I have an epsom problem; admitting it is the first step. I stayed up late tonight, reluctant to go soak in a bath full of the stuff, but knowing it would help if I did. I did. It helped.
I put myself in the unnatural position of having abused my physical corpus too much today entirely because of a defect in my character, which actually pleases me in a perverse way -- I think a lot of the time, our intellectual patterns and personalities, the way we think, has an effect on our actions that is less than you'd expect. Most people think they're brave; most people in battle freeze up and never fire a shot. Most people think they're generous, but they ignore panhandlers and think the cops should do something about them. I think I'm an egotistical showoff... so, when a chance came to show off, it's a little gratifying that I actually dove in over my head.
There's a boy named Jake who was diagnosed with brain cancer a few months ago -- I don't know the lad; I've only seen his father a few times, never exchanged a word with him. However, his father is a senior instructor at the kung fu school I have been studying at for more than two years now, and I have a lot of mutual friends with him -- more specifically, I have a lot of people that I really respect that really respect him. Last time I saw him (the father), he was earning his third degree black belt, and part of his test was breaking a cinder block. With his forehead.
Why do you study kung fu? So you can do stuff that looks cool. Breaking cinder blocks with your forehead, as absolutely ridiculous and impractical a skill as it might be, looks pretty darn cool. So, without having met the guy, I'm a fan.
I live in one of the world's more backwards countries, unfortunately; we have a system here where, if you get sick, the culture would like to see that drive you into total bankruptcy and ruin your life. The legal system is set up so that, if you have a kid that gets sick, not only do you get to deal with the massive nervous breakdowns that are the logical result of that, but you get the massive nervous breakdowns that come with being massively in debt for the rest of your life, as well. Every other country in the world, of course, has figured out that this is no way to live, but here in cavemanland, I mean Amurrica, we're still working on it. So the kung fu school has come together to help out, and part of that is running some fund-raising events. And one of those was a board-breaking marathon.
Donate ten clams, break five boards. Donate twenty clams, break ten boards. And my old friend Mike said that he'd top anyone else who bought boards... when I heard about it, he had donated seventy and was planning to break thirty-five boards. So I had to do him one better.
So, skipping some back and forths, today Mike, me, and a bunch of other board-breaking enthusiasts got together to break some boards. Most people had pledged for five or ten boards. I had seventy. Mike, persistent to the end, had seventy-five. Which is, I want to point out, kind of a lot.
I have been told there are some cool pictures out there somewhere, one of me kicking through one board with each foot simultaneously, and maybe I'll get a copy of those eventually. I also did some speed breaks (which are breaks where the guy isn't holding the board tightly -- he just sort of has two fingers on them, and you have to hit them with a lot of speed and force or they'll go flying away), and one from a dive roll, and another from a half-backflip. Mike did a couple of cool things I don't know how to do -- including, yes, a forehead break, and he also did a cinder block, although he used his hand for it. He also did a Bruce Lee-like zero-inch punch -- the one where you put your hand solidly against the board, then break it without pulling it away, with total disregard for all laws of physics. Importantly, we looked super-cool in some pictures; more importantly, the school raised a significant amount of money for Jake.
And I have bruises on both elbows, my hands, my knees, and my feet. I soaked in the tub an alarmingly long time -- from about 1.45 to almost 3.30, which is less alarming when you realize daylight savings time happened tonight. And I drank about a bottle of wine while I was in there, so I'm drunk as a wheelbarrow now, so this whole entry is probably full of rambling and typos.
But it was a good day, a productive day, and I learned how to do some things that I couldn't before. And I looked cool doing it. And I drank a lot of wine. Hard to have a better day than that....
