The triangle’s still a little leaden, but I can’t complain, considering we were fo’c’sle and bowsprit below water just two weeks ago.
I admit I haven’t been great with my group, but it’s gone both ways. Even back when I was on top of things earlier in the semester, I’d be putting out ideas that kept getting shot down. Obviously, I was biased in thinking that they were straightforward and the correct course of action… But dammit, if you’re gonna put holes in my suggestions, then let’s see you put some of your own up in the shooting gallery.
Oh, whatever. I had this long diatribe about people who tell you to do one thing, then ream you out for not doing another.
I don’t know if any of my work in the past two weeks hasn’t been totally redone.
So I stopped by Rice and worked my way around campus pretty thoroughly for about 2.5 hrs. My grips are so sore I can barely hold a glass to drink right now. And my quads and whatever’s on the insides of the thighs are all wobbly. Mmm. :)
And I still can’t imagine myself jumping any railings. I’ve tested the approaches to a couple tables and walls and such, and … whoo-ee. :) I don’t need to try it to know I won’t clear it. Gonna be a couple more months’ crazy workouts before I’ll try killing myself by concrete faceplant.
And by midnight, most things were right with the world again. It was a damp, cool night. Gorgeous for working out. Also a bit ripe for melancholy as well, but one manages.
Visibility was down to about 300 feet on the way home, due to fog. All the world was rubbed out, swallowed up by the haze. The powerful, amber glow of Houston’s excessive streetlights seemed muted for once, and quickly faded to black overhead.
Very tranquil. Good for introspection.
<Club!>
Oh, wait. That’s seals.
The SCA isn’t dead, it’s just resting.
This is SSG / SCA / WMA:
http://www.scholasaintgeorge.org/coppermine/displayimage.php?album=random&cat=0&pos=-123
An SCA practice that ended up being all SSG? :D
Scott’s a chiv fighter with a real commitment to SSG. Awesome guy. Kinda wicked with I.33, too.
He (and others) are proof that not only can the SCA merge with WMA, but that the two together can make magic (like love bunnies in a nylon city).
[Stop reading if you don’t give a crap or are too cynical to tolerate my glass-is-half-full POV.]
Note that I am *not* talking about supplanting anyone with anything else.
I’ve recently added 6 new members to my WMA group’s roster. Added time spent beyond the normally allotted 3-4 hrs / wk of WMA was… 30-45 mins / wk? Initially, I just posted a few flyers in the student centers at UH and Rice. The big winner was walking through campus with a waster on my shoulder. That one gets a lot of interest and questions.
And when people asked me questions, I treated it seriously but briefly. Get the 10-second intro down, then deliver a tight 30-60 second overview if they continue indicating interest. *Back* *off* if the eyes start glazing or attention wanders. Keep it light and positive.
And *then* start getting into the 10-min, 60-min, 7-year discussions. :)
Make sure to portray the hobby as a serious pursuit, backed up by research and diligent study, with a well-established network and community.
Which is what the SCA is, after all. Too often, I hear members of the us joke about the game we play, or how it’s a good opportunity to wear silly costumes and hit each other with sticks and swords. I don’t do that around new prospectives. They can’t tell how serious our self-deprecating jokes are.
I make the same jokes at times, so I’m not suggesting we stop being relaxed and fun. But it’s all about first impressions in those first 5-10 mins. Within 30 mins of meeting Will and Charles, I was ribbing them about smacking wooden heads with wooden implements. But in the first 5 mins, I used professional shock and awe on Jesse Chan, which is what got him to introduce me within 10 hrs by e-mail to Will and Charles. And I impressed upon W & C the awareness of a deep and thorough history / structure in the first 10 mins.
Then I left the big, weighty picture alone and I spent my usual 90 min workout time showing them 3 basic ways to hold and attack with a sword. I managed to keep us moving and swinging at least 2/3 of the time. At our second practice Tuesday night at 10 p.m. (I get out of job training at 9 p.m.), the 4 students spent easily 80% of our time swinging in drills. I was odd man out, so had to spend most of my time coaching instead. But we’ll get to where they’re sufficiently grounded to drill with me as peers on an increasingly expanded repertoire of techniques. I’m patient.
Charles (another Charles) and Donna have also been very interested, and Donna has actually repeatedly asked me for notes, pics, and anything else she can get.
So where’s the SCA tie-in? Non-Rice Charles is *made* for the SCA. He and Donna are ripe for the pageantry, the costumery (meant from a non-SCA POV, not to be derogatory), and the immersion of it. They’re constantly letting slip little “wouldn’t it be cool if” comments that would be fulfilled in the SCA.
So with them and the Rice folks, I’m pushing the SCA as a good destination once they’ve gotten their sea legs. Within a few months, they’ll know enough to not get swamped by the barrage of well-intentioned but often contradictory (and sometimes flat-out bad) advice that ended up driving me *away* from the SCA for 2 years, back in 2002.
Plus, those couple months will give me time to reinforce their inclinations to *do* and *drill* rather than to yak.
I can’t stop the yakking (b/c I enjoy it, and it’s a good thing after all, in small doses), but I can help to keep it under control. Whacking and smacking are what ultimately build the fencing skills, and seeing real personal growth is what will keep the valuable ones coming back. Yakking shares experience and stories, builds cameraderie, and is just fun, but that can be done during water breaks and afterwards at the local late night diner.
If this sounds like a typical martial arts school environment, should we be surprised? No, b/c I think the wide-eyed “Oh, I get it!” thrill is much more valuable than any long-winded stories (especially mine!). Will’s pretty level-headed (for a crane-climbing, sword-swinging, building-jumping traceur / rock-climber), and I 2x-checked with him afterwards — he said things never got long-winded, and practice was always in action.
And when Will and the two Charleses have asked about competitions and places to take this show on the road, I’ve briefly and enthusiastically driven home the best points of chiv, rapier, and C&T fighting — the large community, the frequency of events, the chance to mix it up constantly with lots of different people. Rules issues like no grappling, no punching, and etc. would just kill the excitement right now. They can learn to deal with that in a few months. Besides, it’s not like I’m allowing them to do any of that anyway.
And by the time they *can* do the zhogo stretto / Handarbeit stuff, they’ll also know how to achieve SCA-legal results with or without it. We don’t *have* to break the SCA rules of play to use it.
I *am* a little newly excited at the past few weeks’ turnout. But I see now that I am more right than I ever realized. We don’t need complicated or bothersome demos. We don’t need to make it difficult work. We just need to raise our exposure and make sure it’s positive and professional.
So, without going out of my way unduly, I will continue to responsibly wander in public with my gear. (Originally, I was headed to do some solo drills and practice in a quiet courtyard on campus, which I still do every other week or so.)
Oh, an important consideration:
Yesterday afternoon, while waiting to get into the machine shop, I was doing some slow and deliberate sequences with my aluminum waster on campus. After about ten minutes, an armed security guard came up to me. He asked to see the weapon, and I politely handed it over, saying very briefly that it was for stage combat (unspoken: and many other things! Muahahahaha!).
He immediately said, “Oh, it’s a prop. It’s not sharp.”
Using verbal fuhlen / sentimento di ferro, I matched my tone, tried to identify his concern, agreed with him and expanded just a hair, “Yes, that’s right. I’m the fight choreographer for the Wiess spring musical.”
He said, “That’s OK, then. I just wanted to make sure.” (that it was safe? That I wasn’t a loose cannon? That I had some legit reason to be on campus? Well, semi-legit anyway.)
People just want reassurance, is all.
If he’d been a bit more cagey, like the HPD cop at Hermann Park over Labor Day, I’d have politely agreed to stop swinging it around, emphasized that I was waiting to work with Will in the machine shop (citing the shop building’s name and etc. to let him know I had an insider student’s understanding of campus) to cut out our needfuls for the Wiess play, and reassured him I would discretely take the whole lot home.
And I suspect the HPD cop wouldn’t have batted an eye at us if we’d stuck to deliberate and slow technique drills. We’d been doing that all afternoon and were only stopped and lightly interrogated when Christian, Adam, and I started our round robin rapier free fencing. It was too dark to continue (we’d been thinking about stopping), but if we’d kept going, I would’ve wanted us to switch back to the more passable fare of slow drill.
And it’s another 20 years of people like me slowly rocking the boat in considerate and positive ways, that’ll eventually familiarize mainstream culture enough that one day they’ll see gambesons, doublets, rapiers, and longswords as normal martial arts gear.
It was only thirty years ago that people thought white pajamas were pretty weird.
You have to figure that someone whose first business e-mail to you refers to you as “cowboy” and himself as “snake” is a little flamboyant and laid back.
Sure enough, my client interview for the Project That Won’t End was pretty cool. Basically, the CIO and I should have gotten together and hammered things out 3 weeks ago. That’d have been nice. Then again, 3 weeks ago, we didn’t have what we have now. He and our team had already independently worked out almost all of the same conclusions. In fact, he took us further than we’ve gone, on a few points.
So as we’ve privately speculated, and he has now confirmed, we are effectively playing at pros from Dovers. He wants us to make our boldest pie-in-the-sky recommendations, and sell the client’s upper management on the deal. Then when they look at him and ask, “Can we do this?”, he’ll just sit there wearing a big, shit-eating grin. He admitted he wants to use us to prod upper management into making some bold moves. His IT boys have been just waiting for the word “go.”
If all self-professed redneck nerds are as easy to get along with as him, then the world is indeed a wonderful place.
And to further sweeten the deal today, both my Rice guys really came through for me, based on a mere week’s acquaintance.
Will arranged for some excellent shop time — he cut out 11 aluminum sword blanks on a heavy-duty bandsaw in Ryon Lab, in 25 minutes. That’s, I don’t know, probably 20% the time it would have taken me with what I have. And with cuts straight as an arrow, too.
Charles has taken to the longsword material like a Russian to vodka. He brought two new people, who both seemed to really dig it. Obviously, the 3-month milestone still looms far ahead, but for now, things are looking up.
Job training at Kaplan is proceeding apace. One more session, some paperwork and etc. to handle, one class observation, and then I should be starting forthwith. Saturday classes are not in short supply, so I think I’m set even if I get hired for a for-real position sooner than I expect.
After the final client presentation on 12/6, resources currently allocated to the Hell Project will be retasked to career planning / real job hunting.
And after Kaplan training ends, I’ll be able to go back to Tuesday UH practices. Woot.
When the hell will I find the 66 hours to finish up the 11 aluminum wasters? Uh.. Yeah. I don’t know. With higher priority issues on the table, it’ll probably be 3-4 months before I get through them all. Got some gauntlets and a helm to wrap up, first, anyway.
Oh, an interesting sidenote: The shop supervisor observed that 7075 is government-grade aircraft aluminum. He figured that 6061 would have been plenty good, and for easily half the price. But hey, the 7075 will rock out for a long time to come — if it’s good enough for the F-23, it’s good enough for us. :) So Shea and soon-to-be Conner have high-end aluminum waster blades, even if the hilts are despicably rough.
So I’ve rolled a couple critical results in the past month, apparently. Some of the first items mentioned here may have gone into another entry somewhere, but I got caught up in some things around the beginning of Nov, and can’t keep straight what I did or didn’t do for a couple weeks around then.
I’ve been doing evening workouts on campus at UH and Rice, 1-3 times a week about 10 - midnight at best. Sometimes just an hour, but that’s better than 0 hours. Just b/c my job trainings have been Tuesdays 6-10 and classes / team meetings in the same timeframe doesn’t mean I should let them stop me from exercising, y’know?
Occasionally, I’ll take my longsword with me for some solo drills and to work through the coming week’s lessons. But 2 out of 3 times, I just want to run, push, pull, lift, or climb something.
So 2008’s coming up, and with it, Hello, Hamlet — the 30-year Wiess musical tradition. I was in the ‘96 show (playing a pompous ass), saw the 2000 show, and choreographed the fight in the 2004 show. So I was thinking it’d be cool to find a way to maybe get involved with the ‘08 show. Now that I have a better grasp of WMA, I wanted to work in some cooler moves, show people a more exciting and realistic fight. So I idly blocked out some sequence snippets based on what I could remember of the final scene’s fight song, which spoofs “Shall We Dance?”
So back around Halloween, I was headed to my usual courtyard spot. I detoured through the RMC (student center) to make sure my WMA flyer hadn’t been covered up by some ad for STD testing or Kaplan testing. :)
Some girl spotted me and called out, “He’s got a sword! Cool!” I ended up talking to her and two other guys for about 15 mins about that, Brazil’s zero-emissions CO2 output (achieved through planting boatloads of sugarcane; whether it does good, I’m not the one to ask), etc. Then she randomly invited me to a post-Halloween party at her house, and asked me to submit an article to a student magazine she’s editing.
I figured, what the heck, right? Sure.
So the party night rolls around, and I show up in full fig, with breastplate, cabasset, etc. I already know 3 of the people there, so things are cool. As soon as I walk in the door, though, this girl points at me and says, “I need to talk to you!”
I don’t know her from Eve (or Adam). Even more bemusingly, another girl, this one Asian, proceeds to rake me over some coals — asking things like, “Who are you? Why are you here? What martial art did you say you study?” I’m like, I just *got* here, how can I already be in trouble?
So I talk with Rachel and her friends a bit. It turns out the Asian girl is one of Rachel’s housemates. The girl who needed to talk to me is another housemate, Caitlin. And when Caitlin finishes bringing out refreshments, she tells me that she’s the director for Hello, Hamlet.
Aha. The picture grows clearer.
So she said that Rice now has a theater dept, and the quality of productions has really improved in the past few years. She wants to make sure that this production of Hello, Hamlet keeps up with the times. She said she really liked the way the action synced up with the music in the ‘04 show, and has been looking for a fight choreographer.
Oh, really.
So I told her *I* had done that scene.
How perfect.
She also said that she wanted to raise the bar a little on the fight scene — make it grittier and more engaging, more realistic.
Is that so?
I replied that I’d actually already blocked out some partial sequences for fun.
And so we exchanged contact info, said we’d follow up after Thanksgiving, during Dead Week. We’re supposed to meet sometime in the next two weeks, to do a rough walkthrough of my now-completed initial .. whatever you call it. Blocking, scene directions. I’ve never done *real* theater.
It couldn’t have been scripted better.
And just over two weeks ago, I was passing through again, when this guy, Jesse (Chinese-American), asked me about the sword. He must have thought it was pretty cool, b/c he very quickly e-mailed me and introduced me to Will and Charles shortly thereafter. I’ve already written about that previously, so I won’t go into details other than to say that we met up two weeks ago, had a great intro practice, and have not looked back yet.
We had a Thanksgiving lunch with some folks. Two of my mother’s teachers, a family friend. This was the first such holiday event our family’s had in … years where it’s not a madhouse of relatives, social circle peers and influential Vietnamese community types; it was so laid-back and even a little surreal. The friend, bac Truoc, used to be in .. the ARVN air force, I think. I also seem to recall he’s missing a finger, but I always forget which one, b/c his hands are so small and stumpy. These days, he’s a painter.
[edit: I think I’m confusing him with bac Cuong, who is missing the thumb. I think he was a lt. col. in the ARVN. He’s not an artist.]
He recently saw an exhibit by an artist he knew from Vietnam. Forty years ago, the man had a distinctive style, strong lines, great expression. He was well-known for his work. The recent exhibit of new work was by the same dude.
And he still showed a distinctive style, strong lines, and great expression — the same style he had 40 years ago.
Bac Truoc talked about how we can grow to think we are successful — complacent, I ventured, and he concurred. And if we perceive we are successful, we perceive a lack of impetus to further develop ourselves and our skills. We become a snail, a mollusc that hides in what it has crafted, maintaining but not exploring or pushing boundaries. (VN civilization being traditionally 43% coastal, our idiomatic speech reflects that background.) Duh, right? Stick with what works.
Another consideration is that anyone from the immigrant generation has had to deal with the amber-trapping effect of traumatic upheaval. For many people I’ve known, much of their attitudes and perceptions froze on April 30, 1975. Everything that’s happened since has existed in a hazy fog of getting by — as though perhaps one day my father might wake up and find himself back in his old room with the windows open, his prized stamp collection still on his shelf, his record player crooning out the Righteous Brothers, just as they were when he abruptly left home 32 years ago. To think that you’re just leaving for a little while, that you’ll be back to put away the record in its sleeve, and then not… for three decades. Well, if not that, then what is traumatic?
:/
(Never mind the panic and terror of being on overcrowded boats and ships, risking pirates, starvation, dehydration, trampling, robbery, and arriving in a new country with no language, money, or possessions beyond the clothes on your back and maybe some jewelry stitched into the hem lines.)
And there is nothing terribly wrong with sticking to what works. It has risks (getting left behind by new developments), but has benefits as well (refining and building upon established strengths). Regarding art, plenty of artists have enjoyed commercial success with it.
It just has to be tempered with change, and vice versa. Neither is better, but most of us tend to one side or the other.
So whether one prefers stability or change is a matter of personal philosophy. The fence-straddling approach is to profess faith in dynamic stability — businesses today stress the value of creating and institutionalizing a learning culture, one that emphasizes formal processes of constant improvement and reaction to shifts in customer needs.
Fancy bizspeak, but they’re just words.
What do you believe in?
What works for you?
:/
No, not the Michael Crichton story.
Ever wanted to know just when all those dinosaurs (and Christians) fell in the scheme of things?
Thanks to MooBob42.
| November 25, 2007 |
| 1:00 pm | to | 4:00 pm |
Ernesto’s in town for Thanksgiving, and we plan to meet up, fence, etc. He might do a run-through of his KWAR class, or we might poison pigeons in the park. Who knows?
… is difficult when a bloody stub of an article utterly fails to mention any names. Interesting idea, though, that the Daylight Savings change kills people. I have no idea how to verify this — usually, it’s not too hard, with the power of Google these days. OK, just distracting myself. Back to work.
Ξ November 19th, 2007 | → 0 Comments | ∇ School |
OK, neither looking like Yoda nor being the hottest hotty in class is sufficient excuse to take 50 minutes to present.
And that’s after the prof requested they speed up.
To add insult to injury, a snafu on the profs’ end led to their approval of another team and ours randomly picking the same industry sector, and to present on the same night to boot.
So the rustling of papers and seats grows louder as we prepare to deliver 70% rehash material.
Thankfully, the remainder of our show is a fairly unique perspective on govt contract acquisition compared to the cardboard cut-out discussions of EBITDA, peg ratios, and P/Es. I offer hosannas for having Nathan, the uber-analyst in our group.
Plus he and I are both pretty dynamic and snappy presenters. We’re going to adjust a little on the fly, to account for mood and material.
If the punks in group 6 don’t square their nonsense away in another few minutes, I’m going to stage an intervention or a faked medical emergency. Or maybe it won’t be fake, and it won’t be mine.
—
Update after class:
We killed ‘em. Between Nathan and me, we provided a more executive-level overview of the numbers, talked about what caused them, and what they meant / implied for our portfolio’s prospects. We did *not* flog screenful after screenful of numbers, causing people’s eyes to glaze over. But we still hit the numbers hard and fast, for the profs’ benefit.
And as a side benefit, our off-the-cuff and somewhat unrehearsed delivery was apparently amusing. I counted 7 times the class burst out laughing — I even spotted our profs chuckling twice. We were probably the top non-zombiefied presentation — Nathan admitted where he had had to speculate or cook up some sort of formula to account for the defense contractors’ ridiculous $20 billion to $40 billion contract backlogs (equal to 2-4 years’ worth of annual revenue). He got the last laugh of the evening when someone asked about factoring those backlogs in, and Nathan concluded his response with, “…But I could be full of crap.”
Under 20 minutes, BTW.
And an A- on the paper. We’ve never scored below that on presentations, and this one went well. So that’s almost assuredly 3 credit hours in the bag with an A or A-.
Higher bonuses than ever, in the face of worsening performance?
That’s a clear symptom of the final theoretical 3rd wave in Dow Theory.
I’ve had bearish feelings every time I read about how the current administration waves its hands and points at Iraq every time economic issues come up. I predicted the housing slowdown within 2-3 years to my parents in 2004 (and that was *before* I really started following finance news more carefully), and now there’s this reported symptom. Pessimistic view through to 2009 (current downside potential to 11,000 unlikely; more likely over time, but downside will rise to 12,500 by 2009). I’ll be curious to look back two years from now and see if this was accurate.
Whatever, I was going to blither on about it, but who cares?
I have to go promote the military-industrial complex. B/c it and health care / insurance do well in uncertain times.
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