I had to drag myself in to class last night. I was exhausted from work, recovering from a cold, and I was in a sour mood from work itself. It’s a scary thought, but I may end up being a dinosaur at my current work. There is a large push to “one platform”, and while that USUALLY means the desktop it can easily leak to the server room. Anyway, things are crappy right now.
Patti jogged with us, and we did it for about 25 minutes. That is so far the longest we’ve gone, and towards the end she was pushing us to run 3 faster laps, then do cartwheels and summer-salts (however that is spelled). Then we did the circuit training ( horse-stance, situps with the medicine ball, and jump rope). Finally after all that we did some nice stretching. I must have looked pretty bad because Patti came over to me and asked if I was alright, if I had food and water, and urged me to take a break. I never really took a break, but I did change my shirt twice, and that was after the class sort of winded down. A group of the class will do a performance this Friday, those of us who cannot make it did our own thing. So I did basic until about 8:30, then I went on the stage to work on our group broadsword set.
After class we went to Diamo, and that was a lot of fun. I stayed till almost 11pm, which was much longer than I wanted too, but it’s just so damn fun hanging out with everyone. Shahaub offered to be my “speed coach”, basically if I commit to it he’ll make sure to push me to go faster and faster. Thats a big problem for me, I never seem to put real speed into things.
mike Wushu
I have a negative bias against old movies. Mostly black and white movies. It is really weird, because not only am I pretty snooty with the films I watch (see that, I called them “films”, which makes my movie viewing experience that much better than yours!), so you would think I’d go on and on about how great citizen kane is compared to the common swill people watch these days. But I don’t, I haven’t even seen citizen kane, or Lawrence of Arabia, or a bunch of “old” movies because the thought of a black and white movie with a mono soundtrack and out of sync audio makes me cringe. Cringe and fall asleep from boredom. So, I don’t watch old movies. I will watch black and white movies ( I did watch Eraserhead a few times, but thats because it’s a weird ass movie. I’ll watch super weird before old.
Well a while ago, a friend of mine ( Corrigan ) purchased an Akira Kurosawa DVD box set. I WANTED to see some of them, but I was still too timid. Then I watched Lucky Number Slevin and found out it was a modern re-telling of Yojimbo. So after that I was convinced that I show watch some of these movies. Now, the other weekend I finally had the opportunity to borrow those from Corrigan. I came home, relaxed, put in Sanjuro and I watched it from beginning to end.
I was pretty amazed how well the story was told, all the fore-shadowing that was tastefully done, the acting and even the action. The fighting was pretty cool for an older movie, and Yojimbo had a very need “special effect” of the character “Sanjuro” throwing a knife at a leaf blowing in the wind. After watching Sanjuro I was pretty excited to watch some more, so the next evening I put in Yojimbo. It was pretty different than Lucky Number Slevin, which I was happy about, but a great movie.
I’ll continue to watch what the rest of them, and hopefully this brings me one step closer to watching more movies without reservations. But I’m pretty stubborn.
mike Movies
I didn’t fall asleep monday night until 3am the next morning. I really messed up my sleeping schedule over the long 3 day weekend ( had a lot of fun though ), and I really thought I could quickly recover and not miss a class. I’m really bummed that I wasn’t able to go, and now I’m feeling a cold coming on so that is just adding to things.
So I guarded the couch last night, watched Sanjuro until it was time to go to bed at a reasonable hour to wake up early enough to catch a early meeting that was cancelled anyway 
mike Wushu
We have been consistent with jogging FOREVER in the beginning of class, and its actually starting to feel a little better. I also made myself pick up the jump rope along side Pierre and James, and this was right before we did a few rounds of horse-stance, sit-ups, and jump rope. I got warmed up really quick , felt really good too.
Shahaub joined us, and I’m going to assume he’ll continue to join us again ( at least for Thursday ). I didn’t recognise him at first, with the goatee and all. He now looks a little more menacing.
Anyway, we did some basic kicks, but doubled the amount. lately, we have done just one line of each kick, but tonight we did too and a pretty fast pace. It was pretty challenging and I was glad we then switched to a simple longfist combo.
Our review of the group broadsword set went over well, and I think we are improving. Patti also went over who was going to do what at the up coming performance. Feb 9th, Saturday evening in Marin I think, for Chinese New Year. I’ll be doing a couple nanquan sections, and I should start figuring out what I’m going to do.
mike Wushu
This movie was probably the best Coen Brothers movie I have seen so far. I thought Fargo was pretty good, I didn’t like O Brother Where Art Thou all that much, and Raising Arizona was some sort of staple back in the day. No Country for Old Men is in another vein altogether and very complete in its approach. By that I mean every action in that movie is done from start to finish and there are no questions left over about what happened. It has won the accolades of critics, and I will gladly pimp it out. Michele seemed to like it too, and I kept thinking about it over the weekend, which I consider a good sign.
In case you have not heard, the premise is pretty straight forward. A guy is out hunting and stumbles across what looks like a large drug exchange gone wrong. With that he also find a bunch of heroine (by thats not of any interest), and a satchel of money. 2 million or so. Unfortunate for him a relentless hitman (Chigurh) is after him, who is a pretty messed up guy.
Well worth either buying it or renting it, I already want to watch it again.
mike Movies
It has been a nice holiday break, but it was time to go back and get a good workout. I knew it would be tough, I had done some light exercising over the holiday but its just never good enough. We started out jogging for 15 minutes or so, at least that’s what it seemed like, and it was brutal (for me). I did make it the entire time, I wasn’t able to run as fast as Pierre or others ( I did get lapped) but I didn’t stop and that was an achievement in itself. After a little break I did feel pretty good, and we then did a little circuit training ( again, 3 groups, each doing a different exercise for 40 seconds ). One round was good, and I felt with that particular set I could have done a couple more rounds.
We then did a nice round of horse stance, balancing, side kicks, and then stretching. The previous routine felt like a great transition into stretching. It worked and stretched out the legs just a little so all our passive stretching wasn’t so sudden and painful.
Basics were good, we ran through them pretty quick and covered a lot. I’d still like to work on getting an aerial in the next few months. After that I worked on the group broadsword set, Umaru was getting pretty discouraged about the set and some of the things that have changed, while I understand I think the only real solution is to practise and then ask for more clarification. Oh and practise, yeah, do that and it will work out.
So class was great up until Cary said “What’s Half Life? Episode 2? Thats lame, I got Halo episode 3!!1!”. Keep in mind this is while he butted in a conversation Isao and I were having about episode 2 and its merits. It’s console players like him that are the reason why games are watered down.
Oh, on another note, I updated the wushu west website. I added a page for the 2007 china trip and replaced the photo gallery. The photo gallery could look nicer, but it’s been difficult getting it to behave exactly how i want it to. The china page took forever because it was entrusted to Cary to throw down some verbage and cobble some pictures together. six months later I was still getting grief from patti and I had to do it. Anyway, thought i should pimp that out and you know, let the google search bots know the site is still being updated.
mike Wushu
