CHAPTER ONE: rolling the dough

I blame two ex-boyfriends for this. Because these events happened nearly three years before I started the blog, I shall call them Mu and Dan. They were two martial artists who came from drastically different starts in life. Mu was a troubled kid from Baltimore who is the most spiritual person I know. His martial arts came out of necessity, and was no doubt nothing refined (he showed me his switchblade once that he carries wherever he goes). He had a particular fascination with bokkens, and he was the first person that ever handed me one to use.

It was like fish to water. He showed me how to do a basic block (which I still use today) and I remember the excitement I had. Holding that piece of wood was oddly empowering. I remember feeling joy as I knocked his bokken down. This was, I can say for certain, the birth of my martial arts.

Dan, on the other hand, went to the best martial arts school money could buy. His teachers included Navy Seals and West Point graduates. His stories what were got me. He’s say things like “oh, such-and-such used to make us do push-ups until we cried, and then we’d yell, ‘Can we do more, sir?’” - those kinds of things. His style, as far as I could discern, was essentially Kung-fu, although he claimed it was a hybrid. I loved his stories, but I could not put the martial artist he had to be capable of being, to him as a person. He had already changed at that point- moved on to other things, in this case, college.

But he was the one who gave me the motivation to start my martial arts journey. He went with me to my college’s karate club that first night and…well…let’s just say it was anything but storybook.

The first time I stepped into the college gym, complete with six sports sharing the space and leak buckets everywhere, my intimidation level went through the roof. It wasn’t enough to be the new kid on the block, but to have 50+ people all kicking past their heads through heavy bags, focus mats, and at each other? You’re talking with a person here that can’t tell her right from her left- that doesn’t have the coordination skill privilege to call herself “with two left feet”. I explained to the woman in charge (and, at the time, I didn’t pay much attention to the fact that women leading their own schools were a rarity, even in a college setting) that I had done some karate before, and that I wished to work out with the club. Unbeknownst to me, the “club” was the college karate group- the cheapest instruction I would ever have at $85 a semester and the most painful. These people were, as Mu and Dan playfully joked, a cult. They loved their karate teacher to the point that some would train two hours a night, six days a week with her, regardless of what papers were due the following day. They also had a ritual called “fight night”, which- let’s be honest- was point sparring mixed with the jubilation of the fact that it was Friday night, and the fact that the dining hall let you horde sugar cookies by the handful. For some reason, people thought getting pelted repeatedly in the head with kicks right after dinner was more fun than spacing out at home or going out drinking. I suppose they were right- especially in a one-street town that only had one bar, barely big enough for a pool table with a missing eight ball. You could always identify the karate “cult” by who ate nothing on Fridays- I knew them. Dan was friends with most of them- the quintessential of who I call “A-teamers” with the perfect grades and athleticism to boot. They had addictive personalities already- two of them were going on to medical school- they didn’t know when to stop studying. Naturally, I thought I was like that too. I like to learn. But they were smart enough not to eat on Fridays. I wasn’t. But that’s a story I’ll share in a bit. I told the lady I wanted to join, and she said, “Ok, but you might want to take the karate class first.” Hmm.

Of course, being the autistic that I am, I didn’t understand that what she actually meant to say was, “Come back when you have taken the karate class and earned your yellow belt.” So I went to club with Dan. Dan, being a black belt in his style, was shuffled off to the black belts’ group. I was thrown in with the yellows, taught by a rather grimly brown belt that probably didn’t care too much for teaching. She persisted to yell at me for my stances and punches, to which I remember to this day, her shouting, “Don’t you know where your freaking solar plexus is?!” I didn’t know. I was newbie. It’s funny now, being that I’ve gone on to do Gross Anatomy and I’ve actually seen it up close. It was an hour and a half of getting screamed at. Needless to say, I did not find much ambition to go back a second night.

So I decided at that point, after talking through the metaphysics with Mu and the logical strife with Dan, I sucked up my pride, admitted to myself I was not able to learn karate through osmosis, and signed up for the beginner’s class. Now, this class was strictly to fulfill a gym requirement. It was meant to introduce you to karate, get your belt so you could say to your friends, “hey, I got a belt!” and never return again. The students that came out of the woodwork for this class were astonishing. I will tell you about two of these people; Chunk and Paco. Chunk was a girl of…let’s say larger than normal body mass, whose exercise regime consisted of tapping a couple buttons on her computer to play World of Warcraft (later, she did not have to do this, as she invested in Bluetooth headset technology so she only had to say the button command). Her karate goal was to touch her fingertips to her ankles. When she achieved this, she showed me in such a proud manner, and I remember thinking, “Good, now you can retrieve the bar of soap in the shower when you drop it.” Let me be clear- I am not mean to fat people. Just lazy ones who bitch about their weight while stuffing chips in their mouths. There are many big people in martial arts who go on to do great things. She is probably not one of them. On the contrary, Paco was an overachiever with a Napoleon complex (and no, he was not obviously short) who had anything money could buy. If there was a golden key that claimed to unlock the key to martial arts, he bought it. The first thing I remember about Paco was that he ran out and bought this gaudy silver sparring gear set when everyone else borrowed some from the dojo vault (a Tupperware box). Nobody liked Paco. In fact, my first semester of college karate was devoted to ignoring both Chunk and Paco.

The thing that got me most about this class was the waiting list. People would tell me, “Oh, if you wanna get into Karate, you have to get on the list. I got on when I was a freshman. I’m a junior now and I’m still waiting.” I found out why. If you did it legitimately through the registrar’s office, you’d be waitlisted and screwed. People bum rushed the instructor before the first class of every semester, hoping to get in. Someone told me this, and I felt like it couldn’t hurt to try. There were 100 people who felt the same way. I figured a class this ridiculous to get in to had to be worth it. I waited for an hour, and finally was taken off the list and enrolled…the last person to get a spot in class. It was a good thing too. I was a senior that year and it was my last chance to get in.

The good thing about entering a college beginner’s class is that it does wonders for your self-esteem. No matter how hopeless you think you are, someone will always be more inept at athletics than you. I remember this, thinking about how some of the kids in my class had trouble with jumping jacks and stretching. Then, there was kata time. The head instructor was obsessed with group kata. We, all 100 of us, had to do group kata while dodging each other and the drip buckets for gym’s creaky ceiling. The amount of people who would bump into each other doing Taikyoku Shodan was hysterical; I never did figure out if my instructors were laughing or crying at us. The funny thing about it all was that we were cramming both Taikyoku Shodan and 27 movements every free moment we had, as if we’d actually fail our yellow belt test if we didn’t. That’s what the fear of college taught us, but that’s not how the martial arts are learned. I wonder now how many of those diligent students forgot those katas.

Even though it was a beginner class, I worked my ass off. I wanted to go back to club and prove I was good. I also wanted to prove that my escapades in my martial arts classes would be a worthy senior thesis topic. I am proud to say I am the only student from my college to ever have gotten karate to count as credits for my major. Incidentally, my senior thesis, “Kinship in the Martial Arts” won an award and $100, but didn’t help my anthropology career any. Maybe that’s why one year later, the school dissolved my major. Needless to say, between working physically and mentally, I pushed myself. And this was my first sense of injustice. I got a yellow belt at the end of class. Chunk got a yellow belt. And so did Paco. And, the hard work paid off…how? I was disgusted at the fact that I got the same belt as a lazy fatass who’d skipped class half the time and a jackass that alienated 99 people plus his instructors. But there was nothing I could do. I knew that after that, Chunk would be a memory, and she was (her yellow belt, I horrifyingly remember, was quickly shown the proper respect of being shoved underneath her bed with 20 pounds of wet clothes and garbage on top of it.). As for Paco…that was another story.

Perhaps now would be a good time to tell you, a little more chronologically, how I got into martial arts. My parents had taken me to a karate school, which was in the business of cranking out black belts and making money, when I was about 6. The only thing I remember about being there was getting to kick and punch this big red foam thing. My dad remembers the instructor shoving a contract in his face, demanding he buy one year of lessons. That instructor probably still remembers my father telling him to go piss up a rope. And so ended my martial arts career. For now.

This is what bothers me most about own culture- the need for all things young and beautiful. The idea that a child should peak at 10 or high school is damn near ridiculous, considering we live now to be about 80. What do you do with the rest of your 70 years? This obsession carries on in sports more than anything (except Hollywood, but that’s a problem for another book). I had a friend, not too long after my run-in with the black belt factory, who had made a local newspaper for her dealings in karate. She was a black belt at age ten who competed and won medals, and was training for the Junior Olympics. Everyone was ga-ga about it. She was supposed to become the next big thing. It turns out this is not an uncommon news story. “All-star kid, does this and this, gets A’s and is a three-sport star!” There’s just one thing the story forgets to take into account- the kid. A couple years later, my friend quit karate. So much for being the next big thing. I bring this up because here I was, at 21, wondering if I was too old to start in karate. It’s rather dumb to think now- yes, I was too old to make the newspaper or compete in the Junior Olympics, but those weren’t the goals. When I first came to karate club, I met two young people; one purple belt, and one almost going for black belt. They were both 17 or 18, bubbly and full of energy. At the beginning of that semester, the latter girl got her black belt, and decided to take a break from class. She never came back. The other girl, despite her age, was a wealth of information. She told us which people are good to spar with (and in some cases, which ones to stay away from) and never once talked down to us yellow belts. It was nice- I wish all young high-ranked people were like that. The point is, age shouldn’t matter. Maturity should.

As yellow belts, we were the babies. It felt at times we were the prey, too. I got the feeling as I lined up for class sometimes the high ranked belts were T-rexes looking for a quick meal, and we were the little plant-eaters they could pick off without anybody noticing. The yellow belts were always the biggest group; we were a collection of rag-tags who were delusional in thinking a yellow belt actually separated us from white belts. We instinctively knew we all had to band together to get through this semester- everyone, except Paco, anyway. Paco had his own grand delusion- that he was the leader of us all. He took it upon himself to lead group kata, to “give advice”, and to go full force on us as a favor because “that’s how they do it on the streets.” It was only natural that Paco took me under his wing…and promptly squished me with that wing. There is a special circle in Hell for students like Paco, where I believe he is forced to teach clones of himself karate until eternity ends, just so he can figure out he isn’t the shit. As much as Paco was on my nerves, I had another problem- I sucked at sparring. I hated it. I had a knack for getting punched in the face a lot. Naturally, the way to cure this was more sparring, I thought. Study the sparring patterns, I thought. Do your wazas- kick, punch, punch. Block, punch, kick. Kick, kick, kick. So, I went to Fight Night.

Remember what I was saying about the sugar cookies on Fridays? There were few foods at college worth eating, but the cookies were to die for. That’s why people used to sneak in Tupperware dishes on Fridays. I discovered this delectable truth the same night I went to Fight Night for the first time. I thought it strange that my pre-med friend, who normally ate like a horse, ate so little at dinner time. Then I went to class, and understood why. I usually pride myself on my conditioning- I was a gymnast and a child, always did sports and other physical activities. I wasn’t a lazy kid. I thought to myself, I can handle this. My stomach thought otherwise. I had no less than fifty sparring matches in less than an hour, all of which I lost, and can’t remember how many times I walked into a punch. I puked my sugary cookies up into a snow bank as soon as I was out of sight from the gym. Sad.

But one good thing came out of Fight Night. I fought a couple of the instructors and found out how good I actually could be someday, if I stuck with it. I still suck at sparring today, but I’ve gotten a lot better. It actually wasn’t from lack of skill but lack of confidence that I was so bad. Paco saw to that. He would make sure to always hit me hardest, for my own good, for course. I don’t know what he intended to prove by hitting a girl that hard (not that I ever think girls should not spar as hard as boys, but he was overkill), or why he seemed irritated at the few times I downright screwed up in group kata. I kept thinking it was a good thing I was only mildly autistic- I had several instances where I wanted to jump him and beat the shit out of him. I think my fellow yellow belts were catching on to this fact because towards the end of the semester, they started sticking up for me. The more Paco opened his mouth, the faster someone in the group shut him up. I’ll never forget the time that the quietest, most laid-back instructor we had, tore into him after Paco suggested he was doing the kata wrong.

Finally one night, there were one-on-one sparring matches in front of the whole club. They were highly entertaining. Then, it was the yellow belts’ turn. Naturally Paco was ready to everyone his prowess, and everyone groaned. I got picked to be his opponent. I don’t know if it was completely random (and I expect it wasn’t), that the instructors chose me, but I stumbled up there anyway, expecting to get beaten. But I didn’t. I won. And that was the end of Paco. I think that was the turning point to my martial arts career. From that point, I could have quit after I graduated from college, and I would have been fine with that. But the moment I won that first match, I knew I loved it. I got my orange belt at the end of the semester, and that was the end of college karate. I lamented that I didn’t have the courage to start sooner, but I did, and I guess that was the important thing.
Half way through this first year of college karate, I got the bright idea that, since my martial arts school back home that I was already studying iai and aiki at also offered karate, that I should do it there, too. I never, ever, EVER recommend taking two styles of karate at the same time. EVER! This was a horrible idea that I will never do again. I don’t know how I did it. My college was two hours away from home and I would study five days a week at college, and go to class every other weekend on top of that. I called it “research” for my paper, and it was to an extent. I was also a nut. But I digress. It was a good thing I earned that orange belt. Head Sensei let me do a lot of things on the account that I was a good student, one of them being allowing me to wear my belt from my college style. Thinking back on it, I’d rather have worn a white belt until I caught up in rank, because I ended up wearing that belt for a whole year. That poor, poor belt left orange thread everywhere.

It’s quite funny how things turned out after I started going to this school full time. I met some nice people- one of them was around my age and rank, and shared the same frustrations about being the same rank forever as I did. Because of his job I called him Verizon Guy, and ended up being more instrumental in my martial arts than I would ever know. I also met one student in particular, who…maybe is best left for when I talk about my love for swords…