Underneath my yellow skin

Tag Archives: Dancing Wu-Li Sword Form

A dangerous time

I’m full of energy today, which is a change for me. Since I got out of the hospital, I’ve gotten a solid eight hours a night, waking up only once during the night. I’ve woken  up and not been exhausted, but my body is still mending. All that sleep is going into the deficit I’ve carried with me for decades. I know that’s not how sleep works, but that’s how I think of it, anyway. I’ve had a lifetime of not getting enough sleep and then I had a very traumatic day followed by two weeks in the hospital. The first two weeks at home, my body was just mending itself and recovering from the trauma. The next two weeks, the sedation and narcotic meds were (finally) completely leaving my body, which meant I could feel all the little aches and pains that a body has.

Then, I hit a plateau of frustration because I wasn’t getting any better. Intellectually, I know that it can’t always be peaks. There are going to be plateaus, and, yes, valleys. That doesn’t mean I have to like it. Part of Taiji is accepting things as they are, which is not my strong point. I come by it honestly as my parents are both major worriers (in vastly different ways). I used to joke with K that her mother was very much, “Whatever choice you make, you’ll be fine” whereas my mother is more, “Whatever choice you make, it’ll go drastically wrong”. We both laughed at the time, albeit ruefully. In my case, it meant that no matter what I did, I always regretted it and thought about how different life would be if I had done x, y, or z. This is more my mother than my father, but he’s prone to it, too. When I had a minor car accident several years ago, I was clearly in the right. The witnesses and the cops agreed with this. So did the young woman who was driving the other car. I, too, knew there was absolutely nothing I could do. I was going straight on a local road when she suddenly turned left and slammed into my car. I saw her coming, instantly thought, “There’s nothing I can do” and instinctively relaxed. I walked away from it with a massive bruise on my stomach from the seat belt, probably, and nothing else. My car was totaled, but I was fine. Later, my father started questioning if there was anything I could have done to avoid it. I was getting pissed because there really was nothing I could do. I picked up a stuffed soccer ball my father had made in Home Ec and threw it suddenly at my father. He didn’t even flinch as it hit him. I asked why he didn’t try to catch it and he didn’t even register that I had thrown something at him. It wasn’t nice of me and I felt like shit afterwards, but it made my point–at least to me.


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My unending love for bladed weapons

I like bladed weapons. A lot. I don’t think this is a surprise to anyone who knows me. Maybe the depth of my love, but not the fact that I’m an aficionado. I am fairly open about it, and I am always up for talking about it (though not the quantitative stuff such as the intricacies of different blades. I’m all about the feelings, bay-beeeeeee!). I’ve noted that women on twitter are uncomfortable with my declaration of passion for bladed weapons (it’s not ‘nice’ and is ‘so aggressive’, not to mention it’s hard for them to reconcile what they perceive as a gentle martial arts with weapons. I like to remind people that it’s still a martial art. I mean, it’s right there in the name!) and a weird corollary is that dudes think it’s hot. I mean, I get it in a way because think it’s hot, but it’s not the first thing I think of when I think of weapons. And, it’s a bit creepy for dudes to be all, “See this hot sword scene that I immediately thought of when you mentioned weapons?”, especially on social media.

Side note: Dudes. My dudes. If there is one thing I can impart on you as a female-presenting person it’s this. If you don’t know a woman (anyone, really, but especially women and female-presenting persons) well on social media (and I define well as not ‘talking’ to them every few days at the bare minimum or having an offline relationship (that includes DMs/PMs), do NOT make sexual innuendos to them as your first foray. I might laugh politely, but it won’t make a good impression. And I’m someone who can be very ribald.

I’ve written before on how I had a similar mindset with the women above in that before I took taiji, I considered myself a pacifist and that violence was always wrong. The reason for it, however, was not a healthy one. I thought my life was worthless, so there was no point in defending it. When I used to walk the circle doing ba gua instead of meditation, I used to imagine an opponent in the middle of the circle. One time, I had a flash of visualizing me killing the opponent. It unsettled me, and I talked to my teacher afterwards. She said it wasn’t a bad thing because it meant that I was willing to defend myself. She was right, and it completely changed my viewpoint.

Back to weapons. I dragged my feet on them for so long. When I first started taiji, it was for self-defense and the martial art applications. I didn’t care about the health benefits or the mental health benefits–I was all about the martial arts. Weapons, though? That was over the line. No way I was ever gonna do that. Nuh-uh, no way. I dragged my feet until my teacher placed a wooden sword in my hand and exhorted me to just try. The second my fingers closed around the hilt, I was hooked.


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