<p>friday night we somehow ended up at a biker bar downtown drinking with a bunch of russians (lani&#8217;s russian housemate and his friends from princeton came into the city for a bachelor&#8217;s party). </p>

<p>on saturday, in a rare showing of ambition, lani and i didn&#8217;t sleep in all day (our usual weekend activity). instead we actually went out to see the <a href="http://www.whitney.org/exhibition/biennial.shtml">Whitney&#8217;s Biennial show</a>. then we wandered around st. mark&#8217;s place for a while. after dinner, we watched Mulholland Dr. then went out for a drink with julintip.</p>

<p>today, we again made it out of the apartment for dim sum and bubble tea with julintip, adam and some of adam&#8217;s friends.</p> 

<p>over about the last year, this has built up to about half a cubic foot of change that i&#8217;ve dumped in a box in my apartment. last night i had a slight <span class="caps">OCD</span> moment and decided to sort and count it. i simply didn&#8217;t have the time or energy to completely sort it though so i settled for just seperating out the quarters (the only coin with any practical value whatsoever as far as i&#8217;m concerned) and counting those.</p>

<p>$100.50 </p>

<p>just in quarters. i was pretty impressed.</p>

<p>while that was kind of entertaining, i&#8217;m really looking forward to the day when we can use digital cash and smartcards for everything instead of having to deal with heavy and inconvenient coins.</p> 

<p>because i think that splitting these parts up (due to the why8k? bug) makes them ugly and confusing,  i&#8217;m going to <span class="caps">TRY</span> to write smaller parts if i can, which means, of course,  more parts to waste your life reading. hey, at least you&#8217;re not paying to waste your life like at school. so, while keeping your patience meters in the red, onward we trudge.</p>

<p>part three introduced sanda and <span class="caps">SAM</span> and the fact that the <span class="caps">LRC</span> in fighting may approach a meditative state. part four is a linking section hopefully clarifying why being in china is necessary, and why i must have the kind of involvement that i do in order to accomplish essential components of the study, while at the same time satiating the crucial requirement of authenticity. </p>

<p>&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;</p>

<p>it should be said right off here that searching for <span class="caps">SAM</span> didn&#8217;t just coincidentally land me in china.  as mentioned earlier, the principle has been written about, studied, and practiced much more in the far east than in the near west.  it is, in fact, a quality not limited to the realm of combat or sport here, but is actually pervasive throughout asian culture itself, perhaps less so in recent times, but present nonetheless.  this is probably because the various philosophical doctrines  typically had a way of ending up in some sort of governing or guidepost roll here.  </p>

<p>admittedly, my <span class="caps">SAM</span> infatuation probably has its origins in a samurai movie or something. but, whatever it was that started things turning, soon i was funneled into thinking about the aimless baseball pitch of yesteryear, and from there it has evolved into a more comprehensive curiosity encompassing the territories of philosophy, history, and the very important cultural grounds from which both develop. <span class="caps">LRC</span> can&#8217;t be relegated into the restricted Occidental senses of biodynamics, or psychology, or physiology. in my estimation it can&#8217;t be seen as anything less than somewhat of a union of the three.  unity or &#8216;oneness&#8217; or whatever you want to call it has historically been an almost strictly asian philosophical principle (as you all know). </p>

<p>if we accept the above, that the <span class="caps">LRC</span> has a more involved history and emerges more noticeably in asia and in various asian things than in their western counterparts, then it naturally follows that our investigations should utilize the compiled knowledges which our eastern brethren have been housing for centuries. there&#8217;s a virtual database of <span class="caps">SAM</span>-related philosophical and physical discoveries and teachings which have been stockpiled over hundreds of years and is now at our disposal. this is where tucker&#8217;s superhuman parental unit  has problems: &#8220;why can&#8217;t you just read more books? why can&#8217;t you train here? for the cost of your plane ticket, you could have an entire library of this stuff!&#8221;  well, it is my estimation that such a library would be virtually useless.  it comes down to the fact that we, as westerners, are unfamiliar with asian ways of thinking. we can read about chinese-this and chinese-that in a fervent attempt at coming to understanding. but the very words we read are western; these asian things, when described through western convention, become westernized things.  the difficulty is not necessarily in the asian ideas themselves, but from realizing (let alone adapting) the very modes of thought from which these ideas need to be understood through.  if the methods of thinking we use differ from those under which these foreign ideas originated, then we&#8217;re immediately distanced from understanding, no matter how much care and scrutiny we use.  anything we try to investigate and gain insight into is immediately tainted by our own examination lens. merely looking, in this case, distances us from actually seeing. we  relate and derive meanings out of new learnings by using principles obtained in our own environment,  through a brain which was developed to use these principles as its filter for understanding.  we explain all new knowledge to ourselves through understandings which we already have. in our case, our filter for understanding is entirely western.  and, because words can only be communicative between those who share similar experiences (thank you <span class="caps">GEB</span>, yet again) we have no hope of understanding asian ideas through western means, no matter how scholarly, precise, active, or beautifully written they are. we can&#8217;t take interesting new ideas, describe them in western ways, call them by chinese names, and say we understand these &#8220;chinese&#8221; things.  </p>

<p>this is an area where experience simply can&#8217;t  be replaced;  this is the smell-of-smeared-grass. </p>

<p>Part 4 has introduced the asiatic factor into all of this, which is a required component  when you consider that <span class="caps">SAM</span> seems to be, essentially, asian.  actually, no&#8212; that isn&#8217;t right, and i wish i&#8217;d stop saying that. <span class="caps">SAM</span> is human, and has merely been more heavily contemplated upon and used in asia over the years than anywhere else that i&#8217;m aware of.   Part 4 also introduced this study as one in which experience can&#8217;t be substituted for, and also that this experience should be an &#8216;asian&#8217; one as one goal is to access the well of knowledge already existing here in an authentic and unfiltered way.</p>

<p>so far i&#8217;ve discussed personal motivations for training, my personal history of training, the interest in <span class="caps">SAM</span>, the benefits of the <span class="caps">LRC</span>, and just now how and why china is an important factor in all of this. next, in part five:  &#8220;Please Make Him Stop Writing!&#8221;  i want to spell out the components of my particular study which make it worthwhile and special (or so i&#8217;d like to think).  hold your respective lunches in your respective bellies people, it&#8217;s almost over, i promise, and then we can just get on with our lives.</p> 

<p>now i&#8217;m just waiting for them to issue me a funky hat and a popemobile.</p> 

<p>flossing: good</p>

<p>take care of your teeth, folks. </p>

<p>i spent about two years nursing a pepsi bottle (2+ litres/day) and not brushing and flossing often enough. about a year ago, i lost a couple fillings and noticed some cavities forming. demonstrating at least partial intelligence, i quit caffeine entirely (thereby curbing my pepsi habit) and started brushing and flossing much more religiously. demonstrating that it was only <em>partial</em> intelligence, i didn&#8217;t go see a dentist immediately. </p>

<p>i think quitting the pepsi and taking more vigorous care of my teeth halted or at least slowed the spread. unfortunately, plenty of damage was already done. </p>

<p>i finally made it into the dentist today to get them looked at. the results: well&#8230; he says my <em>gums</em> look healthy&#8230;</p>

<p>my teeth have some issues though. next wednesday i go in for my first root canal. joy. some cavities to take care of too but they&#8217;ll probably wait until after i upgrade my dental plan so i don&#8217;t have to pay for them out of pocket.</p>

<p>to top it off, i&#8217;m still due to get my wisdom teeth out.</p> 

<p>i came in 4th at a semi-full contact aikijutsu tournament in Kobe, Japan in an event called &#8220;Randori&#8221;. that was cool, but also controlled and if you saw it, sort of lame and silly. it really wasnt an appropriate place to evaluate my level of consciousness.  after that, i returned to bates,  boxed some more, wrote my thesis, graduated, and got a cool job. it took me about 9 months of working full-time until i started feeling miserable. i felt as though i had abandoned or given up on something important and that now life was just going to speed on by and id never finish exploring my long-held interests unless i did something drastically committed. so i did. the point of this paragraph is to introduce drastically committed,  partially because i like the way it sounds, but mostly to prepare readers for the situation introduced next. </p>

<p>full-contact Sanda fights in China: these can get scary. no more helmets sometimes (depending on the venue) and absolutely fierce kicks and punches to all areas of the head and body like muay thai. the most interesting physical element is that you are also allowed to wrestle, which usually involves one combatant being picked clean off the platform and thrown down as hard as possible.   ive found it significantly harder to stay relaxed and to enter the already elusive <span class="caps">LRC</span>, which is exactly what i was hoping before i landed here. there are a couple probable reasons for this. one thing is that for the first time, in athletics anyway, im dealing with fear, which isnt easy.  before each match, and even some sparring sessions, im nervous and afraid because:  A) there isnt much safety; B) im fighting the chinese in a chinese art;  C) the chinese are obsessed with face, and whoever loses to the american also loses much face and thusly needs to do everything physically, humanly, and inhumanly possible not to lose; D) these guys have been training and fighting for years and, in fact,  were chosen by the government to do so because thats how things are in china; E)  the coaches assume that by choosing to participate, you accept the risks, and thus accidents are not their responsibility.  </p>

<p>another reason why the <span class="caps">LRC</span> often eludes me here, i think,  is the shear quantity of variables my  mind has to deal with in this system.  kicks, punches, charges, throws, timing, safety, the hooting of angry onlookers,  worrying if my opponent knows my knee still hurts from the last kick or throw and will take advantage by targeting it-  its absolutely exhausting and it is terribly hard to relax up there (up there being a platform called a lei tai which is raised two feet off the ground, and is a perfect 8&#215;8 meters).   im curious about what training and competing would be like if america does something to piss the chinese off again (of spy planes and embassies).  the chinese have a hard time separating a countrys government from its citizens. actually, this is a curious fact since the chinese people have been at odds with their own iron fist government for, well, ever.  </p>

<p>anyway, mentioned earlier as being critical for success in just about any speed/precision-dependent physical action, both relaxation and the <span class="caps">LRC</span> are vital in Sanda, although id wager it is among the most difficult grounds in existence to actually achieve them.  </p>

<p>this is exactly why i need to.</p>

<p>(next half pasted to comment to avoid the 8k max bug)</p> 

<p>Even more cooler, a new form of whine cooler, would be to have thraxil tags you could put in outher page what would only include the info from that page within the tags&#8230; like just the content.</p>

<p>Hmmm&#8230; there&#8217;s thinking going on here. Maybe I can do some of this without the whine.</p> 

<p>on friday night, i finally watched <a href="http://us.imdb.com/Title?0166924">Mulholland Dr.</a>, the new(est) david lynch movie. lynch is my favorite director and i&#8217;m ashamed that it took me this long to get around to seeing this one. pure genius. i&#8217;m really glad that i bought the <span class="caps">DVD</span> instead of just renting it because i&#8217;m going to have to watch it about 10 more times before i&#8217;ll have any clue about what went on. <a href="http://us.imdb.com/Name?Watts,+Naomi">Naomi Watts</a> really impressed me and i had no clue until after i poked around on imdb that she was Jet Girl in <a href="http://us.imdb.com/Title?0114614">Tank Girl</a>, one of my all-time favorites.</p>

<p>on saturday it was <a href="http://us.imdb.com/Title?0078788">Apocalypse Now (Redux)</a>. the extra footage makes it much longer and slower in some spots but definately improves the overall experience. </p>

<p>sunday afternoon i somehow got sucked into some action movie with Dolph Lundgren fighting insane, genetically altered escaped prisoners in some post-earthquake/apocalypse desert world. i don&#8217;t even remember what it was called and, honestly, the less remembered, the better.</p>

<p>finally, last night i watched <a href="http://us.imdb.com/Title?0171804">Boys Don&#8217;t Cry</a> because it was on TV and i hadn&#8217;t seen it before. powerful movie. love that cheerful ending.</p> 

<p>this section involves  a meandering lead-up to hinting at present day motivations, so keep that end in mind to avoid getting lost.</p>

<p>i was put into a special program for smart kids like many of you probably were when i was 10 and didnt have to go regular school on fridays. i won  regional and state championships for Olympics of the Mind competitions and even competed in the world championships. i tested unusually high in creative application, spacial reasoning, and writing.  mentioning this relatively meaningless garbage is only to set up a comparative frame of my early history. soon after all the nerdery intensified, i was compelled to end it all. the nerdification, i mean. i stopped doing the after school young engineers club and readers society and instead chose to play sports.  this may take some explaining considering  who the likely readers of this are, but ive been thinking about it lately so it wont be too hard to write about it clearly.  </p>

<p>at the time, i liked the roughness and the exhaustion. the crashes and bumps and smell of smeared-grass. it was a smell of reality.  i liked taking my glasses off.  as anders recently mentioned, it does feel good to get exercise and the reason is simple. but for now i would like to bring up another reason why sports were appealing to my young geeky self: i liked mastering  the physics of action.   there was a degree of greatness in being able launch a projectile by hand at XX mph into your target, eluding a swinging obstacle,  especially if you could make it curve on a trajectory which tricked the eyes of, and eluded even the most precisely coordinated obstacle-swinger. theres also a shivering glory in the ability to intercept an airborne, speeding orb when you have to make a split second decision about where you anticipate the ball will be when your bat eventually comes around enough to strike it.   success here results in a feeling you cant understand unless youve grown it yourself.  controlling your body like this is a special skill resulting in a special satisfaction shrouded in a mist of special mysticism. its a time when your body and mind are working in unity. at a higher level of performance, your mind isnt sending signals to your muscles to swing!  or kick!, its your mind itself swinging and kicking,  your whole body becomes one, big, silent brain. this is the crux of what i would like to think will be a main topic of this piece of writing, somehow.  </p>

<p>incidentally, i would also like to  quickly mention, as it will probably enlighten a bunch of you, that this is how some people  are actually able to watch a baseball game and not die of boredom, a question we all ask ourselves and others from time to time. i suppose the same thing is true of golf (which is painful to admit) and, here in china, ping pong. that is to say, as we watch with an air of superiority about us and point out how silly the game is, or how idiotic the fans are for being so enraptured, we essentially generalize and assume that everyone is watching the same game that we are. but, depending on their experience, they arent. some of the observers of these sports know what it is like to have conquered action and master the properties of  dynamic movement. they have an understanding which we wont have unless weve played enough to appreciate these certain elements.  when there is a perfect pitch, or whack, or shot, they not only marvel, but they often nod and remember. in way, there is a sharing taking place between actor and observer.   this can be a very subtle and elusive idea and the fans themselves may not even be able to explain this and are thusly easy for the uninitiated to criticize.  </p>

<p>ive often wondered how it can be so easy for someone who  watches a ballet  with appreciation and awe be so critical and demeaning towards other areas of athletic performance (and vise versa) despite the degrees of similitude. these  range in everything from grace of movement, self-expression, concentration, to the utterly impressive feats of neuro-motor coordination and the grandeur of highest-level human physiological capabilities which are tied, in an essential way, to deepest-level human mental capabilities.</p> 

<p>so here we go&#8230;</p>

<p>&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;-</p>

<p>Part One: Stasis Status</p>

<p>everything is just good.</p>

<p>it seems like there should be some sort of problem or struggle or stress to deal with or overcome-  but there really isnt. in fact, im so content that im frightened. </p>

<p>content with my existence, i mean. not the worlds, but mine. each and every non-relaxing but nearly perfect day.</p>

<p>this could be good or bad; seeing as this has never really happened to me before, i have no basis for thinking either.  this could be bad because i could get rusty. i could become lazy and grow to expect the easy-breezy.  in essence, i could be spoiling myself into retardation. </p>

<p>but it could be good. i feel good. im closer to feeling fulfilled and, to a degree, existing in an element that actually feels natural for me.</p>

<p>in fairness to tucker watchers, i realize that my lifestyle here, doing what im doing  (discussed later)  is not really on any sort of  path towards some ultimate career goal.  this results in  worried family and makes friends question my judgment as they (amazingly, just about all of them) move on and up to prestigious, meaningful, important, high-level, moneymaking, long-term and brightly futured employment slots.  but in fairness to the tucker being watched, ive never had an ultimate goal, just a long series of mini-goals which ive been knocking off one by one as they sprout up around my life.  eventually ill get to the make-hoards-of-money goal. it just didnt rank high enough on the list to be a priority.  however, lately ive realized  that to parents, friends, professionals and random people i meet,  i might be coming across as some sort of hopeless <span class="caps">DMA</span> (Discover Myself Abroad) hippy. especially to the chinese, who really cant grasp the idea of a liberal arts education or going to college to explore personal interests as opposed to fulfilling the req. for working at <span class="caps">XYZ</span>, i also must seem like an <span class="caps">LAH</span> (Loser At Home).  but  i can defend myself: im  accomplishing things here and i do feel like im on my way to something important.  but before i get into it, allow me to point some things out. </p>

<p>i think one difference between myself and most thraxil contributors and others whove been steered here to read this chunk of blab, is that, unlike most of you who were fortunate enough to have an interest in something which also happens to be an increasingly important, needed, and meshed aspect of the lives of every human being, my driving interests have always been located in much broader realms.  unfortunately, these areas dont really have a professional sector. </p>

    there is no industry for me, per say; 

    not a legal one anyway.

<p>this poses quite a challenge.  imagining myself  having to work for the sake of work and starvation-prevention instead of forging ahead in pursuit of my interests is hard. </p>

<p>i know what kind of person i am and i also know that there are few slots for me.</p>

<p>i do have a couple of ideas floating around for the future, so, im not a complete desert of professional ambition.   in fact, ambition itself is something i have a surplus of now. its just not for the 9-5 gig. its to explore the interests i have with all the fervor i can muster while i still can.  to mention, i am supporting myself over here, entirely. im proud of the fact that ive enabled myself to grab onto what im interested in with both hands (and feet, toes, ears, mouth, brain and strange-loopy soul) and that im officially no ones burden.   </p>

<p>im not particularly special, but i know im not an average joe.   ive had all sorts of revelations resultant of a huge diversity of comparatively rare life experiences.   that  none have been entirely steering is no ones fault, and, although causing a problem of convenience, i think its not entirely unhealthy.  i  think that typically when someone has an interest in something and it turns out that they are good at whatever that thing is they tend to follow it.  to a large degree their talents, when meshed with their enjoyment of those talents, form a guiding force which illuminates the occupational avenues to stroll down. but what if their interests and talents dont coincide? or, what if they do, but, unfortunately, theres no place for them in todays world? or what if theyre  still being pulled in different directions?</p>

<p>i guess you either role dice, or attempt to create your own, self-satisfying venue. </p>

<p>Part One here has been an attempt at bringing issues forward and dusting them off for a rousing good time of self-defensive literary posturing which probably has not satisfied the reading audience whom are now  remembering that they have better things to do than read my drivel. </p>

<p>but alas,  thy wilst blab unto thine faithful. tune in later for Part Two: Missing Misty Mysticism which will somehow involve a meandering lead-up to present day motivations, if you&#8217;ve nothing better to do.</p> 

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