Running with scissors

As in, do they really trust me with these things?

Regular class tonight was all about self-defense. We had a whole family of white belts start tonight, which was cool, and I ended up working with two of them on the color belt defenses. Then, when they split off to work forms, Sir had the black belts start working and reviewing the haganah defenses with one person in the middle and the rest of us doing the different random attacks. Then he wandered off to work with some of the higher color belts on their forms (we had a really big class tonight), and after we'd finished that drill the rest of the black belts start looking at me like I have any idea what to do next. I answered a few questions for them (none of the other tkd students do haganah as well, so I guess most of this is relatively new stuff for them, and very old stuff for me), and then started teaching one of them, a kid who has recently aged up to the teen/adult class and had therefore never done ANY of the haganah defenses, the basic punch defense while the others paired off. It was just weird that I was the lowest dan there, but they were asking me what to do next.

Other than that, and the giant headache that has been hanging around my right temple since I woke up today, classes were really good. Mel was back in class tonight (it's a year today since she had her knee surgery, and about fifteen months since she tore it up in my first sparring class), and it was fun to have her as a partner. She's been training for the past few months, but now is getting ready to test for her third degree, and her knee has been officially deemed good enough to be back in regular classes with us. She was my first sparring partner tonight, too, and we kept making cracks about the last time we'd faced each other (that first class). It felt good to spar tonight in general, though. I feel like I'm maybe starting to lose the fear of injury again, since we've been doing it more regularly, which is a good thing. Instructor class also went pretty well, I think. Tonight we did the higher belt forms, and I was really surprised to discover that I knew them (with a few small mistakes) without even really thinking too hard about them. The switching back and forth between form styles, though (dan form techniques are slightly but significantly different than gup ones), takes some brain power still, though. Sir watched me go through my regular form, corrected a few things (a foot angle and a balance issue), told me I was doing really well with it, and then started teaching my weapons form! I'm still doing single bahng mahng ee (one fighting stick), and I only learned the first dozen or so moves of it, but I like it so far. Definitely more than I thought I would, although I have to admit to liking the weapons drills better than the forms. There's just something very satisfying feeling the sticks crack against your partner's. The other thing is that I will NOT be midterming in October now because we started the weapons so late. This is actually a really fabulous thing because it means that my first midterm will probably be in December, after I'll have been able to be back in class five nights a week for a month or so. It should be absolutely no problem at all now. And, I get to go back in on Friday and work by myself again. Yay!

Anyway, CP #1 is still cruising along, my sleep schedule is back to its no classes routine and is not being helped the fact that I don't really need to go to the office at all during the day right now (pretty much, I'm not sleeping any kind of normal hours right now, which sucks), my right forearm is definitely going to be sore tomorrow, as I am not used to the weight of a weapon, and I have to go in early to babysit Outreach tech, so I'm crashing.