I’m back with more actual goals. Here is my last post, and, yes, I’m still talking about my re-birthday. Hm. It’s really late (early in the morning), and I am exhausted. I t hink I’ll skip it and come back to it tomorrow.
I’m back. A quick side note (yes, this early): My sleep has been so fucked in the past two weeks. It’s the vaxxes and my bloodwork, and I really should not have done all of them on the same day. Yes, it made sense to do them all at one time just to get them done, but given my outsized reaction to shots, I should have known better.
It’s been a week-and-a-half, and my arms are almost 100% better. I’m still tired, though. Very much so. I was able to do the whole Swimming Dragon Form (hands-only, Bagua) after completely forgetting the beginning of it yesterday. I was also able to do the whole Double Sword Form, though I did have to peek at the videos now and again.
Here is the post from day before yesterday in which I listed four goals for this year. I struggle to make them realistic because I swing from making very small goals that I easily do and goals that are so big, there’s no way I can reach them.
In addition, I don’t know what is realistic, really. Like before my medical crisis, I could confidently say I could write a rough first draft of a novel (100,000 words or more) in a year. hell, I did that during NaNoWriMo several years in a row without breaking a sweat. Now, however, I don’t know if that’s true. I think I can still write 2,000 words a day? But I haven’t been able to do that in ages, either.
I want to set goals that I can conceivably achieve, but I just don’t know what that means any longer. I think it’s better to set ongoing goals when I’m unsure about the results. I think I can say that I will finish teaching myself the Double Fan Form. I have 11 movements left, so I could even possibly get it done by the end of this calendar year.
If that’s the case, then I need to start thinking about what I want to learn next. I do want to teach myself a Double Sword Form at some point, but there are several problems with that. One, there is not an official Double Sword Form–at least not one I could find. My teacher’s teacher hasn’t done one, either. She did ask him about it, and he said that you can do the Sword Form with two swords, doing the guiding hand mmotions with the off hand with a sword in that hand, too.
I tried to do that with the first several movements, and I did not find it very smooth or easy to do. In addition, I was floundering with what to acutally do, and I eventually put it aside. I know there is a Chen-style Double Sword Form, so maybe I could adapt it to less punishing on the knees. Most of the others I’ve seen, though, are really fast and ‘hard’, for lack of a better word. Several of the ones I watched were in competition, so maybe that’s the reason. It seems to defeat the purpose of Taiji, though. Then again, not all of them were Taiji.
There are more examples of Double Sword Form for the butterfly swords (shorter, stockier, and more like big knives, really, than swords), but I don’t have confidence I could adapt one of them. They’re really cool, though. As are most of the videos for the various Double Sword Form I watched are. A few months ago, I had seen a video by a student of a master, and he was doing a Double Sword Form. I can’t find it again, though, sadly.
My teacher has said that she’s fine with me teaching myself any weapon form. I still feel like I should run them by her, though I’m not sure why.
I might do the Karambit Form next. I’m about halfway through it, and it’s fairly short. Most of the weapon forms are roughly three minutes each (though it takes months to learn each one), which is weird to think about.
The Karambit Form is one my teacher’s teacher created, and it’s really cool. A karambit is a small, curved dagger, and can have one or both sides of the blade sharpened. It’s generally illegal to have a double-sharpened-blade dagger/knife in the States, though, so there’s that. I have three or four of them because I keep misplacing them. Mine are rubber, though.
I will say that the reason I started learning Bagua is because I love the Deerhorn Knives. From the moment my teacher placed a pair of practice ones in my hands, I knew that we were meant to be. It was the same when I first held a sword in my hand. These are the only two weapons I’ve felt an instant bond to, by the way. Although, when my teacher’s classmate did the Double Saber Form at their school’s demo in 2020 (right before the pandemic hit), I instantly knew I wanted to do that form as well.
Once I get closer to the end of teaching myself the Double Fan Form, I will decide which weapon I teach myself next.
Another thing I want to do in this year is:
5. Cook more. I don’t like to cook, and I’m bad at it. I used to like to bake, but I don’t do that any longer, either. I’ve been relying too much on DoorDash, and I would like to cook at least once a week. I have a slow-cooker, but my sink is broken, so I don’t have an easy way to watch the slow-cooker. In addition, it’s a lot of work. All the prep, I mean. I know once it’s time to cook it, then it’s easy to ‘set it and forget it’, but it takes a lot to get to that point.
My brother coaxed me into buying an intapot (my name for it) when it was all the rage. I used it exactly three times before I realized that it was not for me. The only thing it makde easier was, again, the ‘set it and forget it’ part. I still had to do all the prep I’d do otherwise.
As a single person, my favorite cooking gadget (that I haven’t used in probably a year) is my personal rice cooker with a steamer. It makes perfect rice every time, and it can steam a bunch of vegetables simultaneously.
I’m done. More tomorrow.