centuries. there&#8217;s a virtual database of <span class="caps">SAM</span>-related philosophical and physical discoveries and teachings which have been stockpiled over hundreds of years and is now at our disposal. this is where tucker&#8217;s superhuman parental unit  has problems: &#8220;why can&#8217;t you just read more books? why can&#8217;t you train here? for the cost of your plane ticket, you could have an entire library of this stuff!&#8221;  well, it is my estimation that such a library would be virtually useless.  it comes down to the fact that we, as westerners, are unfamiliar with asian ways of thinking. we can read about chinese-this and chinese-that in a fervent attempt at coming to understanding. but the very words we read are western; these asian things, when described through western convention, become westernized things.  the difficulty is not necessarily in the asian ideas themselves, but from realizing (let alone adapting) the very modes of thought from which these ideas need to be understood through.  if the methods of thinking we use differ from those under which these foreign ideas originated, then we&#8217;re immediately distanced from understanding, no matter how much care and scrutiny we use.  anything we try to investigate and gain insight into is immediately tainted by our own examination lens. merely looking, in this case, distances us from actually seeing. we  relate and derive meanings out of new learnings by using principles obtained in our own environment,  through a brain which was developed to use these principles as its filter for understanding.  we explain all new knowledge to ourselves through understandings which we already have. in our case, our filter for understanding is entirely western.  and, because words can only be communicative between those who share similar experiences (thank you <span class="caps">GEB</span>, yet again) we have no hope of understanding asian ideas through western means, no matter how scholarly, precise, active, or beautifully written they are. we can&#8217;t take interesting new ideas, describe them in western ways, call them by chinese names, and say we understand these &#8220;chinese&#8221; things.  </p>

<p>this is an area where experience simply can&#8217;t  be replaced;  this is the smell-of-smeared-grass. </p>

<p>Part 4 has introduced the asiatic factor into all of this, which is a required component  when you consider that <span class="caps">SAM</span> seems to be, essentially, asian.  actually, no&#8212; that isn&#8217;t right, and i wish i&#8217;d stop saying that. <span class="caps">SAM</span> is human, and has merely been more heavily contemplated upon and used in asia over the years than anywhere else that i&#8217;m aware of.   Part 4 also introduced this study as one in which experience can&#8217;t be substituted for, and also that this experience should be an &#8216;asian&#8217; one as one goal is to access the well of knowledge already existing here in an authentic and unfiltered way.</p>

<p>so far i&#8217;ve discussed personal motivations for training, my personal history of training, the interest in <span class="caps">SAM</span>, the benefits of the <span class="caps">LRC</span>, and just now how and why china is an important factor in all of this. next, in part five:  &#8220;Please Make Him Stop Writing!&#8221;  i want to spell out the components of my particular study which make it worthwhile and special (or so i&#8217;d like to think).  hold your respective lunches in your respective bellies people, it&#8217;s almost over, i promise, and then we can just get on with our lives.</p> 

made pontiff on perlmonks today. 700 more XP’s and i’ll reach saint.

<p>now i&#8217;m just waiting for them to issue me a funky hat and a popemobile.</p> 

pepsi: bad

<p>flossing: good</p>

<p>take care of your teeth, folks. </p>

<p>i spent about two years nursing a pepsi bottle (2+ litres/day) and not brushing and flossing often enough. about a year ago, i lost a couple fillings and noticed some cavities forming. demonstrating at least partial intelligence, i quit caffeine entirely (thereby curbing my pepsi habit) and started brushing and flossing much more religiously. demonstrating that it was only <em>partial</em> intelligence, i didn&#8217;t go see a dentist immediately. </p>

<p>i think quitting the pepsi and taking more vigorous care of my teeth halted or at least slowed the spread. unfortunately, plenty of damage was already done. </p>

<p>i finally made it into the dentist today to get them looked at. the results: well&#8230; he says my <em>gums</em> look healthy&#8230;</p>

<p>my teeth have some issues though. next wednesday i go in for my first root canal. joy. some cavities to take care of too but they&#8217;ll probably wait until after i upgrade my dental plan so i don&#8217;t have to pay for them out of pocket.</p>

<p>to top it off, i&#8217;m still due to get my wisdom teeth out.</p> 

Part Three: Ow Now, How the Nose Knows

<p>i came in 4th at a semi-full contact aikijutsu tournament in Kobe, Japan in an event called &#8220;Randori&#8221;. that was cool, but also controlled and if you saw it, sort of lame and silly. it really wasnt an appropriate place to evaluate my level of consciousness.  after that, i returned to bates,  boxed some more, wrote my thesis, graduated, and got a cool job. it took me about 9 months of working full-time until i started feeling miserable. i felt as though i had abandoned or given up on something important and that now life was just going to speed on by and id never finish exploring my long-held interests unless i did something drastically committed. so i did. the point of this paragraph is to introduce drastically committed,  partially because i like the way it sounds, but mostly to prepare readers for the situation introduced next. </p>

<p>full-contact Sanda fights in China: these can get scary. no more helmets sometimes (depending on the venue) and absolutely fierce kicks and punches to all areas of the head and body like muay thai. the most interesting physical element is that you are also allowed to wrestle, which usually involves one combatant being picked clean off the platform and thrown down as hard as possible.   ive found it significantly harder to stay relaxed and to enter the already elusive <span class="caps">LRC</span>, which is exactly what i was hoping before i landed here. there are a couple probable reasons for this. one thing is that for the first time, in athletics anyway, im dealing with fear, which isnt easy.  before each match, and even some sparring sessions, im nervous and afraid because:  A) there isnt much safety; B) im fighting the chinese in a chinese art;  C) the chinese are obsessed with face, and whoever loses to the american also loses much face and thusly needs to do everything physically, humanly, and inhumanly possible not to lose; D) these guys have been training and fighting for years and, in fact,  were chosen by the government to do so because thats how things are in china; E)  the coaches assume that by choosing to participate, you accept the risks, and thus accidents are not their responsibility.  </p>

<p>another reason why the <span class="caps">LRC</span> often eludes me here, i think,  is the shear quantity of variables my  mind has to deal with in this system.  kicks, punches, charges, throws, timing, safety, the hooting of angry onlookers,  worrying if my opponent knows my knee still hurts from the last kick or throw and will take advantage by targeting it-  its absolutely exhausting and it is terribly hard to relax up there (up there being a platform called a lei tai which is raised two feet off the ground, and is a perfect 8&#215;8 meters).   im curious about what training and competing would be like if america does something to piss the chinese off again (of spy planes and embassies).  the chinese have a hard time separating a countrys government from its citizens. actually, this is a curious fact since the chinese people have been at odds with their own iron fist government for, well, ever.  </p>

<p>anyway, mentioned earlier as being critical for success in just about any speed/precision-dependent physical action, both relaxation and the <span class="caps">LRC</span> are vital in Sanda, although id wager it is among the most difficult grounds in existence to actually achieve them.  </p>

<p>this is exactly why i need to.</p>

<p>(next half pasted to comment to avoid the 8k max bug)</p> 

One of the banes of my existence… sand fleas in august are the collective other one… is that I try and keep multiple journals. Some are easy… the paper one in my little book. The poetry blog is slightly better… there are only 2 on sarahsmiles, one on my computer and 5 livejournal groups. You get the picture. What would be coolest, and I’m working on it elsewhere, would be the following… and I’m talking to Anders(Redux)… there’s a form field in settings where we can specify a URL. And that url would server to suck into Thraxil our external blog and dump it in a css/dhtml layer. Someone said I might be able to do it with an iFrame tag. But I forgot what iframes were called until this second.

<p>Even more cooler, a new form of whine cooler, would be to have thraxil tags you could put in outher page what would only include the info from that page within the tags&#8230; like just the content.</p>

<p>Hmmm&#8230; there&#8217;s thinking going on here. Maybe I can do some of this without the whine.</p> 

i basically spent the weekend catching up on sleep and watching movies.

<p>on friday night, i finally watched <a href="http://us.imdb.com/Title?0166924">Mulholland Dr.</a>, the new(est) david lynch movie. lynch is my favorite director and i&#8217;m ashamed that it took me this long to get around to seeing this one. pure genius. i&#8217;m really glad that i bought the <span class="caps">DVD</span> instead of just renting it because i&#8217;m going to have to watch it about 10 more times before i&#8217;ll have any clue about what went on. <a href="http://us.imdb.com/Name?Watts,+Naomi">Naomi Watts</a> really impressed me and i had no clue until after i poked around on imdb that she was Jet Girl in <a href="http://us.imdb.com/Title?0114614">Tank Girl</a>, one of my all-time favorites.</p>

<p>on saturday it was <a href="http://us.imdb.com/Title?0078788">Apocalypse Now (Redux)</a>. the extra footage makes it much longer and slower in some spots but definately improves the overall experience. </p>

<p>sunday afternoon i somehow got sucked into some action movie with Dolph Lundgren fighting insane, genetically altered escaped prisoners in some post-earthquake/apocalypse desert world. i don&#8217;t even remember what it was called and, honestly, the less remembered, the better.</p>

<p>finally, last night i watched <a href="http://us.imdb.com/Title?0171804">Boys Don&#8217;t Cry</a> because it was on TV and i hadn&#8217;t seen it before. powerful movie. love that cheerful ending.</p> 

Part Two: Missing Misty Mysticism

<p>this section involves  a meandering lead-up to hinting at present day motivations, so keep that end in mind to avoid getting lost.</p>

<p>i was put into a special program for smart kids like many of you probably were when i was 10 and didnt have to go regular school on fridays. i won  regional and state championships for Olympics of the Mind competitions and even competed in the world championships. i tested unusually high in creative application, spacial reasoning, and writing.  mentioning this relatively meaningless garbage is only to set up a comparative frame of my early history. soon after all the nerdery intensified, i was compelled to end it all. the nerdification, i mean. i stopped doing the after school young engineers club and readers society and instead chose to play sports.  this may take some explaining considering  who the likely readers of this are, but ive been thinking about it lately so it wont be too hard to write about it clearly.  </p>

<p>at the time, i liked the roughness and the exhaustion. the crashes and bumps and smell of smeared-grass. it was a smell of reality.  i liked taking my glasses off.  as anders recently mentioned, it does feel good to get exercise and the reason is simple. but for now i would like to bring up another reason why sports were appealing to my young geeky self: i liked mastering  the physics of action.   there was a degree of greatness in being able launch a projectile by hand at XX mph into your target, eluding a swinging obstacle,  especially if you could make it curve on a trajectory which tricked the eyes of, and eluded even the most precisely coordinated obstacle-swinger. theres also a shivering glory in the ability to intercept an airborne, speeding orb when you have to make a split second decision about where you anticipate the ball will be when your bat eventually comes around enough to strike it.   success here results in a feeling you cant understand unless youve grown it yourself.  controlling your body like this is a special skill resulting in a special satisfaction shrouded in a mist of special mysticism. its a time when your body and mind are working in unity. at a higher level of performance, your mind isnt sending signals to your muscles to swing!  or kick!, its your mind itself swinging and kicking,  your whole body becomes one, big, silent brain. this is the crux of what i would like to think will be a main topic of this piece of writing, somehow.  </p>

<p>incidentally, i would also like to  quickly mention, as it will probably enlighten a bunch of you, that this is how some people  are actually able to watch a baseball game and not die of boredom, a question we all ask ourselves and others from time to time. i suppose the same thing is true of golf (which is painful to admit) and, here in china, ping pong. that is to say, as we watch with an air of superiority about us and point out how silly the game is, or how idiotic the fans are for being so enraptured, we essentially generalize and assume that everyone is watching the same game that we are. but, depending on their experience, they arent. some of the observers of these sports know what it is like to have conquered action and master the properties of  dynamic movement. they have an understanding which we wont have unless weve played enough to appreciate these certain elements.  when there is a perfect pitch, or whack, or shot, they not only marvel, but they often nod and remember. in way, there is a sharing taking place between actor and observer.   this can be a very subtle and elusive idea and the fans themselves may not even be able to explain this and are thusly easy for the uninitiated to criticize.  </p>

<p>ive often wondered how it can be so easy for someone who  watches a ballet  with appreciation and awe be so critical and demeaning towards other areas of athletic performance (and vise versa) despite the degrees of similitude. these  range in everything from grace of movement, self-expression, concentration, to the utterly impressive feats of neuro-motor coordination and the grandeur of highest-level human physiological capabilities which are tied, in an essential way, to deepest-level human mental capabilities.</p>