Books Lying Open
¤ Middlesex, Jeffery Eugenides
¤ The Color of Magic, Terry Pratchett

Soul-Devouring Worry:
¤ Fatigue.

Answer of the Day:
¤ Because she is a very naughty little kitty.

Curse of the Day:
¤ May your absence cause distress to your loved ones.

ince it's Sunday night and I'm very tired, I'm just going to talk about some of the stuff we did over the weekend, and then I'm going to bed. Also, I worked a ton the past few days on editing my ongoing novel, got enough done to print out the 270+ page chapter two, and gave it to mom before she left Sunday night, so with her reading it and Malaya as well, I'll get my first two opinions on the big chapter 2 pretty soon.

Cutting to the chase, here's a quick weekend recap.

They were down in Monterey Thursday and Friday, and arrived here Saturday afternoon, and we did... stuff. It's all sort of a blur at this point, after a very tiring weekend full of very little sleep, but it was a pretty good visit. Lunch out on Saturday, drove around and saw some local sights, dinner out, then back here for some conversation. Dusty made us proud and came out and rubbed ankles and let himself be petted. Jinx shamed us again by hiding in the bedroom, though she at least came out close enough to eat cat treats and crouch warily in the hallway.

Saturday night we went to bed early; early for me at least, around midnight. Because... Sunday morning I went to Kali class with Malaya, my 2nd real martial arts class as a full participant (the one we attended together last year was more of a visitor type thing). It's a good class with a real master teaching it, but it's also held at 9am over in Oakland, and that's a fair distance at an unfair time, by my standards at least. The parents went along, but they were going to hit the local Unitarian Church for the service and out of curiosity. Of course class went long, well past 12:30, so they were back before it ended, and the weather was quite chilly Sunday morning, like 65 and windy, so they bundled up on the cement bench and watched for a bit, before retreating to their rental convertible (with the roof very much up) and waiting for us to finish.

It wasn't a real great class for spectating, at least not until the end when the noobs (like Malaya and I) sit down and watch the gurus spar with interesting weapons and techniques, assisted and coached by the master. We learn a lot just by watching people who actually know what they're doing, and it's like a good kung fu movie, for free, in person. Though you're much more likely to see someone actually get hit during these sparring sessions than you are in most martial arts movies.  It's damn entertaining too; the master going with double sticks against a very good guy with a long staff and then a spear was damn impressive.  Certainly motivated me to want to get better with the stick, so I can work up to using two of them. That's a years-long project though.

I'll write more about the Kali classes soon, since Malaya's been going twice a week for a couple of months, and I'm going to be going (at least) once a week now that I've tried it and enjoyed it. I also seem to pick the movements up pretty quickly, though there's nothing like sparring with someone who's been doing it for 4 or 5 or 8 years to immediately humble me. As I struggle to master the 4 or 5 rapid hand/arm movements to successfully block a slow motion punch and deliver a good counter-strike, my more experienced fellow students effortlessly catch my punch, pull me sideways, and delivery 3 or 4 killing blows in literally 2 seconds.  We've got to practice everything in slow motion several times, and I think I'm doing good when I can do that, and maybe deal with them at half-speed. And then I see them working with each other, or they go full speed once in a while as we're sparring, pulling their punches short of hitting me, of course, and it's just... yeah.

The master at Sunday's class has been practicing and teaching Kali for upwards of 40 years, and while he looks like a dumpy little Filipino guy in street clothes; when you see him move it's scary. So fluid, so quick, and he's like iron under his skin and slight pot belly. He shows you the movements and hits you with about 10% of his power, and you stagger back. Literally; he does little slaps just for fun to show you where he would have hit, and your arm goes numb. He was showing me a little block to chest bump thing, and while leaning against my sternum he did the bump at about 1/5 power, and I went "whoof" and staggered back two steps.  And he was just leaning on me; zero distance to build up speed or power, and he was far from trying to knock me.

I was always very skeptical of that focused force and power stuff, like how they say Bruce Lee could knock someone ten feet with a one inch-punch, but when you feel it pushing into your sternum hard enough to empty your lungs, or feel a short little guy slap your arm casually and it feels like you just got hit by the door of a truck, it's sort of hard to remain a non-believer.

I don't know what my long-term goals are with studying Kali, but I enjoy the classes, enjoy doing the exercises, and since Malaya is into it as well (meaning we've always got a sparring partner/move memory aid) I'll going to keep at it for a while. It's not real cardiovascular, but it's fun to learn new techniques, it's definitely a good way to build up some muscle in odd places (lots of work on the wrists, my triceps were aching from all the punching the first class, and both my forearms and thighs are sore today from stick and footwork), I've gained some coordination, and on the off-chance I need to defend myself against a non-gun wielding opponent, it might come in handy.

It's also very informative when we see the good people duel, since it shows just how absurd the fights in movies are. Any one with any skill in Kali would counter and put away 98% of the people I've ever seen in a movie within 2 or 3 moves. Literally, movie character would take a big, slow, telegraphed swipe with their sword, Kali expert would sidestep, slap the opponent's weapon hand down effortlessly, and then strike hard to the head or other vulnerable areas, and that would be that.  True, fights of those type wouldn't make much of a movie, but reality seldom does.

Anyway, more on Kali soon, perhaps Friday after I attend class Thursday night and have more to say and more perspective on the whole thing.

After class, we hopped into our waiting, heated, chariot, and drove to Berkeley looking for a Thai place that had been highly recommended by Malaya's friend. Unfortunately, Malaya knew what street it was on but had forgotten the cross street, so we ended up searching for parking (always borderline impossible in Berkeley), finding it, and then walking about eight blocks only to find that the restaurant didn't open until dinnertime on Sundays.

We ended up eating at a sports bar type place in the area... a sports bar that inexplicably had no TVs. I find it hard to imagine why a pizza and burger and beer type place with an interior painted with scenes from Cal Football history wouldn't have TVs showing games on the first NFL weekend of the year, but it probably went a long way towards explaining why there wasn't a single other customer in the whole place when we first arrived.  The service was speedy, at least, and while everyone else went in on an extra large pizza, I got a swiss chicken sandwich with fries. Mine was okay; the biggest selling point was that it was done in about 8 minutes, which let me eat the whole thing before anyone else even had their salads served, much less had pizza on the table, and by the time they got the pizza and finished 9 of the 12 slices, I was hungry again and got 2 slices of pie also. Mediocre pizza, but hey, you know what they say about pizza and sex even when it's bad...

The other odd thing about the place was the only other occupied table. Three people came in a while after we did, a short, young, and very fat black woman, with a black girl with her (daughter?) and a skinny little white kid who looked a lot like Harry Potter, circa book 1. Adopted son? Baby sitting? Dunno. The odd part was that he soon began feeding the juke box, which resulted in a steady stream of typically mopey R&B love songs. AKA my least favorite music on earth. I wanted to smack the kid and demand to know why the hell he wasn't rebelling and listening to the Insane Clown Posse or Limp Bizket or Eminem or whatever the hell band 11 year old white boys listen to these days to piss off their parents, but that hardly seemed appropriate behavior in front of my future wife and current parents.  It was somewhat informative music though, since from that I assumed the white boy was her son, by adoption or step-mothering or something, since it would, at least, explain his (lack of) musical taste. I don't know what would explain the fact that at least a dozen wimpy R&B songs were on the jukebox in that sort of a pizza dive in the first place, but we're happy to solve one mystery a day, at this point. 

I could do a whole blog about Berkeley at some point, and maybe I will, but it would be under protest. It reminds me of the crowded, noisy, drunk-infested New Orleans French Quarter, though it lacks the class that age and interesting architecture brings. And trust me, NO has precious little of that. Reputation aside, if you're not a fiend for old brick buildings or a party-starved drunk, it's like a much hotter, dirtier, more-crowded European city without the ambience and marble fountains.

The biggest difference between NO and Berkeley, aside from architecture (Berkeley is pretty ugly and mostly modern), is that Berkeley is simply full of dirty street people/hippies. If you're an aimless, pot-smoking, dreadlocked, skateboarding homeless 22 y/o, with a small puppy on a leash and a misspelling-filled cardboard sign begging for spare change you'll just spend on cigarettes, it's your Mecca. Back in the day, Berkeley and various other areas of SF (downtown especially) were the home of the hippies, and while most of those people grew up and got real jobs and conformed and now hate themselves, there's always a new crop of idiots coming along to take their rightful place hanging around on the street at all hours of the day and night. It sucks compared to the old days though, since 1) there aren't thousands of vaguely-hot hippy chicks eager to fuck for a smoke, 2) the few girls in sight are impossibly-skanky from doing fifty guys in the three months since their parents cut off their tuition checks since they flunked out and they've got at least herpes if not AIDS by now, and 3) none of today's aspiring hippies have any money, and in the current "$1500 for a studio with no window" world of Berkeley real estate, that means no one's got a crash pad.

The best purpose for Berkeley now is to remind the rest of us exactly why we have jobs, why we studied in school, and why we don't ever want to live downtown anywhere.  That's what it does for Malaya and me, at least.

After lunch the parents drove us back to our condo, they returned to their relatively-nearby hotel, and we all chilled out motionless for a few hours.  No wait, actually I watched about 20 minutes of football and then got on the computer to work feverishly on my novel editing, since we wanted to pop over to Malaya's work and print out the revised chapter two for her and mom to read, and I wanted to get that done while mom was here.

I really do work best with a deadline, though I hate to admit it. Every year, back when I was doing those D2 holiday/halloween short stories, I would have some ideas, want to do it, but dick around for weeks, until the morning of the 30th (or 31st, on several occasions) when I'd realize it was now or never, and spend 4 or 6 or 8 hours banging out a story, before posting it that night, frequently without any editing at all.

On a similar theme, I'd been nibbling along editing my book for weeks, wanting to finish with the amazingly-long chapter 2, but hadn't had much motivation and hadn't been doing more than an hour or two a day, most of the time.  That changed about a week ago, when I realized mom would be here and decided that I wanted to get the print out done and given to her while she was here.

Well, actually I wanted to get it done and mail it to her before she left so she could read some of it on the drive up here, but we failed to coordinate that and I didn't have it done in time anyway.  Having missed that opportunity, I decided to get it done by the time she got here, and working towards that end I spent at least 6 hours a day on it for the past week. Ordinarily I have to be in the right mood to write, have to have relative silence, no distractions, etc. Of course when I had a deadline and really wanted to meet it, I was waking up, surfing for 20 minutes, and then writing for four hours, even while Malaya was bustling around, people were making noise outside, the sun was up, etc.

I managed to get in a few hours on Saturday morning and then more at night, despite being too tired to think, and we got into bed before midnight, which is unheard of around here. As usually happens when I go to bed without being awake for at least 16 hours, no matter how tired I am, I woke up after 3 hours, dozed for a while, woke up at 5am, dozed for a while, and finally at 6:15 I gave up and got up and went straight to the computer, eating shrimp ramen and writing from then until 8, when Malaya got up and we had to shower and get ready to leave.  After Kali and lunch we got home at 3:45, and after watching a bit of football I got back to work, despite harboring a desperate desire to nap, and after an hour and a half I was near enough to the end to say "what the hell" and we hurried over to Malaya's work to print out the 260+ pages of chapter 1 & 2, make a copy of the whole thing (love those auto-feeding copiers), hurry back here, put it in a binder for mom, and leave to meet them for dinner.

Ill fortune struck first though, when I drove off with the whole 600 pages on top of my car.  No, not really. What actually happened was that Malaya called the Thai restaurant we were planning to go to, near the parents' hotel... and they were out of business with the phone number disconnected.  As a result, since we knew a pretty good Thai place near here and no others near there, the parents had to drive out here again, and off we went for a late dinner.

It was good, conversation was engaged in, home was returned to, cats were harassed, and that was that. Mom was sad to be leaving, much like dad has been when each of his visits up here have ended. I don't really know what to do with that; it's like, "They actually love me and miss me?" is a hard concept to hammer into my cold, hard heart.

I'm going down there around Xmas again this year, and Malaya might be convinced to go down as well, in January or so, but that's all still up in the air. 

And that's about all.