Friday, February 10, 2006
Fixing a hole where the pain gets in
After something like twenty classes in eighteen days, I am taking today off. Both uniforms are in the laundry, there's a cut in the webbing of my little toe--more painful than you think--yesterday's two classes were exceptionally crushing, and so I am taking today off. It's not, mind you, that I am sore or stiff. I am not, and this is the miracle of intensive training: it stops hurting. It gets easier by several orders of magnitude. It's taken over my life a little, because it's the only continually rewarding activity I engage in. It feels like I'm inhabiting a whole new body. I'm in the best shape of my life, but when I got out of bed this morning I felt like I'd been run over with a truck. My limbs are infected with lassitude, laziness--my body is telling me to go the hell back to bed. But I'm not actually in any pain. It's striking, really, the speed with which a body can condition itself to handle abuse. One month ago, yesterday's lunchtime class would have ruined me for a week. Charlotte, the new teacher, is also kung fu-trained, and is shoehorning the chinese martial art into the korean one. Which is excellent: kung fu is easily the prettiest of the practical arts (capoeira is not exactly a fighting style), to say nothing of the most difficult. So yesterday, it was all kung fu. Abusive one-inch push-ups, several minutes in cat stance, learned the opening moves of tiger style (which does, you will be glad to hear, actually involve one clawing one's opponent). But kung fu has entirely different stances and movements, much faster and more violent than tae kwon do, which is fundamentally kickboxing, a sparring art. TKD is not a compact art, the way karate is, but it doesn't involve the same kind of explosive limb-flailing that kung fu does. So Charlotte wrecked us. For the rest of the day, I felt tired, but not finished off. Like I had something left that needed to be let out. A month ago, as I said, I would have been destroyed. But yesterday I went back for another round, with another teacher. A solid class, tough, unrelenting, but nowhere near as hard as that afternoon. But afterward, I felt more energized than I had all day. Like I'd really done something. Kung fu is definitely on the agenda for this summer in Beijing.
And so today I feel no shame in being useless again. Another thing I did yesterday, in addition to finally purchasing the tickets for my April romp though Europe (Barcelona, Dublin, Amsterdam, London; April 11-May 2), as well as calling China institute and Brown university, watching two 24's and one Alias and bidding Sir Andrew Naughton goodbye (the official farewell of the poorly- and provisionally-named International Friendship Society must be, I am sure, "See you later."), I started the Columbia General Studies essay. The question is simple: who are you, and what have you done with you life thus far? In around 2,000 words. This is the opening I came up with. I don't think it's quite what's called for:
"The greatest impediment to brevity when attempting to condense the span of one’s life into exegesis, into essay form, must be the compulsion to crowd the narrative with em-dashes and parenthetical asides (mitigating circumstances, context, details, etc), in hopes of imbuing it with a certain insistent dynamism, a gravity--in effect a justification of one’s life to date. Two thousand words: this is it? “I fit into two thousand words?” One feels one has lived fully, lived well, but after cataloguing the achievements of twenty years, one is likely to find that list meager, more rotted with indolence than one ever anticipated, and, dismayed, seek to rehabilitate one’s image by embellishing, amplifying those few achievements with those
million crucial details that made it all seem so urgent at the time. A life rendered in essay form is apt to be an exercise in excuse.
That said, I am undaunted. The task, after all, is not to write the life as it was, but as it felt. The character who says Brevity is the soul of wit is, naturally, a pompous, bloviating bore. It is not brevity anyhow, but timing."
Your comments, please.
And so today I feel no shame in being useless again. Another thing I did yesterday, in addition to finally purchasing the tickets for my April romp though Europe (Barcelona, Dublin, Amsterdam, London; April 11-May 2), as well as calling China institute and Brown university, watching two 24's and one Alias and bidding Sir Andrew Naughton goodbye (the official farewell of the poorly- and provisionally-named International Friendship Society must be, I am sure, "See you later."), I started the Columbia General Studies essay. The question is simple: who are you, and what have you done with you life thus far? In around 2,000 words. This is the opening I came up with. I don't think it's quite what's called for:
"The greatest impediment to brevity when attempting to condense the span of one’s life into exegesis, into essay form, must be the compulsion to crowd the narrative with em-dashes and parenthetical asides (mitigating circumstances, context, details, etc), in hopes of imbuing it with a certain insistent dynamism, a gravity--in effect a justification of one’s life to date. Two thousand words: this is it? “I fit into two thousand words?” One feels one has lived fully, lived well, but after cataloguing the achievements of twenty years, one is likely to find that list meager, more rotted with indolence than one ever anticipated, and, dismayed, seek to rehabilitate one’s image by embellishing, amplifying those few achievements with those
million crucial details that made it all seem so urgent at the time. A life rendered in essay form is apt to be an exercise in excuse.
That said, I am undaunted. The task, after all, is not to write the life as it was, but as it felt. The character who says Brevity is the soul of wit is, naturally, a pompous, bloviating bore. It is not brevity anyhow, but timing."
Your comments, please.
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