167 Good, Bad, and a Little of Both Saturday Valkyrie had to deal with an assault in the neighbourhood. We intervened quickly, and as a team. It was an unpleasant interruption to the afternoon’s teaching, but
167 Hard Starts Sometimes I don’t know how my students do it. Fencing is a damned hard thing to learn. It’s demoralizing. You have to be fit, and that&
167 Fat There is a current and recurrent thread amongst HEMA and other martial arts disciplines that mocks the fat instructor. It’s one of those things that everyone feels comfortable
167 Change and Mutation Hopping into the shower this morning, I saw a nice big long-legged spider sitting in the tub. As a life-long arachnophobe, this presented me with a bit of a dilemma.
167 500 Blows I’m reminded today that it was eight years ago that I fought 500 passes in two hours. I didn’t do it as a personal challenge. I
167 Devil On Your Back I read an article about a week or so ago that really bugged me. It was one of those feel good, overcome your failures sort of articles. It talked about
167 A Change is Gonna Come Valkyrie is now open. It took us years to put in the base work, and six months of headaches, tension and bureaucratic fighting to get the doors open, but here
167 Bullshit and Lies Do you want to be an eagle or a crow? Common sense and admiration are fantasies. We look at the eagle, the hawk, and the falcon and think of the
167 Moving Past Quit She’s supposed to be searching me, but I’m just tired of it. So I turn, with everything I’ve got, and smash my elbow into
167 Assembly Been sick for over a week. Missed a lot of work, which is going to suck when the next payday arrives. But at least I’ve managed to catchup
167 Cultivating Awareness When I demonstrate a technique, I do want you to perform it the way I do. Last night we did wrestling, and explored some pinning movements from a couple of
167 Grinding and Forgetting Some of my favourite moments in martial arts are when the whole class is pushed past the point of exhaustion. During last night’s class, I looked up during
167 The Cost of Doubt Doubt costs repetitions. The time you spend thinking about how to do something, or what you have done wrong, or even if there is a better way to do something,
167 Leaving the Past Behind I don’t know why Achille Marozzo wrote his New Work on swordplay. I know the result of it, but I don’t know what made him sit
167 Gun Not-Play When Danielle submitted this post, I wanted to talk to her about it first, to address some of her concerns, or to maybe encourage her to look at things another
167 Better Right or Wrong? What’s better: Aikido or BJJ? A classical Japanese martial art that puts a heavy emphasis on wrist locks, or a slightly more modern Brazilian art with an emphasis
167 Fort and Sally Forth I write a lot about frustration. Or at least, I feel like I do. Inability is what drives me to train constantly. It’s also what shoots my training
167 Bright Swords and Shiny Teeth The world is full of stupid people. A lot of them think they are smart, but it’s the thinking that’s the problem. I’ve been
167 Teaching 3.0 It’s nice to grab a few minutes this morning to write a post. Nothing in mind today, like usual, but I’m in the mood to feel
167 White Eyebrows and More Half way to being the aged martial arts master, at least according to the common wisdom of aging. To my twenty year old self, I’m old and wise.
167 Beauty and The Beast Being pretty means you win at life. That’s how it works. If you are born with the right genetics for the time, it’s like being
167 Do You Know What Pressure Is? I had a wonderful night last night. My family got to reconnect with our long out of touch French relatives. It was, I think, the first time in a long
167 Painting Death Ditch all the drama of martial arts, and you are left with a reality that doesn’t jive with our spoken or even understood reasons for training. Mostly we
167 Wise and Stupid Monkeys Sometimes I think I’m a terrible stoic. I get caught up in weird little imaginations of things that don’t really matter. My emotions get out of
167 Less of Your Own Bullshit Why is getting better a struggle? It’s a little bullshit mindgame we play on ourselves, that’s why. We set “better” as a goal. When
