Day in the Life of an Idiot

Not only is there no yelling in Aikido, but it's also kinda... boring.

Don't get me wrong. I'm easy enough of a student that anytime sensei tells us to get a bokken from the collection and hold it, I'm already made pretty happy. However, last time we practiced letting go. Uh, literally. Holding our swords over our heads, and then dropping them.

It was all very mystical, you know, letting go and _LETTING GO_, but I kept thinking to myself, "No way Renji Abarai would do this. He'd never toss Zabimaru on the floor." Followed by: "Dang it. I wanna cut something."

You may not know this, but Mason and I started at KSW through community education too. We took a six (or maybe eight?) week class, but SBN and JKN were smart enough to make the community education classes ridiculously fun and addictive to the fan-personality. There was YELLING. There was hitting and rolling and jumping and kicking and lots, and LOTS of demonstrations of the awesome. Nearly every class through that community ed course ended in SBN showing off -- spear form, sword form, all the wicked cool stuff -- that made Mason and I say, "Oh, holy CRAP, I want to learn THIS! I NEED to learn this NOW!!"

I found out that I could take JUST bokken through the Center for Mind-Body Oneness at a pretty reasonable price per month, but I'm just not sure. It's COOL to hold a sword, it's even more fun to actually hear people say a few words in Japanese ocassionally, but... I'm not sure I'm adult enough to spend an hour letting go.

Dude, this is why I'm a dark sider. The Force is f*cking boring, man.

I realize I never wrote about my bokken class. My friend Sean (not to be confused with my partner Shawn) and I decided to take a four week class in the art of the Japanese wooden sword through Community Education. The class is being taught at the Center for Mind-Body Oneness by Aikido Sensei Jon.

I had an awesome time because I discovered that Aikido is, in point of fact, the Force.

We spent a good portion of class time becoming "one" with our swords/zanpakto. We didn't do a whole lot else with the swords that day, but I *did* realized several important things about myself and why my personalty doesn't mesh well with Aikido.

I'm too polite for my sensei. Now, you'd think that my default "sir" would translate well from the Korean Kuk Sool Wan to the Japanese Aikido, but that didn't seem to be the case. In fact, Sensei Jon made a point of telling me I only needed to call him sensei in the dojo, and that otherwise he was just Jon. Perhaps I messed with his sense of humility to constantly defer, but, I tell you, once on the mat it's REALLY hard for me not to pepper every sentence or two with sir when speaking to or being spoken to by an instructor. I'm going to try to abide by his wishes next Wednesday, but I may just have to apologize and explain that it's been drilled into me after a year and several months of KSW. But, damn it, dude, you're the sensei. You're also the founder of your dojo, a third degree black belt in Aikido and a pretty seriously ranking guy in the Ki Soceity, suck it up and take the respect I'm offering.

I'm too loud and enthusiastic for Aikido. Guess what? Quite contempation is not my strong suit if you can imagine that. I think sensei was pretty baffled by my ocassional outbursts of, "This is AWESOME!" To be fair, I probably would have been a little less out loud but, as it happened, Sean and I were the only students. It was easy to forget to have on my "inside personalty," as it were. This experience, however, has caused me to have some deep understanding of my favorite Bleach character. There's a scene in the Anime where he's admonished for being too enthusiastic a student. Some of this is clearly about class (for him, given what follows in the scene), but I think, too, self-control is so highly valued that even happy/positive outbursts are considered shameful. I would SUCK as a samurai. I'm too [bleep]ing into it.

Also, I probably should lie more. When sensei asked why I signed up for the class, I admitted that I was a samurai in my imagination and I thought it might be fun to try being one on the outside. I also confessed to being an Anime fan, which caused sensei to think I might be able to count to eight. I can't. I know a lot of the numbers thanks to the fact that the Soul Society's Court Guards have 13 squads/divisions. I tend, however, to visually recognize the numbers better than the hear the words. Regardless, I think that even though being an Anime fan who wants to be a samurai is not only a perfectly valid reason for taking an Aikido class but also secretly the reason a lot of people sign up, I suspect more people keep that sort of information to themselves.

So, even if I end up being the weridest student ever, I'm learning a lot. Not all of it is about the sword, however.