Reading, Writing, Wrestling

Conflicted about public speech

2010-02-15T09:48:00.000-08:00

Hi. I always threaten that this will be my last post, and yet it somehow never is. I am a conflicted blogger because I have things I want to say and at the same time I am acutely aware of how powerful public speech can be. However, I did delete my doula blog. While it is important that I have an online presence, I believe that the bulk of what people come to know about me should come from direct communication, preferably in person but also by phone or email. It's not that I don't want broadcasting methods like Facebook, Twitter, blogging, etc to stand in for one-on-one communication, it's that I am just not very good at that kind of broadcasting, or I don't know what it's good for or how to use it properly. When it comes down to it, I'd really just rather spend my time talking to people.

You can find my doula web page at: http://www.nycdoulaservice.com/ourservices/hana.html.

Feel free to email or call me directly if you want to know more about me. I think this is really it for now.

Officially Resting from Wrestling

2009-11-17T09:08:00.000-08:00

I’ve decided to let this blog lapse. I’m no longer a wrestler (although I am still a writer and reader) and would like to separate that part of my life a little bit from what I am working on now. You can find my new blog at: www.hanaleora.blogspot.com. Here is the first post.

I have always been concerned with helping women develop their full physical strength. As a wrestler I constantly came up against assumptions that women couldn’t or shouldn’t be physically powerful. At the same time, I competed in tournaments with hundreds of extremely strong women from all over the world. I always saw their strength as fundamentally feminine, rather than a masculine overlay to their gender; it was one of their basic characteristics and an expression of a potential that every woman has, whether she develops it or not. The women I had the privilege of coaching knew this instinctively as they learned how to lift, throw and take people down and as they became stronger through weight training, running, swimming, and competing. Even little girls, if they haven’t yet been taught what’s proper (and often even if they have), take great pleasure in huffing and puffing up a hill on their bike or knocking their brother down.

I’ve now been trained to coach women in a different kind of physical force. I’m about to start a (moonlight) career as a doula, a nonmedical labor assistant who helps women give birth. Ancient people knew that birthing women needed extra help for physical and emotional support, whether that help came in the form of family and friends or other women in the community. It is only recently that modern hospitals began allowing male partners into the delivery room and even more recently they have been allowing doulas in. A doula can make a huge positive improvement in the woman’s ability to deal with pain and the length of the labor, and can decrease the number of intrusive interventions. In a way, she takes the place of the traditional birthing community.

My father was a family doctor who delivered low-risk women with a minimum of intervention outside the hospital, and I consider myself a folk expert on women’s reproductive health. With a high rise iron worker, a marathon runner, and a postwar PhD in the family, I come from a good legacy of strong women. It is natural that I come to this kind of work eventually. But other than those forces of good, I am compelled by two pressing issues: one, the shocking lack of confidence most women have in their bodies, especially when it comes to matters of physical prowess, and two, dismal maternal mortality and morbidity rates that already rank the US lower than over 40 other countries and appear to be underreported. As a doula, I can help women one at a time, but I’d also like to make as big an impact as possible with my writing.

Please tell me what you think – I welcome any and all comments about these issues, and ideas on how we can do more.

Fads and feet

2009-10-22T12:21:00.001-07:00

The New York Times printed an article yesterday about barefoot running. I have not tried running in the barefoot shoes, only hiking – but advocates of running tout it for the same reasons I love my barefoot shoes, mainly that they allow the foot its full range of natural movement.

There are too many “natural” trends going on right now and I wonder if any of them will become anything more than fringe subcultures. I’ve heard that CSA (community supported agriculture) memberships are in such high demand that I’d do well to get on a waiting list now for next spring. I’ve also heard that the memberships are extremely expensive and have not yet investigated whether this is true, but I’ve seen farmer’s market prices with my own eyes. The Lincoln Center farmer’s market tends to be slightly better than Union Square, but still very pricey when compared with most supermarkets. It appears that this natural-food-craze has driven up the price of a limited supply of vegetables without really increasing the supply – or maybe I’m just being cynical.

Americans have always been obsessed with health and personal physical fitness. I could recite an endless list of fads including Atkins diet and carb-o-phobia, bans on trans fats and a New York ban on salt (in the works?), as well as NY’s ongoing ad campaign against sugary drinks. All of these have some appeal to me as someone interested in health and lifestyle, but they are way too narrow and seem to go too far in the opposite direction. Maybe they are the inevitable result of a system that thrives on megacultivation of food monocultures processed into packages and sold by the careful application of marketing genius. What comes out the other end of the system may challenge it but ultimately does so by similar means – sensationalism, contrarian beliefs and overall the insistence that there is only one “right” way.

I still think that all my shoes benefit my feet in different ways. I’m not going to throw away my running shoes – but don’t be surprised if you see me trying out the lightfooted barefoot run around the reservoir now and again.

Hiking in the barefoot shoes

2009-10-01T08:51:00.000-07:00

I went hiking last week in the barefoot shoes. Walking in them in the city is fine, and it’s nice to feel barefoot, but at the end of the day the pavement is only hard and flat. Rigid shoes fit this kind of standardized walking landscape because the straight edge of the shoe matches the flat plane of the sidewalk or subway platform or floor. Walking on flat planes makes it easy to let your foot roll in and to let the arch collapse, because there’s nothing really to stimulate it or make it work. It does to your feet what a desk job does to your back. This is why many shoes provide “support.”

Hiking, on the other hand, is the equivalent of lifting weights or playing sports for your feet, and I’m not convinced that feet need all-enveloping support for this activity, provided they are moderately strong. Most people’s foot muscles have atrophied from disuse, so they would need some strengthening before they could fully participate, but I think that big blocky hiking boots are unnecessary and even detrimental to feet that have regained some of their natural strength.

Barefoot shoes allow the foot, and especially the toes, to flex and extend to match the uneven terrain of the trail. They allow the various parts of the foot to be used in different ways and move independently rather than all as one unit. They allow the wearer the pleasure of feeling the give and texture of the ground underfoot, the shoes really facilitate using the feet as tools, rather than just blocks. The foot is a complex arrangement of bones, ligaments and muscles and should be used as such.

Also, we found a delicious laetiporous sulphureus on that hike, at least 5 pounds worth.

Sounds like a sex toy, but isn’t: a natural history of my feet

2009-09-17T14:32:00.000-07:00

New shoes might seem like a silly reason to blog, but these are no ordinary shoes. They’re barefoot shoes – a rubber sole to protect your sole from sharp things, and not much else. They don’t provide arch support, they don’t bounce, they don’t have air pockets or springs or cantilevers. They just free the feet from being confined in boxes or walking on the blocks that we usually strap to our feet.

For a long period of time when I was a little kid, I refused to wear any shoes except for completely flat sandals, and it drove my parents crazy. They blamed themselves when I went to the podiatrist at age 12 with flat feet, saying that they should have forced me to wear “real” shoes – in spite of the fact that multiple people in my family have flat feet. The podiatrist made orthotics for me and forbade me from wearing sandals, telling my parents that if I wore the orthotics all the time, I might just be able to avoid foot catastrophe. My lack of natural arch support put extra pressure on my first and fifth metatarsal joints, pressure that has been connected with the formation of bunions. The podiatrist hoped that the orthotics would redistribute the pressure and keep the bones of my foot in something like their “natural” geometry.

For the past 15 years I’ve worn the orthotics on and off, and I’ve also spent a whole lot of time running around barefoot or in shoes that provide no “support.” I think it is telling that I spent lots of time on my feet wrestling – lifting people, pushing and competing – in shoes that had completely flat soles. I developed strong feet wrestling and climbing and I think I’ve done pretty well. I’ve developed very small bunions that only hurt when I wear high heels and my feet are relatively healthy.

So the barefoot shoes are the logical next step. I’ll probably have to strengthen my feet slowly before I can really run in them, but I’m not a big fan of jogging anyway. I’d rather sprint, play games, and go on hikes.

I’m not going to abandon my other shoes. They all have their uses, even the high heels, and as long as I don’t wear any of them too often or too long, my feet should keep getting healthier. I think this barefoot shoe represents a technology of an interesting type – one that allows our bodies to do what they’re built to do. There aren’t many of these around, but I’d like to see more. Such technology should be simple but useful; the first one that comes to mind is fertility awareness. People may think I am a Luddite because I don’t take birth control hormones, relying instead on my body’s own hormonal cycle, when in fact I use an electric thermometer and a computer, as well as medical knowledge, to help me. Without that technology, I’d be flying blind.

And the best thing about these shoes is their name: Vibram Five Fingers.

Why I quit (1)

2008-01-03T07:30:00.001-08:00

It's no shame to reject something great if you would have to do it all by yourself.

Going to Europe for six weeks?

Drinking a nice bottle of wine?

Having a baby?

Competing in the Olympics?

These are great, fulfilling, wonderful things to do, but they ring hollow if you imagine doing them all by yourself, or worse, with someone you don't like. That's one of the reasons I quit wrestling and why I'm not going to start again.

There is some intrinsic value in accomplishment for its own sake. It gives me infinite pleasure to practice a skill that I have spent a long time acquiring; to show that skill in front of others; and to take pride in what I can do. If I had started wrestling by myself then maybe I would appreciate these things more. But I had the best coach and mentor money could buy (that's a joke – he did it absolutely free) and after having trained with him, all I see with others are diminishing returns.

Hard Work Is Cumulative

2007-10-30T16:52:00.000-07:00

Where Victories Unparalleled Await

2007-10-06T15:58:00.001-07:00

I haven't written any tirades lately. I haven't written about why men and women should train together, or why you shouldn't study literature, or something about poetry and beauty or love.

Here's why: I'm tired. I hopped onto a plateau in April, or a downward spiral, which is what a plateau feels like to someone with time-sensitive ambitions. I lost in Bulgaria; I won one and then lost in Germany; I won in Israel but didn't wrestle up to par; and I started well in Austria and let my concentration go. By the time Canada Cup came around in Guelph, I was burnt out and didn't care. I nearly quit then, and the only reason I trained hard through the World Championships was because I told myself that I'd allow myself to entertain the thought of quitting afterward.

I've had sleep problems (not unusual for me). I've had serious digestive problems that I have tried to solve variously with diet changes, coffee abstention and yoga (yoga came closest to succeeding), but it has gotten so bad since Azerbaijan that I have literally given up. I've also given up trying to pay off my credit card or stay ahead of my bills - luckily my rent in my new place covers phone and utilities, so if I can make that then at least my internet won't get cut off. Even so, it's very close every month. My significant relationship, long distance to begin with, has suffered immensely. I call my friends in Montreal whenever I'm in town with free time, which happens so rarely that even they are starting to feel like long-distance friends.

I hadn't noticed this creeping since April, but it was recently pointed out to me. I am now getting farther from the kind of person I would like to be, not closer. Or at least stagnating, which to an ambitious person like me feels like a decline. Many people involved in wrestling will tell you that the greatest athletes and people who accomplish things become like this; but if I lose what is most important to me, what worth will an Olympic medal be? I like to think that I can defer having the kind of life I want to have, just for six more months, nine more months, but enough is enough. Three years ago I was supposed to be on my way to financial independence.

There are two things that momentarily stay my hand. The first is that the Israelis have invested a great deal in me, and I don't want them to think I disrespect their investment or that I'm throwing it away without a second thought. One could say that since I am their greatest hope for qualifying for Beijing 2008, that I at least owe it to them to continue training through the qualifications. This argument has some merit. It is important to respect people who go out of their way for you.

The other is the thought that it's only a few more months. But I don't really buy this argument because it's always only a few more months to the next possible stopping place, the next milestone, and there is always another one.

It might sound like I'm on the verge of quitting, and I am. I'm also finding it an incredibly difficult concept to get my head and heart around, especially when I go to practice and feel at ease in my muscled body, working a method and technique that I understand intuitively, always on the verge of some great discovery, of leaping up to the next plateau, where victories and joys unparalleled await...

This blog is getting personal

2007-10-04T19:23:00.001-07:00

One of the happiest times I can remember was one evening when O and I were listening to KCRW and Samuel Barber's "Adagio for Strings" came on. We laid there with each other, not moving, for the entire piece.

I had another musical moment like that today, riding down Cote-des-Neiges, listening to Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. The steep grade of the hill had just started to catch me and push me into the wind, and as I rounded the bend and came in view of that wonderfully oriented Guy/Sherbrooke intersection, the choir started to sing " Freude schöner Götterfunken, Tochter aus Elysium."

I am reminded of this poem by Jimmy Santiago Baca (this is only an excerpt):

I followed these signs
like an old tracker and followed the tracks deep into myself,
followed the blood-spotted path,
deeper into dangerous regions, and found so many parts of myself,
who taught me water is not everything,
and gave me new eyes to see through walls,
and when they spoke, sunlight came out of their mouths,
and I was laughing at me with them,
we laughed like children and made pacts to always be loyal,
who understands me when I say this is beautiful?

Change

2007-10-02T20:05:00.001-07:00

Tonight I hated wrestling. Tonight I hated everything I loved and everything I have committed to. I hated everything I've given my mind and soul to, and everything I've invested in. I hated everything I've sacrificed and everything I've achieved. I hated money and I hated not having any, and I hated wanting it.
I hated wrestling while I wrestled. I hated it but I did it because I had to, because I had no choice, because it is the best way I know how to move. I hated it because it is integral to my being. I hated it because it is woven into every aspect of my life. I hated it like you hate a city that you love but have to leave. I hated it but I wrestled and wrestled well, and it made me feel old.

Ambition and Motivation

2007-10-01T21:13:00.001-07:00

I spent the weekend in the elements. Some rain and thunder on Friday, cloud and cold with delicious warm patches of sun on Saturday, a bright moon on Saturday night, not to mention fire and wind. Some say the world will end in fire, some say in ice...

As you may have guessed, I lost in Azerbaijan. I'm rethinking this whole thing I'm in, and it's wonderfully refreshing. When I consider that I'm not bound to any of the things I'm doing, I can do whatever I want. Maybe I'll go to Israel to train with the coach who instilled the love of the sport in me in the first place. Maybe I'll quit and do something else. Something big. It has to be big with me otherwise why even bother. Sometimes I wish I could just sit around and drink tea and noodle around on the guitar all the time and just cuddle with someone and watch the snow falling. I can do that for a while but I have a curse and I think it's called ambition. That's what I'd like it to be, and not some inferior cousin like impulsiveness, obsession, or misdirection.

See I used to think that all I wanted in life was to have a family and kids and stability and community. Like that Raffi song, "all I really need is a song in my heart, food in my belly, and love in my family." But I think I need more. I need intellectual sharpness and vigor, and I need to be involved in some deep work, and I need to be always creating connections, whether that means making friends or finding people to create things with. As soon as I stagnate I start to feel stuck. Believe it or not, that's how I feel now.

Seconds

2007-09-22T07:33:00.000-07:00

Two minutes is about all I have to write this post.

Two minutes go by so fast. You are pushing and defending and trying to think and the seconds just go by. The expanse of mat resolves into colors and you are like a deer in headlights. This is all there is.

There is so much to write I don't know where to start, about Azerbaijan and how I'm basically cross dressed if I'm wearing a t-shirt. About Baku and the strangeness and when it comes down to it it's just another place. About the amazing variety of languages I have had the chance to struggle to speak. About professionalism, making wise choices, and Japanese displays of emotion. The wisdom of coaches and parents not your own.

But I'm out of time.

Update

2007-09-18T10:38:00.001-07:00

There is so much to say. Azerbaijan is a pretty good city but way too big to take in on a trip like this. I'm not even going to begin to think about learning the public transportation system which seems shoddy and crowded. The old city is beautiful and touristy and the Caspian sea is polluted. We tried to get some caviar today in a market but the tins it was in looked old and moldy and the guy wanted $80 per 100 grams! Everyone is worried about the food and water; I don't think it's that bad. I just drink bottled water, like I do in Israel, and eat what they give me because it's all I'm going to get.

The Israeli coaches as usual are really worried about my weight - I was 50.8 kg today after working out. But they've seen me make weight once before so they are not as worried as they could be. They also have some freestyle guys weighing in tomorrow so they've got their eyes on them, thank god.

In true Israeli style, we have two security guards with our 16-person delegation. I was actually glad to have them because there was some weird guy staring at me while I practiced with one of the girls this morning, and I decided I didn't need that so I went and got our security guys. The weird guy beat it right away. He's a wrestler. It's weird how I'm one of very very few women here; the first women don't wrestle until Friday so a lot of them aren't here yet, and the tournament that's going on right now is greco - still an all-male sport, and likely to be that way for a long time.

Baku day 2

2007-09-16T04:22:00.001-07:00

This morning I went to the tournament site. There was a ton of security: we had to pass a security guard to get into the parking lot in our taxi, then another at the door to the arena, then a metal detector, and there are security people/cops (?) everywhere. But it feels more like just the security at a big international event, and not like this is a dangerous place.

They had about 6 mats laid out for practice, and they were nice mats. Our team was given a little cubicle change-room and there were showers. So different from Bulgaria, where there wasn't even toilet paper in the bathroom and the practice room was close to 0 degrees. I did some technique with some girls from Cuba, who all spoke French and from what I understood, came from different parts of Africa originally. We are all international people here.

My weight is good, a bit heavy but I'm still feeling jetlagged and I remember that I'm always heavier the few days after I get off the plane. Weigh-in is Thursday and I'm not worried. The food here is good.

Baku

2007-09-15T05:29:00.001-07:00

The last few days have been absolutely hectic, but finally I have arrived in Baku. I had a lovely 12 hour layover in London - what a blessing in disguise that was. I was upset that I had to travel by myself and deal with that 12 hour layover but I just took the Tube into the city, went to the Tate Modern Art Museum and tooled around in London. I know I was lucky to get a sunny day, and I was in a touristy area (Southwark by the river) but I really really liked it. I want to go back.

Baku reminds me of Israel and Sofia. The city is kind of dirty and old in the same way, the traffic is gridlocked and the drivers are crazy, and people will stare at you on the street but are generally friendly and helpful. None of my languages are any good here - they just speak Azari and Russian. Occasionally English. There are a lot of fashion stores and it seems like a pretty expensive city. Our hotel is right by the Caspian Sea.

I saw some Japanese guys going for a run on the boardwalk earlier, all decked out in their sweating clothes and their Japan uniforms. I met a couple of Americans on the plane, and I've seen various other wrestling people, but no Canadians yet. The guys who met me at the airport were well organized and I think it's going to be a good tournament. The Israeli team is nice but they all speak Russian among themselves. Even so, I've got plenty to deal with trying to get over this jet lag and maybe catch up on some reading for the classes I'll be missing.

I'll update every time I get to this internet cafe. I feel good, not nervous yet, but confident that at least I'm ready for anything.

Practices #7 and #6, or, Priorities

2007-09-01T13:12:00.001-07:00

Like love, friendship is a skill rather than a state of being, a process rather than a finished product. I would not throw away a friendship for anything - not for a world medal, not for a romantic relationship, not for money or success. This is something I've fully realized only recently. Friendship, if it is good, is compatible with all these things and supports them.

I'm in London Ontario right now for the wedding of a dear friend. I am missing one practice, a practice very close to the World Championships. I leave for Azerbaijan two weeks from today. It was an iffy call and a tough decision but I'm sure I made the right decision. According to my coach, I have my priorities wrong but I think I have them just right. If I win the World Championships but don't have any friends, what kind of a person would I be? What kind of success would that be? Success that is obtained at the expense of your values is not success at all.

I put this much more eloquently in my head, but I have to write it somehow and there's no time for fanciness. It's the symbolism of the missed practice that really gets me - my coach holds these symbols over our heads. The fact that I would miss a practice for a friend's life celebration symbolizes my non-commitment to wrestling. The practice itself is ok, I did a small makeup practice on Friday and my wrestling won't suffer for it. But to him it shows that my priorities are wrong because I place relationships with family and friends above my wrestling success. The symbolism allows no room for balance or for being a full human being. And I don't buy the argument that in order to succeed you need to sacrifice your humanity. Some people replace humanity with success and it is all they have, but that is a pure survival mentality and it is desperate. It would be a bad kind of world if only desperate people achieved things.

Practice #8a

2007-08-26T15:47:00.001-07:00

I miscounted; I have 8 practices left before I leave for the World Championships.

My wrestling is coming together. My partners at practice are going harder with me and really pushing me. I'm trying different moves and wrestling more cleanly, finishing well, doubling my singles, getting out of bad positions. My confidence is up - not just in words but in practice. I go for my moves. I'm opening up. Doing everything that my coaches are telling me to do.

I'm starting to think about my mentality for the World Championships. I know that I can get the proper mental state but it's not easy and I have to prepare. It won't just happen when I need it unless I really know what I want and what I need to be thinking.

In Austria, I spent ten or fifteen minutes thinking exactly what I needed to be thinking. I visualized myself doing my moves, opening up, and nobody getting my legs. I imagined moving my opponent around, staying in the center and controlling the mat. I thought of all the ways I could score points, and thought of all the times when people have tried, and failed, to score on me. I thought of my strengths - I'm fast, I have good reactions, I'm stronger than I look, I'm creative, smart, and stubborn, and I want to win. Thinking about my strengths and imagining my moves made me really want to do them, and made me really want to win. Not in that flighty "wouldn't it be nice if I won" kind of way. I just got really excited about being there and having a chance to focus and wrestle and come out on top.

That state of mind held for the first period of the match and then was broken by external factors that I hadn't anticipated. This time I'm going to anticipate everything. My opponent is going to cheat. She's going to head butt me and break my nose and then poke me in the eyes. My coach is going to yell something I can't hear, or suddenly forget that I can't speak Russian. The room is going to be too hot or too cold. There will be a fire drill right before my match. I will get called up to wrestle before I have a chance to warm up. I will have the toughest person in the tournament first round. I will have an American first round. Nobody there will speak English, French, or even Hebrew. I will get food poisoning. The referee will give me the evil eye. A donkey will run up on the mat and I'll have to dart under it to grab my opponent's ankles and take her down. I will be informed just before my match that I've been sold into slavery.

Etc. No matter what happens, keeping that state of mind is the most important thing. If I lose focus, I have to refocus. If I shut down, I have to open up.

Stress and Practice #8

2007-08-23T21:01:00.001-07:00

I am seriously stressed out and have been for many months. And I feel everything starting to descend: my financial problems along with Concordia's muddled bureaucracy, courses that may or may not be interesting and take up incredible amounts of my time, moving (!), getting rid of my stuff, getting new stuff, needing new stuff that I can't afford. Not to mention wrestling. I'm feeling a bit broken down physically. This week has been pretty strenuous, especially yesterday when I ran the stadium stairs in the morning, did more cardio and weights later, and then did some really intense weights in the evening. My neck is sore from that pulled muscle a few days ago, my IT band is killing me (whose elbow was that?), my shoulder of course is always sore, and my other muscles are just vaguely thinking about starting to complain. I hardly slept last night after being dumped by a friend of 13 years, so practice was killer. I wrestled well though - I played the "pretend you're not tired at all" game. It worked. I may have to play that game in Azerbaijan.

PS I spoke with a friend who is studying Ayurveda and she gave me some stress-relieving yoga poses. One of them is basically lying down on the floor for 20 minutes not moving. Count me in!

Tomorrow I think I'll run in the morning, swim in the noon, and do some more hard weights in the afternoon. Then the week is over and I can have some coffee on Saturday morning and read the New York Times.

Practice #9

2007-08-22T18:44:00.001-07:00

I'm going to change the format of this blog. Where before I would write long ruminations that were somewhat groomed and edited, my entries will now look more like journal entries. I have about three weeks before I leave for Azerbaijan and the World Championships, and I'm going to document each practice and see how it goes.

A friend gave me some good advice: he told me to count the number of practices I have left before the World Championships. Having a finite (and small) number gives it a sense of urgency, like I have to learn something absolutely every practice. It should be like that all the time, but of course the intensity increases as the big tournament comes close.

Last practice was Tuesday, and it was Practice #9. It was an ok practice, I felt a bit clumsy but I got the job done. I also used a variety of moves and opened up a little more, which is what V has been telling me to do all the time. I did an inside leg trip, a move I haven't used for a while. I tried to keep myself in the center of the mat in a good mat position no matter what else was going on and that gave me better offense and better defense.

I also practiced that on/off intensity. When I was resting, I let my mind relax. When I was about to wrestle, I got my mind into it 100%. That switch is important because if you are "on" the whole time, you will waste energy and not have any left for when it matters. But you need to be able to get into it fast.

When we were at the training camp I wrestled a match in which the coach and my teammates were watching, egging me on, keeping the intensity through to the last second. That was great and I brought that to this practice too. I need to bring it, and more, to each successive practice.

I leave on September 14th.

The Grind

2007-07-24T07:30:00.001-07:00

I started wrestling on a lark, and I loved it. I got hooked on the endorphin rush of training, the camaraderie on long trips, the thrill of winning. My coach was the kind of person you respect and admire not because he demands it but because he deserves it and leads by example. My team was a close-knit group of eccentric students who told jokes in the van and would hold your contact lenses for you when they fell out during a match.

Those students graduated and that coach left (the job did not pay and he found opportunities elsewhere). I had to have shoulder surgery and took a year off. When I returned I applied to a PhD program and started wrestling with a different team, whose coach has produced many world medalists and at least one world champion (that I know of). But I'm not happy there. The team is not a team but a group of individuals who train together only because you cannot train for wrestling alone. The coach is a good coach but his personality leaves much to be desired. I was ok there while I was winning the CIS Championships, but now that I'm losing at the international level, I sometimes wonder why I even started wrestling and how I got so far. In the beginning, it was fun. Now it's not.

It used to be fun because in addition to fulfilling my desire for physical activity it fulfilled my desire for social interaction. Now (with no disrespect to the individuals on the team who are interesting people by themselves) I feel like I'm in a human wasteland. There's no group, no spirit. The practice is not a happy place.

But who ever said it would be fun? Who ever said you should be happy? No one on my old team ever won anything big. This is hard work, and you don't become great by having fun and being happy. So I've been told. But what am I supposed to do when a great deal of my life's philosophy rests on interacting with other people in meaningful ways?

I don't know if this question has an answer. I have been told that for every top athlete, there comes a time when the "love of the game" transforms into something else, something more serious – a job, a duty, a sacrifice, a commitment. Maybe so, but they must be getting something out of it in order to continue. I never did it for anything other than love of the game. So what can I get out of it now? The promise of greatness?

If achieving greatness requires a person to become solitary and indifferent to others, then I don't want to be great. If achieving greatness requires a person to sacrifice everything important to them, even their identity and philosophy, then I don't want to be great. I want to achieve a lot in my lifetime. I have extremely high standards. But there might be a turning point at which the value of the thing I want to achieve is no longer greater than the value of the things I must give up in order to achieve it.

I don't believe that life has to be all peaches and roses – I curse my alarm clock some mornings and I do what has to be done. But I also believe that people who work hard to achieve greatness by sacrificing their happiness have failed at life. While I will make no hasty decisions, I am aware that my recent unhappiness should tell me something and I should not ignore it. Writing about it is the first step toward not ignoring it.

Making Faces

2007-06-11T13:49:00.001-07:00

You know how they say that if you are not happy, fake a smile anyway and eventually it will become real? So if I fake calm then maybe I'll start to really feel it. It sure worked in practice the other night - I was sprawling hard trying to get the guy's hands off my legs, pushing on his head as he tried to get in a better position, and the coach yelled "stop making faces and take your point!" I realized that my face was twisted in a rictus of extreme effort and frustration - the guy's fingers just grabbed so hard and I was almost out of his grip, but I couldn't quite peel his hands off. As soon as I heard that, I willed my face to relax and directed all my energy to the sprawl and spin, and I eventually scored the point.

Making faces wastes energy, it betrays my emotions and frustration and signals how hard I'm working (or how hard I believe I'm working) - plus it's embarrassing. My face has always been expressive, even when I don't mean for it to be. Significant others and friends say they can read my emotions clearly on my face, moment to moment.

But the wrestling faces are extreme and they have gotten out of hand. In a way I think they are a way for me to be lazy while convincing myself (or others) that I'm trying hard. Much of the time that's a problem in wrestling - coach says why didn't you try and I say but I was trying. All of that energy-wasting wrist grabbing, aimless pushing, halfhearted fake shots - you can really convince yourself you're trying hard. It's true, you are expending energy, but it's all scattered and unfocused.

So, Hana, stop making faces. Focus all that jittery time-wasting energy into doing the actual techniques. Get the leg and double it. Don't use the fact that you tried hard as an excuse for having lost. When you are really wrestling, exertion means nothing, your heart could be going 200 bpm and you won't feel it. If it makes you feel ok with yourself, fine, but it won't make you succeed.

Mooching Books

2007-05-16T14:40:00.000-07:00

I've just found this website, bookmooch.com, where you can post titles of books you'd like to give away, and search for titles that you'd like to get. I've already got some requests, but I haven't been able to find very many that I want. So please inundate me with suggestions! I like any kind of book - fiction, nonfiction, academic, pulp, reference, biography, weird experimental, philosophy, sheet music, math - whatever, as long as it's good.

Even better, you should join the site yourself and participate in the worldwide sharing of books. Aww.

Plans

2007-05-15T05:34:00.000-07:00

Yikes! I'm going to Europe for three weeks. On May 23 I'm going to Germany for a tournament, then to Israel for a training camp, then to Austria for a tournament and training camp. When I get back to Montreal, I'll be here for less than a week before I go to Guelph for the Canada Cup and a training camp afterwards.

I'm nervous about traveling with, and spending three weeks with the Concordia coach. I like to explore when I travel. I like to walk around (sometimes by myself!), and look at things, and talk to people, and be independent. From what I've heard, this coach does not let his athletes do anything by themselves while traveling. He is quite controlling, normally, so I can only imagine what he will be like in an unfamiliar environment. He likes to eat Chinese buffet and Swiss Chalet chain restaurant stuff, tries to keep a routine as much as possible.

So it's clear that I won't be able to do what I would normally do on this trip. If I acknowledge that before I go, then it will be much easier for me. Maybe I can figure out ways to enjoy myself within the limits imposed on me - there will already be limits imposed by the fact that I'm traveling primarily in order to compete, not to vacation.

Opposite Coasts

2007-05-06T18:09:00.000-07:00

New York seems to be on the right track, while LA is about to make a terrible mistake.

New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg recently unveiled his PlaNYC 2030: A Greener, Greater New York, which includes proposals designed to decrease traffic congestion and improve the mass transit and cycling capabilities of the city. He proposes "congestion pricing" for certain parts of Manhattan - basically a toll for entering that area with a car. The plan sounds great; it will take years to fully implement but it's starting now, and little by little the city its quality of life will be improved. Like any change, it will happen gradually as initiatives nudge people towards more urban lifestyles.

Meanwhile, LA County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavksy is pushing a plan to turn Olympic and Pico Boulevards into one way streets with no street parking. Speed and safety are serious concerns, but I'm even more concerned with what will happen to the neighborhoods and businesses all along those streets when they become highways for cars and not destinations in and of themselves. Marc Porter Zasada, KCRW's Urban Man, says that well meaning people have spent half a century "destroying great cities in the name of better traffic." He points out that improving traffic circulation is an empty goal, because "whenever circulation improves, people shop further, work further, and abandon the love of neighborhood." And the long-term result is worse traffic, more congestion, and longer commute times.

Certain parts of LA have had the love of neighborhood for a long time, and certain other parts have recently acquired it or are in the process of doing so. There is a lot of hope for that city to become a real city for people and not for cars; but it is something that can only happen gradually, as the city's infrastructure evolves and its density increases and lifestyles change accordingly. Those changes must be nudged along by initiatives, like the Expo Line, that can vastly improve LA's chances for becoming livable. This one-way proposal has more power than anyone realizes to kill those chances.

That Bright-Eyed Face

2007-04-21T22:32:00.001-07:00

I was thinking about writing a post about how I usually cut weight because I got so messed up in Bulgaria by other people telling me what to do. It’s important to not let other people get to you, and do what you know works. I did that, but not enough. I was too polite because I knew these people meant well – but it ended up being one of the hardest cuts I ever did even though it was no more than 3 kilos.

But cutting weight is boring. Instead, I’m going to describe a state of mind. It’s thoroughly non-committal and mediocre. It’s not a terrible state of mind – not nervous or terrified or full of doubt – and it’s not a good state of mind. It is neutral, colorless, and docile.

It’s almost worse to be in this state of mind at a tournament than scared out of your wits. At least if you’re scared you know you have to master it in order to wrestle well. You give the fear a good look and say, all right, come with me, and you know you have to have the courage to wrestle your best with that fear sitting right in your belly.

On the other hand, this neutral and vaguely anxious feeling is killer. You’re thinking mildly through your moves and imagining doing them, but without real intensity. You’re going through your warmup and feeling your blood start to go faster, but your muscles are too loose, unready to react. You’re thinking, at least if I lose, this person has a chance of making the final so I could get third. You’re done before you start.

That’s what happened to me at the European Championships and I didn’t even realize it until I was back home and my coach pointed it out to me. Even though he wasn’t there because he was unable to coach me at this tournament, he said he would bet that I had that bright-eyed face that he recognized, the face that meant I was only half there.

It’s going to be a real challenge to get over this. The first thing is recognizing it; it’s incredibly difficult to recognize that your attitude is too mild. The middle ground is all gray. And once I recognize it, how do I snap myself out of it? As much energy and focus as it takes to deal with the fear, I think this state of mind is even more difficult because it puts up no resistance. Your intentions slip past as through a ghost. It’s not something you can grab by the scruff of the neck and throw out the back door.

You know what it is. It’s the negation of the desire to win because something in you has decided that it’s too difficult and you would rather not want it so bad. Believing that the disappointment of losing will crush you. Well, I say to myself, I DO want to win. I want to win more than I’ve wanted almost anything. And if I lose, the disappointment will crush me. There’s no way to avoid it except by winning, and there’s no way to win except by wanting it with every fiber of your being.

Another Article

2007-03-17T16:21:00.000-07:00

Another article in The Link:

Following a Path to Success

Links to the Link - pictures!

2007-03-12T16:04:00.000-07:00

The Concordia Link ran two articles about the wrestling team, one featuring a picture of me during the CIS tournament:

Women's Wrestling Slowly Growing

and Askren and Mancini Golden at CIS

2007-03-09T06:09:00.000-08:00

The CIS was the biggest tournament I've ever won. A stepping stone to bigger things, but still an accomplishment.

I had two easy matches and two harder ones. In one of the easy matches I did a textbook shoulder throw and the girl flew high in the air. Afterward, instead of saying "nice match," one of the coaches said "nice throw."

My last match on the first day decided who won the pool. Each of us had beaten the other two girls in the pool, so whoever won this match would be in the final the next day, and whoever lost would be in the bronze medal match. She stayed farther away than the other girls, didn't grab onto me so I didn't have a chance to throw her, and I made a few shot attempts but she got away. One time she almost pushed me out of bounds but I circled back inside, pulling her around with me. Finally she made a shot attempt and I got her head and arm, and she was just in the zone. Everybody was screaming, go behind, go behind, but that would have taken my foot out of bounds and you never know how the ref will score it. It seemed too risky, especially since it wouldn't be a clean spin behind because she was holding on to my arm. So I grabbed her head tight and rolled with it - that took us out of bounds but I had a clear 2 points.

There was less than a minute left and the pressure was on her to score. She tried a fireman and almost got it, but I squirmed out and gave 1 point, and the period was over. Everyone gathered around the screen so they could review the move to see if there was exposure - if they ruled that there had been, the score would be 2-3 and I would have lost the round. But they upheld the 1 point and the round was mine, 2-1.

Second round was frustrating. She was even farther away and didn't try hardly anything, and I kept shooting or faking but only got in deep really once, and I wasn't in a perfect position so I came out. I got in on her legs again and she tried to chin-pick me, which didn't work, but it made enough space that she sprawled out. Time was winding down and I did not want the round to be decided by a coin toss, which is what would happen if I let it go to a clinch. We were 0-0 with a few seconds left and I had her head and arm, again in the zone. She was obviously content to let time run out, but my team was yelling, making noise, urging me to score, and I pulled her arm in as hard as I could and did another gebori roll. Just then the buzzer sounded and I saw the time: 00:00. I had scored just in time and won the round 2-0.

Teams are underrated in a sport like this. The guys really helped me, yelling from the edge of the mat, encouraging me in the break between rounds, talking me up before the match. Especially before the final, Jamie was telling me the same things he was telling himself: this is only a practice match, we're aiming for bigger goals, treat it like any other match, it's good to wrestle under pressure. I could see him battling the nerves and anxiety just like I was. Having a team of guys who are used to wrestling under pressure helped me keep my head on straight and not panic. And of course it was great to hear the entire Memorial University team cheering for me as I walked on for the final.

canadian university champion

2007-03-03T23:00:00.000-08:00

the longer i can make this night last, the longer i’ll be the champion, the one who won with style and heart, the one who got the award, the one everyone’s congratulating. i didn’t want to leave the tournament venue because i wanted to watch other people winning their final matches. i didn’t want to leave the banquet because all the coaches kept giving me their hands to shake, and wherever i looked there was someone giving me a smile of approval. and just now, at the very end of the night, i didn’t want to leave the bar, because when else in my life am i going to have people i don’t know coming up to me and telling me how great they think i am? i worked so hard for this victory, and though it’s a small one compared to the ones i have my eye on, it is sweet. and all too short. tomorrow i’m going to get on the plane with my coach, and maybe he will have already slipped back into critical mode. he’ll quiz me, lecture me, grill me on what i did wrong and what i need to work on. i’ll get back to montreal and i’ll have to do mountains of work until it’s off to the next thing, and this day and night of glory will be a speck in the distance. so you can’t blame me for wanting to make it last, for wanting to milk every last ounce of satisfaction out of it, because it won’t be long before i’m hungry again.

Pictures from the Queens Tournament

2007-02-05T13:36:00.000-08:00

Note: the fourth picture is not a continuation of the first three.

My Shoulder's Dream

2007-01-05T09:46:00.000-08:00

The dream was long and full of ache. Nothing all that much happened, and I didn't have much visual clarity - everything was a reddish pink fog. There were people around me, reaching for me, I reached for them. I gave them my hand. I turned my shoulder there.

Then the doctor took a pair of gleaming tweezers and slowly extracted something from the most painful point in my shoulder. It was about the size of a pea, and as I looked at it closely I realized it was a small cylindrical clear glass bead. I could see the line of the hole going through it. And at the moment it was pulled out, I felt the enormous relief of a foreign object being removed from my body. All of a sudden I could see everything around me.

If only it was that easy in real life.

Moments in December

2006-12-17T18:21:00.001-08:00

Rounding a bend in the trail at the top of the hill to find, amid the sage and chapparal, a movie set replica of the Great Wall of China.

Getting into a dirty SUV to drive from San Jose to LA with a pot-smoking winemaker from Napa Valley.

My cousin’s face when she opened the door to her three-year-old running around naked in a room full of toys, playing with nothing but a piece of brown paper.

My grandmother asking me how my boyfriend and I manage to make love when his apartment-mate is home.

Helping my 54-year-old mother correct a slight knee wobble in her near perfect back squat.

Sending my sister an online chat message while we are sitting in the same room, just to hear her exasperated sigh.

Running my hand along a beautiful girl’s smooth upper arm toward her neck.

Walking along rows of good-looking 4-storey brownstones, the statue of liberty off in the distance, holding a loving hand.

Singing 17th century vocal music without a time signature or a key signature, three out of the four parts sung at 9:30 in the evening in a luxurious living room in Silicon Valley.

Mastering the Self

2006-11-03T20:57:00.000-08:00

I forgot to mention something else I thought during practice. I thought, now that I know how to do this, how to master my self, I can do it every time! But I realized that although mental training is a skill that improves with practice, there is always an element of uncertainty to it - and that's the spice. You know you've done it before, you know you'll do it again, but will you be able to do it this time? If it weren't a challenge every time, it would become rote and therefore obsolete - because if you fall into complacency, even at a high level, you must rise to master that, too, in order to succeed.

Turning Water into Wine

2006-11-02T19:50:00.000-08:00

Last weekend I competed for the first time since my shoulder surgery. My shoulder was strong and felt better than I could have hoped, and the rest of me was in all right shape too - except for my mind. I wrestled my first few matches ok, calmly, doing my good technique. But in my last match I freaked out, partly because I was tired, the girl was a weight class heavier than me, and probably also because I had seen her beat the other girls. For whatever reason, I went into that match anxious and timid, though I had done my standard physical warmup, jumping up and down, pummeling with my teammates, jogging around the room. What I needed, and didn't have, was a mental warmup. I won the match by the skin of my teeth.

Tonight at practice, I started out badly. I was anxious about some other things, and feeling generally low, and worrying about the tournament this weekend. I got turned on the ground and got very frustrated wrestling the people I can usually score on. I couldn't seem to get in or set anything up, and when I did get in it was sloppy and half the time I couldn't finish.

During a break I searched through my mental files to see if I had anything to help me. And what I came up with was so simple. It was something that Danny said to me at 2005 Nationals in Las Vegas: "Take the emotion out of it." The emotion didn't matter, it was fluff. No matter what I was feeling, I still had to wrestle.

So I started. I started telling myself, this is my job, it's only about wrestling, I can evaluate myself later. Sure there's anxiety and self-doubt, but it doesn't matter right now. And it worked because it made sense. I wasn't reasoning with my negative emotions or justifying them or even pretending that they didn't exist. I was just putting them to the side. I actually managed to turn off a part of my mind, the part that Tim Gallwey, in The Inner Game of Tennis, calls the "teller" Self 1 (versus the "doer" Self 2). Actually, he would say that I changed what the "teller" was saying - instead of judging and criticizing, it took a step back to allow the "doer" to DO. I was, in the moment, "learning to see 'nonjudgmentally' - that is, seeing what is happening rather than merely noticing how well or how badly it is happening."

And what do you know - after a few minutes I was setting up my shots and finishing them, defending my legs, and I even got a nice outside fireman throw. But I kept myself from getting too happy, because that is also a distracting and judgmental emotion. I just stayed focused on what I was doing, and it ended up being a great practice.

So Many Books!

2006-10-07T11:46:00.000-07:00

In addition to a physical re-naissance (I compete in my first tournament since my surgery on October 29!), I have been experiencing a cultural explosion, which for me, of course, means books. I had lapsed into a cultural complacency, - in fact I had lapsed into many kinds of complacency, including social, but that is another story - even though I was still reading, I am always reading. But I was reading "safe" books. Books from which I knew what to expect. Which doesn't mean bad books: among them was one of the best books I've read in a VERY long time, God of Small Things; but I wasn't being adventurous.

So following my re-interest in urban planning/architecture/art and urban culture, I have started re-reading Mike Davis' City of Quartz, which is really a masterpiece. I just finished the first chapter, "Sunshine or Noir?" which traces Los Angeles' cultural history and the various mythologies that have been propagated about the city. For example, the contrast between the paradise myth and the reality of "fake urbanity" led a German artist to call Hollywood "a murderous desert of houses... a horrible garden city," saying, "indeed, one is much and extensively in the open here - yet, am I a cow?"

It has also given me a sub-book list to explore: Joan Didion's "LA car book" Play It As It Lays; Reyner Banham's naive celebration of LA "finding virtue in almost everything disdained by traditional critics, including the automobile, surfboards, hillside homes.." Los Angeles: The Architecture of the Four Ecologies; and works of noir like The Big Sleep.

I'm also reading Jane Jacobs' The Death and Life of Great American Cities, which is making me understand my two cities better, and is making me understand and appreciate my choice to stay in Montreal even more. Now I juxtapose the Great Blight of Dullness that is most of LA to the diversity and walkability of the Montreal Plateau. Interestingly, I am tending to look down on LA less and have more respect for the people here, who have generated substantial local culture and vibrant islands in spite of the physical obstacle in their way (the design of the city), which after all they only participate in and did not create.

So it is only fitting that I also read The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York.

And among all this, I am reading Thus Spake Zarathustra. I read a good amount of existentialist and other angsty philosophy in high school, but somehow never got around to Nietzsche. I definitely respond to his valuation of personal choice over the herd mentality, but there is also a lot of fluff and ideas better left ignored, not to mention the enigmatic and quasi-biblical writing style, which is not my favorite. For philosophy, I have found none better than Alan Watts. But it has been a while since I have engaged with philosophy, so I'm looking forward to some discussions. Anyone?

The Practice

2006-09-13T09:16:00.000-07:00

Yesterday afternoon I could not have felt worse. I had somehow gotten myself feeling so low, I was practically in tears as I sat in the YMCA bathroom before practice. Anxious about my job or lack thereof, my imminent non-status in Canada, my aching shoulder, my convoluted love life, and my PhD application, I watched the square tiles on the floor start to blur. Pure physical exhaustion made me want to fall asleep right there, and practice hadn't even started yet.

I started talking to myself - in my head (there were other people in the bathroom). I went over all the things that were bothering me until the square tiles became circles and I was ready to lay down, close my eyes, and forget about everything. My head was buzzing. How can I do this, I asked myself.

I told myself that the next three hours would be about one thing: wrestling. Nothing else needed thinking about, nothing else mattered. If the coach yelled at me, that wouldn't matter. If I didn't have any friends at practice, that wouldn't matter. If I did a technique wrong or gave up a point, I would only have to think about it in terms of wrestling, and improve it.

So with great effort I swept my mental arm across my mental desk, clearing everything onto the floor. Then I started practice. And once I started my technique repetitions, the motion calmed me. I fit on the mat, mentally and physically, because I was one hundred per cent there. After practice, I found I had gained some peace and some perspective. Problems didn't seem so big anymore. The weight of being had become lighter.

Wrestling is my practice and my discipline. I need some kind of practice to keep me sane. It is similar to the practice of meditation, music, math, and others. When I can focus on it completely, body and mind, I reach the pure moment that reminds me that I'm alive.

But how do I forget I'm alive in the first place? Aldous Huxley might have something to say about that...

Jazz, Sex and Architecture in a Capital City

2006-09-05T12:18:00.000-07:00

Never before has orgasm brought me visions of architecture - white stone swirls and ornaments, pillars and bay windows, spires, cupolas and Victorian townhouses. I didn't imagine Washington DC would be such a visually stimulating city, eye candy wherever you look. Not only is the architecture and urban design amazing, but there are trees everywhere, big trees that are healthy and thick - ginkgos, all kinds of oak, some ash, maple, and sycamore.

Of course, I didn't really see the other side of DC, the ghetto, the east side. So I'm really only speaking about half of the city. I'm aware of that, and I'm sure one day I will get to see the other side, just like I saw the other side of Israel's security wall. It is essential to see many sides of a place.

Which brings me to something else I've been thinking about. I love songs that have words and I memorize words and lyrics very easily. But the other side of music, that is, instrumental music without words (jazz or classical), is a lot harder to get my mind around, as is music that has words that are indistinct or difficult to make out. I take to concrete verbal music much more readily than to music with no reference to anything real - it is hard for me to appreciate something that is purely abstract. I find myself wanting it to be representational or symbolic, rather than appreciating it for what it is.

Today I listened to some jazz and achieved a state of true listening, without judging or trying to guide my listening or make the music represent something or tell a story. My mind went blank and still and my mouth went slack and I entered that state of relaxed concentration that is the best way to focus on a task while performing it effortlessly. It is something I have learned and continue to work on in wrestling, the state of mind I seek in order to wrestle my best.

So what about architecture and sex? It is perhaps easier to achieve that relaxed focus with regard to buildings and touching because they are both somewhat more manifest experiences - they ARE what they are, without much possibility of representing anything else. Useful and enjoyable. A perfect combination.

Are You In the Wedding?

2006-08-21T01:05:00.000-07:00

The first question everyone asked me when I told them that I was going to Jerusalem for my sister's wedding was, "Are you in the wedding?" I was confused by this question because no one from my family had informed me whether I was "in" or "out."

Now, after the fact, I realize why: because EVERYONE was in the wedding! At other weddings that I have seen, the guests sit quietly like an audience and watch what is happening on the stage, and the immediate family and a couple of friends get places of honor on the stage and stand there. At this wedding, there was very little time when people were standing - mostly they were dancing and clapping and jockeying for position under or next to the chuppah (canopy). Various people came up to recite blessings and the band played music in between, the ritual wine was drunk, the ketubah (marriage contract) was displayed, and the glass was broken. Then everyone was swept onto the dance floor to dance the hora and lift Ari and Eyal on chairs and dance in circles around them for forty-five minutes. And then food, and more food, and more dancing, and scotch, until 2 am.

But the moment I knew this wedding would be different came much earlier. I was standing near Ari's chair with the rest of my family and she was given a plaque with a blessing to recite. As I took the plaque after she finished, wondering what to do with it, I caught some movement out of the corner of my eye. A line of men, arms around each other's shoulders, feet kicking the air, voices shouting, heads bobbing, danced down the hill toward us like a wave, bearing Eyal on its crest. He put Ari's veil over her face and then it was our turn to circle around her and make a line behind her, dancing her up the hill toward Eyal and the chuppah. The wedding party became a mass of people kick-stepping and hora-ing around the bride and groom, pushing them gently toward their union.

So I should have answered, when people asked me "Are you in the wedding?" - "Yes! Everyone's in the wedding. If you come, you'll be in the wedding too!"

Climbing With Aaron in Colorado

2006-08-10T13:14:00.000-07:00

This was taken from one of our belay ledges on Spearhead in Rocky Mountain National Park, North Ridge Direct (5.8). We camped that night at the lake in the bottom of the picture, and climbed the peak, Pagoda Peak, the next day.

This gives an idea of the scale of things.

Dear Hermes,

2006-08-09T08:27:00.000-07:00

I need a little help here. As the god of wrestling you may or may not be able to help me, but please try? I am at a turning point in my life and I have a couple of choices. It is not clear which choice would benefit me more.

My first choice is to live and scrape by in Montreal until I am (hopefully) admitted in January to a PhD program at Concordia. This would allow me to train with the Concordia team, whose style suits me best out of any team I have trained with. I would receive good coaching as long as I am eligible to wrestle for university (2 years) and I would be able to go to tournaments and train with world champions and such. There is no doubt it is the best training situation.

My other choice is to live and scrape by in LA until January, when I could hopefully then decide whether or not to go to Concordia. In LA, I would get free physio as often as I needed it, and train with the high school team. I would also get sent to Germany to train with Dave, and I'd get sent to various tournaments.

No matter which option I choose, I'll have no money and I'll be just barely getting by, perhaps still living off the remainder of my loan. So thinking about this problem in terms of what would be better for my training is only a microcosm of the problem. I want to have kids one day. I want to be stable. Somehow I think that going back to LA is more along that path, because it is so much easier when you are a citizen of the country in which you live, and when you have family nearby, even if they do not help you materially. Montreal has always felt like such a temporary existence. I do not think this will change if I go to Concordia.

And why do a PhD anyway? At Concordia? What will that be worth? Where is the funding? Maybe I'll just end up at the end of this with a couple of degrees from Canadian universities, a body that's strong as hell and a LOT of debt. What am I building by remaining here? By being the Concordia coach's new pet? He looks at me and sees team points, like numbers across my chest. At least the Santa Monica club has good intentions, and the coach sees me as a human being, a human wrestler, and wants me to succeed for myself as much as for him.

But still, the training is better here.. Last night in that wrestling room, I felt at home, I felt like I belonged there. I don't feel like that in the high school wrestling room, no matter how many of their guys I beat. Their style is different, their mentality is different. I want to wrestle like my coach, and being coached by his coach is a good way.

The fact is, I'm on my own no matter where I go. The Santa Monica club has not given me any concrete commitment and I have to pay rent. In which place would it be better?

And there is also the substantial consideration of winter. It is coming, again. I dread it.

And what will become of the barbershop quartet?

Why Regret?

2006-08-07T14:56:00.000-07:00

by Galway Kinnell

Didn't you like the way the ants help
the peony globes open by eating off the glue?
Weren't you cheered to see the ironworkers
sitting on an I-beam dangling from a cable,
in a row, like starlings, eating lunch, maybe
baloney on white with fluorescent mustard?
Wasn't it a revelation to swim all the way
from the estuary, to the river, the kill,
the stream, the run, the brook, the beck,
the sike gone dry, to the shock of a spring?
Didn't you almost shiver to hear the book lice
ticking their sexual dissonance inside the old
Webster's New International, perhaps having
just eaten out of it izle, xyster, and thalassacon?
What did you imagine lay in store anyway
at the end of a world where the sub-substance is
muck, birdlime, slime, mucus, gleet, ooze?
What could the joke have been that night when even
at the tables out of earshot the people were laughing?
Don't worry about becoming emaciated - think of the wren
and how little flesh is needed to make a song.
Didn't it seem somehow familiar when the nymph
split open and the mayfly struggled free
and flew and perched and then its own back
split open and the imago, the true adult,
slowly somersaulted out backwards and
took flight toward the swarm, mouth parts vestigial,
alimentary canal unfit to digest food,
a day or hour left to find the desired one?
Or when Casanova threw the linguine in squid ink
out the window, telling his startled companion,
"The perfected lover does not eat"?
As a child didn't you find it calming to think
of the pinworms as some kind of tiny batons
giving the cadence to the squeezes and releases
around the downward march of debris?
Didn't you once glimpse what seemed your own
inner blazonry in the monarchs, veering
and gliding, in desire, in the middle air?
Weren't you reassured at the thought that these
hinged beings might navigate their way to Mexico
by the flair of the dead bodies of ancestors
who fell in this same migration a year ago?

Isn't it worth missing whatever joy
you might have dreamed, to wake in the night and find
you and your beloved are holding hands in your sleep?

From Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

2006-08-07T14:53:00.000-07:00

by James Joyce

A soft liquid joy flowed through the words where the soft long vowels hurtled noiselessly and fell away, lapping and flowing back and ever shaking the white bells of their waves in mute chime and mute peal and soft low swooning cry; and he felt that the augury he had sought in the wheeling darting birds and in the pale space of sky above him had come forth from his heart like a bird from a turret quietly and swiftly.

since feeling is first

2006-08-07T07:34:00.000-07:00

by e e cummings

since feeling is first
who pays any attention
to the syntax of things
will never wholly kiss you;
wholly to be a fool
while Spring is in the world

my blood approves,
and kisses are a better fate
than wisdom
lady i swear by all flowers. Don't cry
—the best gesture of my brain is less than
your eyelids' flutter which says

we are for each other: then
laugh, leaning back in my arms
for life's not a paragraph

And death i think is no parenthesis

narrow bridge

2006-07-21T22:06:00.000-07:00

my sister went to a funeral yesterday for one of her fiance's friends. her fiance left the army when his service was up; the friend stayed. meanwhile the recurring image i have in my head is the view up to the summit of pagoda peak, along a meandering boulder-talus ridge that i scrambled over, rock by rock, exactly one rope length away from my partner, the rope stretching between us, a 2000 foot drop on either side. to quote the song, kol ha’olam kulo gesher tzar me’od, v’ha’ikar lo lefached klal: the whole world is a very narrow bridge, and the most important part is not to be afraid.

the fact is, we are afraid. fear is everywhere, impossible to avoid. i’m sure my sister was afraid when she heard that her friends were getting called out of the reserves to go to Lebanon or guard the home front, who can tell which is more dangerous. i was afraid when i faced the first vertical wall since my shoulder injury - 500 feet up. my heart raced and my body froze when i topped out on the last vertical wall and saw the long narrow ridge that was between me and the summit.

i was afraid when i went to sleep at the foot of the imposing buttress of that peak. i was afraid when i saw the ankle-twisting scree that was the descent. my sister tells me that the air in Jerusalem is saturated with anxiety and fear. i do not doubt that this is the case in Beirut as well.

there is so much fear that cannot be avoided. if we listened to the words of that song we might end up trying never to feel the fear, avoiding confronting it, even denying that it exists. this strategy has never worked for me. if i acknowledge my fear, acknowledge that it is there and even that it has great power, it loses some of its power. once i face it i can decide if it is there because i must take action, fight or flee, or i can decide that it is an irrational feeling and do what i mean to do anyway.

this is not the same as ignoring my fear. i cannot pretend it is not there, because if i do it will sneak up behind me at the worst moment. but if i bow to it and then keep walking, as i might salute a teacher i have surpassed, i just might be able to continue and succeed, feeling its eyes on me all the time.

my sister and her fiance are brave. i wish them fruitful encounters with their fear, and i urge them to stare it in the face and stare it down.

Pillion

2006-07-02T10:59:00.000-07:00

Motorcycle is not transportation. Motorcycle is gluttony. The vibrating creature wakes and lurches forward, growling, thrumming between my thighs and I hold on. I cling to the back of the machine-animal, arms around the boy-animal while the exhaust rolls out behind us. The quickness throws my heartbeat wild and my lungs open, open, as the wind kisses me hard on the mouth, pulls my hair and slaps me.

Motorcycle is better than flying. No soft air pockets to buoy me but the rough madness of the road bounces up to throw me, hold on hold on hold on. The beast's driver opens the throttle, feet kicking the side of the wicked thing. No need for wings with the road so open and the wheels so hungry.

Motorcycle is masculine. I hold on to the boy's hips as he lashes the beast under us, noise and warmth grating up through our jeans. Never has holding on seemed more vital, leaning into sharp turns yawing down toward the ground on the wheel's edge.

Motorcycle is escape. We weave around metal boxes, accelerate accelerate accelerate oh god while people sit in benches and cars in the sun by the lake with their dogs on leashes. Not even the hawks as they drop feel this swift. Addicted, I hold on and wait for the next curve.

Flash and Burn

2006-06-18T06:24:00.000-07:00

Fireworks are a true hedonic pleasure. Watching a fireworks show is an extremely sensual activity. It's the pure bliss of expanding patterns, symmetry and motion, color exploding across the sky, the contrast of bright and dark. Flash and boom. The delicious pop and bang, crash and crack. People saying "oohhhh" in unison with slowly falling stars.

There are plenty of pure pleasures for the other senses, pleasures that have no purpose. Perfume, for example, and especially aftershave and men's cologne, bears little resemblance to any natural scent. Some foods, while delicious, have very little nutritional value. There's instrumental music. And cuddling and oral sex, of course.

So what is there for the sense of sight? Perhaps the beauty of a landscape or a sunshiny morning. The night sky. Acid visuals. Even those laser light shows at the planetarium contain representational images. I suppose the closest thing to a pure visual pleasure would be non-representational art - color, shape and form.

However, abstract art can be difficult to appreciate, and it is usually on such a small scale. It is often found in quiet, chaste, white-walled museums where technically, you CAN talk loudly (and I make a point of doing so), but few people do. And art is art - it pretends to say something, even if only in reference to previous works. It's high culture. It's intellectual even when it tries to be accessible.

But mmm, fireworks. Bruise my eardrums, dust my retinas. Hypnotize me until my jaw droops and my eyes water. Draw me in close and caress my senses. Light and motion, flash and bang.

Small things

2006-06-01T23:38:00.000-07:00

My name is Hana Askren, and I suffer from road rage.

Why does it always make me a little bit sad when I realize how incredibly much I love someone?

There is no comparison to the feeling of stepping into the wrestling room.

The E an octave above middle C on my parents' piano is sharp.

True friendship is resilient.

Concussion #1

2006-05-21T23:00:00.000-07:00

...over my shoulder a black mercedes with its right blinker on i have to get up to the sidewalk shift and click derailer skips all the gears again no resistance foot slips off pedal to wheel look down see air and hard

pressure near my eye the pavement is hot and rough and earthy and my glasses are tucked neatly in my right hand how did that happen?

then i’m standing on the sidewalk my helmet upturned like a half egg fallen from a nest and my bike like a broken-legged horse kneeling at my feet. the sun shines on the cars in pretty white dots and a gray spot starts at the upper left by the palm tree like a drop spilled on a newspaper. i try to look at the lady in the big white SUV and she is saying something to me and her car is dark inside and she is on her cellphone handing me something white and it is kleenex. “you’re bleeding,” her voice has a trace of an accent and she is wearing too much lipstick and looks like she wants to drive away. i touch the white to my forehead and it comes away red, all red, and there’s red on my toes and i wonder if it’s coming from my toes or my head and it’s running down my arm and it’s so bright i might never have another chance to see the bright colors from inside my body again like this, so red and i think i should do something about this but it is so hot and living i never want to stop looking at it.

i can only see half of the man’s face because the blurry stain has spread over the rest of my vision and no matter how i flick my eyes up and down side to side it stays there and keeps spreading seeping slowly over the sky will i be able to see well enough to ride now? it is very important that i be ok and so i tell the man that, i tell him i’m ok and i am fine and walk to his car. i am asking myself am i ok? am i ok? am i fine? should i be worried? the watermark has stopped growing, i think, but it’s still there and i look in the rearview mirror to sponge off my face and oh how much blood there is, it has dried and caked on my chin and neck and forearm but i think i have stopped bleeding. by the time he drives me the remaining few miles of my trip and i lock the front wheel back on my bike, i can see again.

unsettled the rest of the day. ears ringing. colors and smells so bright. need sleep.

this happened friday. i’m better now, but i need a new helmet.

Happiness, Music and Mathematics

2006-05-17T21:59:00.000-07:00

Everyone wants to be happy. Many think that they do not know how to achieve it or they do not believe that they can. They think that a happy life is something mythical and unattainable, that the formula lies buried somewhere near Atlantis, never to be unearthed. The thing is, they imagine that what they yearn for is something ineffable, mystical, something too complex for human minds. In fact it's very simple and each person can design their own model for happiness. But in order to design happiness you have to know what you want – what makes you happy, and not what someone else thinks should make you happy – and you have to be able to think clearly.

My good friend Jeremy has influenced my recent thinking profoundly, beginning with something called "Designing Happiness." Since I read it I have, with many false starts and wrong turns, begun to design my own happiness. I may not have his mathematician's training, but from him I have learned the merits of thinking slowly, simply, and carefully, even about concepts that seem antithetical to clear thought. He also constantly reinforces my innate conviction that I can get what I want without compromising my values, my goals or myself.

Before all this, of course, there was music. I listened and he played. I followed along with the music and turned his pages, or I spaced out and let him turn his own pages. He says Chopin makes him think of me; it's Debussy makes me think of him. But when I try to pinpoint exact pieces, exact memories of him playing Debussy for me, it gets all fuzzy – I have a bad memory, and I can't remember if he actually played me a lot of Debussy, or whether I just associate him with the music. Those lush, dainty, heavy chords describe perfectly what I felt as I watched his hands, his back, his fine (sometimes unwashed) hair, while Debussy's playful melodies evoke his games and his silliness.

Jeremy has pissed off more than a few people, and he can seem callous, arrogant and self-righteous. What these people don't appreciate is that he always means what he says and says what he means to a greater degree than most. He will literally refuse to have a conversation if the terms are unclear and impossible to clarify. He also refuses to spend time on conversations about things that do not interest him. While it can be annoying, this is a merit, not a fault. Once I began to understand where he was coming from, our interactions became clearer, more fruitful and more enjoyable.

He has written a lot about himself and his worldview, but I think the short piece "On interfaces and people" expresses it best and in the most universal terms. Read it. It might give you a new way of looking at life.

On interfaces and people

Defining Jeremy

In-city, out-city

2006-05-09T21:25:00.000-07:00

My current goal is to ride more miles than I drive in the city. I'm not counting weekend trips because those are miles that I would drive anyway. This is not a contest or something I'm dead set on, it's just a fun exercise.

Last Monday I rode 33 miles.
Tuesday I drove 33.
Wednesday I rode 22.
Thursday I rode 11 and drove 5.
Friday I drove 5 and rode 11.

Miles driven: 43.
Miles ridden: 77.

It's nice to see the numbers. But mostly it's just nice to ride my bike.

Can You Cheat on a Bike with Another Bike?

2006-05-04T09:17:00.000-07:00

I've started thinking of my bike as my lover. Is that strange?

My bike doesn't even have a name. It's actually the twin brother of the bike that I usually ride, the two having been bought at the same time when I was 13 and my sister was 11. She stopped riding hers when she moved to Israel, but I took mine with me to college in Montreal. It's there now, in my closet, waiting for moving day when I either sell it or take it with me.

I've come to Los Angeles for the month of May in order to do intensive physiotherapy for my shoulder. Now that I'm almost done with school, I'm contemplating setting myself up as an athlete here, and the logistics are mindboggling. My Master's thesis is in Montreal, uncompleted and waiting - my project for June and July. The plan is to move to LA in September. The goal is to go to Beijing in 2008.

The whole thing seems unreal to me. How did I manage to move away from this city of my childhood in the first place, and how did I manage to stay there for seven years? Those first few years in Montreal surged with loneliness and cold. And what made me pick up wrestling? Now I am an Olympic hopeful. I am also hopelessly in love with Montreal, and the two desires have finally come into conflict. Montreal will always be there, so I've decided to move away from the city I love to this city of yard and asphalt.

I've been away from LA for so long, it's become a stranger to me. Sure, I still know my way around its boulevards, but they now pulse with a maniacal energy that I didn't see before. Everybody's worked up about something new or old. Gas prices. Immigration. Traffic. Rent, money, success. Advertisements look doubly garish and supermarkets impossibly huge. Everything is on such a large scale that it gets distorted and I feel lost.

And then there's the bike. My father rides it occasionally, and it is both newer-looking and less well taken care of than my own twin. But it is still the same bike. It has the same heft, the same handling, the same rubbery handlebars. Its brakes are better, not having been worn down like mine. So I, loath to change my habits in the midst of so much other change, have been riding it 10 miles down Venice Boulevard to physiotherapy appointments and wrestling practices in Santa Monica.

I have a lot of time during this ride to notice, again and again, the unfriendliness of LA. Drivers cutting me off. Gigantic billboards. Buildings burglar-barred or boarded up. The omnipresent smell of exhaust. But I also have plenty of time to notice the things that haven't changed. My legs can still pedal. My lungs can breathe deep. And I don't feel that I am being unfaithful to my own bike if, just this May, I look to its brother as my rock, my solace, my support, the one thing besides myself that I can rely on in my changing world.

The Yurt

2006-04-25T18:56:00.000-07:00

it feels like a spaceship inside. the walls are lined with silvery bubble wrap, many layers over. the bubble wrap blurs the corners and it feels like you're inside a big dome with an earth floor. the floor is covered with plastic and carpets, also in many layers. the whole thing is layers. hanging from the ceiling are strings with carabiners attached, and there is a lantern hanging on one (powered by a solar panel), and some organizing crates hanging on another, and a water container. the yurt is round, with a pointed roof, and from the outside looks a little bit like a shack, with black plastic on the top. it also looks very very small, but part of it is lower than the ground level, so when you get inside you can stand up no matter how tall you are. the ceiling is about 10 feet at the tallest point, and i'm told there is a hornet's nest there in summer that doesn't bother anybody if nobody bothers it. low cinderblock shelves have spices, books, tupperwares and other random things. there is a fold-out bed in the corner with lots of blankets, and a wood stove that can get very very hot. you have to bend over to get through the door, which swings inward and has a little cat door that the skunks can get through. but apparently there haven't been any skunks in a while. the door gets blocked with a stick during the night so that the wind doesn't bang it. rain sounds nice and tappy on the plastic on the roof, and the wind ruffles it and makes a comforting sound. it is so so dark in there, even though there are small windows, because the windows are almost on ground level. it is so dark that your eyes don't really ever get used to it. you wake up in the middle of the night and go out to pee, and you are almost blinded by the lightness of the starlight and the sky. there is a field out back, and a shed and a tree with a cardboard target on it. i shot 4 guns at that target. he has a beautiful siberian husky with pure ice blue eyes named ninook and a black cat named shadow. there's a fire pit outside where we cooked some delicious smoky pancakes and a path leading into the woods where we shit. there were little polypore mushrooms growing out of a birch stick near the yurt, and piles and piles of firewood under plastic. the trees on the dirt road leading to it almost touch at the top, so when they are green they form an arch. lilies were coming up. the canadian border is so close, one of the streets in the town has one side canadian, one side american. you can cross the border without realizing it, but apparently they will come after you if you do. the yurt feels so roomy and warm and stable, and i liked the floor because it felt like real ground. and it was.

New Book List

2006-04-20T07:44:00.000-07:00

These are books that have been recommended to me, or that I saw in a bookstore and was too cheap to buy.

The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen
Eats, Shites and Leaves by Antal Parody
Deadwood by Pete Dexter
The Sea by John Banville
I Know This Much Is True by Wally Lamb
The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference by Malcolm Gladwell
The Glamour by Christopher Priest
Selling Sickness: How the World's Biggest Pharmaceutical Companies Are Turning Us All Into Patients by Ray Moynihan and Alan Cassels
Summer Sisters by Judy Blume
something by Oliver Sacks
something by MG Vassanji
something by Connie Willis
Perdido Street Station by China Mieville (thanks Zolky!)
I Didn't Do It For You
Notes from the Hyena's Belly
Lullaby by Chuck Palahniuk
The Four Loves by CS Lewis
The Problem of Pain by CS Lewis
Lateral Thinking by Edward de Bono

Yurt, Guns and Hippie Pagans

2006-04-18T12:21:00.000-07:00

I stayed in my friend's yurt this past weekend. It is a round tent made of wood and canvas, and it's sturdy and warm. But you can hear the roof flapping a little in the wind, and you can hear the trees and the outside. It is like permanent camping. I loved it; it made me want to live in the woods.

I also got to shoot some guns for the first time. I wasn't a bad shot, from 5 yards away! Once I got to 10 yards I was a little worse. I shot a BB gun, a single-six .22, a .357 and a .22 rifle. It was interesting, but I have to say, guns still scare me, and the novelty of it would probably wear off pretty quick.

Love: Instinct or Skill?

2006-04-10T21:59:00.000-07:00

I've been reading this book by Erich Fromm called The Art of Loving. God knows why I picked it up, but it's really interesting. He writes that most people expect love to just "happen" to them, and then their lives will be perfect. He writes how this society's idea of love has been commodified until it has become an object, a goal, something to be obtained, rather than a state of being.

I suppose I picked up this book because the end of a relationship turned out not to be an end, of course. Feelings don't just stop. And I started thinking about what love is, and how my love has continued towards everyone who has ever been its cause and source. And how I love my friends so incredibly much, and my family. Fromm is right - it is a capacity and not a one-time offer.

Here are some random quotes:

Most people see the problem of love primarily as that of being loved, rather than that of loving, of one's capacity to love. [1]

What most people in our culture mean by being loveable is essentially a mixture of being popular and having sex appeal. [2]

A second premise behind the attitude that there is nothing to be learned about love is the assumption that the problem of love is the problem of an object, not the problem of faculty. People think that love is simple, but that to find the right object to love is - or to be loved by - is difficult. [2]

The first step to take is to become aware that love is an art, just as living is an art. [5]

Love is not primarily a relationship to a specific person; it is an attitude, an orientation of character which determines the relatedness of a person to the world as a whole, not toward one “object” of love. If a person loves only one other person and is indifferent to the rest of his fellow men, his love is not love but a symbiotic attachment, or an enlarged egotism. . . If I truly love one person I love all persons, I love the world, I love life. [46]

King Arthur

2006-04-02T09:36:00.000-07:00

The only reason I didn't die was because of Gawain's unshakeable loyalty. Gloin put a spell on me so that if Gawain asked me if I trusted him, I would have to say no, but he absolutely refused to question me. Arutha and Gawain had a child, Eleanor Deleanor Mudd seduced everybody, and Gloin and Victoria and Trogdor plotted against me. Morgan Le Fay (after having been killed in a duel) was put in the dungeon and enchanted to look like Guinevere. Merlin, wearing my crown, went into the dungeon and then Victoria locked him in, thinking he was me. But I was outside and challenged her to a duel to the death. Garth offered to fight for her, but he lost, so I killed her and the plot against me was foiled.

Here is my court:

And here is a duel in action:

Trogdor, Arutha and Morgan Le Fay:

Nostalgia

2006-03-31T20:36:00.000-08:00

Live Butterflies

2006-03-18T08:50:00.000-08:00

I took my mom to the "Butterflies Go Free" exhibit at the Botanical Gardens. She appreciated the greenhouse temperature after the windy freezing morning.

Wrestling Move Generator

2006-03-16T11:07:00.000-08:00

Ok, this is amazing. It's a website that automatically generates characters, settings, and apparently, wrestling moves! Here are some of the moves it came up with (my favorite is Cloverleaf Ankle Bite):

Abdominal Cobra Entanglement
Chin Takedown
Elevated Chin Moonsault
Leg Suicida
Brain Twist
Butt Slam
Clothesline Lock
Cloverleaf Ankle Bite
Corkscrew Abdominal Trip
Fallaway Body Stretch
Flying Slam
Go-behind Scissors Lock
Gory Apron Scissors
Gory Attack
Overhead Torment Gutwrench
Grounded Piledriver
Heel Blow
Hip Straight
Jaw Breaker
Leg Fists
Ring Rope Armbar
Slide Bar Bomb
Team Rake
Three-quarter Breaker
Tombstone Flurry
Turnbuckle Hold

The website is called "Seventh Sanctum": http://www.seventhsanctum.com/generate.php?Genname=wrestling

Which fantasy character are you?

2006-03-16T11:01:00.000-08:00

I don't exactly agree with this, but the meme gave me this result multiple times.

The African Violet

2006-03-11T19:08:00.000-08:00

for D, R and N

I rescued it from beside their sink
in the darkening kitchen,
autumn light slipping up the walls toward the ceiling.
It looked dead,
a brown stump coated with beaten leaf-husks,
its soil turned to sand,
neglected in the moving-day frenzy.

The high chair was gone
with my wrestling coach and his family.
Dust lay on the hardwood floor that used to cool my cheek,
a cup with pens and pencils had overturned,
there was no wine on the table.
Their laughter echoed in the barren cupboards
as I sat where the toy chest used to be,
staring at the empty lot where the doll’s house once stood.

When this city was a dry well of lecture halls and phone calls home,
they took me in, fed me,
gave me a key to their house.
Here I read bedtime stories,
changed diapers,
and talked strategy along the white table.
When my body was simply a body and nothing more,
he showed me how to seed muscle,
how to keep my balance, how to live
for pure motion and use my body as one,
when to attack
and when to let go.

Since they left, the plant has sprouted thick reptilian leaves,
and today, a bud.

I go over and over this growing knowledge of myself
as a person who could succeed, who could win
merely by wanting it badly enough.

My wanting filled the house
but could not bring them back.
So I took the plant, and with it
all their gifts, their joy,
their unconditional love.

Maybe what they taught me
was the simplest thing:
that if someone cares enough
to pack a dying plant gently in paper towels
and race across the city
to plant it in a plastic pot and give it soil from a bag
with nothing more than faith that it will live,
it cannot fail to flower.

What do you mean when you say TV?

2006-02-20T17:24:00.000-08:00

I realized recently that while most people consider television a form of entertainment, I consider it an annoyance. But not because I don't see what everyone else does - I will readily admit that there are very many shows that are entertaining, fun, intelligent, etc. The reason I am so annoyed by TV is because of the commercials. It takes a lot to get me to watch TV regularly, not because I don't like the shows, but because I can't stand the commercials. And also because I don't have time, but that's neither here nor there. Now that my roommate has downloaded one of my favorite shows (Sex and the City), I watch plenty of it. But since it doesn't have commercials, I don't think of it as TV.
I'm sure I should be able to say something conclusive and pithy about this.

Beets and Aristocrats

2006-02-13T14:05:00.001-08:00

Beets are very good for you. I like beets. Especially organic ones. With garlic and olive oil.

"The Aristocrats" is probably the most terrible collection of moving pictures and sound I have ever seen on a screen. It's boring and gross, with no funny factor. It's not even that offensive! There is nothing there to latch onto - at least if I was offended I would be offended, but all it left me with was a vague kind of "ugh." I'm more offended that they would actually release a movie like that, and I'm starting to suspect that it might be one of those movies that is funny to the people in the industry, for some unfathomable reason. When I see a movie that I didn't love but that still had some interesting things, I say to myself, I wouldn't suggest it to anyone but I'm glad I saw it. When I see a movie that was just bad, I say, that was a waste of 2 hours. This is the first movie that I felt actually took MORE time off my life than it took to watch it.

And if anybody has a magic wand that could heal my shoulder instantly, can I borrow it please? I'm getting mighty tired of this physio stuff.

definition

2006-02-11T06:50:00.000-08:00

I know this is a bit of a pathetic excuse for a post, but it was either this or how much i love beets...

hana --

[adjective]:

Extremely extreme!

'How will you be defined in the dictionary?' at QuizGalaxy.com

dream #8748296501

2006-01-24T17:36:00.000-08:00

here was my dream.
at the very beginning, there was something like an election (boo hoo!) and there was a great leader whom everyone loved, who was not only good for the country but good for the planet, everyone believed in him, he was doing great things. and then he died. he was bitten by a snake as he flipped the light switch in an auditorium (it was dark, and he couldn't see the snake). the whole world was thrown into crisis.

so all the world leaders came to this other planet where there were also people, different people, but people and not aliens. and they asked them what to do, if they had any technology that would save the planet now that this great person had died. i think what they wanted was a quick antidote to the snake venom, because maybe he wasn't all the way dead? but these other people said, i don't think we should give you our technology, and the people from earth said please, and the others didn't put up a very good fight, they just said, well, ok, i guess. but you should be aware that your population will probably increase, so you should try to find ways to handle it. and they said ok ok just give us the technology.

so it happened like a download, and we were watching it all on the screen, and we could also see graphs and charts of earth statistics, and the increasing bar of the download - 26% done, 52% done, 67% done. and when it passed 70%, the graph marked "population" started to rise, and the other alien people said, see, we told you.

but the population graph kept rising, faster and faster, and by the time the download had reached 99% it was spiking so high and so fast the earth people said stop stopstop it! and they stopped it but the graph was out of control now, i don't remember the numbers (although i saw numbers in the dream) but it must have been up to 50, 100, 200 billion or more, and we all just watched in horror as it kept rising and rising, and then, without warning, it leveled out, and started to fall. slowly at first and then increasing speed and it plummeted by millions and billions every second. all we could do was watch. and the earth people had left by then to try to do something on earth, and i think i was part of the alien people, because we all just turned away and didn't know what to do, and started seeing images on the TV screen of drowned divers.

Delicacies

2006-01-11T16:48:00.000-08:00

Waiters raise their eyebrows when I order steak rare.
Is it difficult to believe that a woman
could enjoy halving and quartering muscle
while blood pools on the plate?
I relish the texture of red flesh between my teeth,
its give, its thick tenderness,
The scent of something opened.
Raw oysters are another joy: the sea-smell, encrusted shell
I like to drive the knife inside to find and cut the hinge muscle
Then open and swallow the quivering tissue
Fresh salt, an odorous bivalve
The indelicate pleasures of food.

Here’s something else: I fight.
Under my female skin, the hard muscle waits
In my heavy hands to snap down on a nape.
My head is dense, a battering ram
Driving my opponent across the line
Until I stand over her, neither gloating nor apologizing
Smell of sweat
My face bruised, a tremor in the knee.
There is pleasure in fighting
In moving side to side to find an opening,
unwedded to worry or fatigue
In watching the opponent’s fear gather and pool
Like blood on my plate.

There is no malice in it. I do not want to cause pain
and no fighter feels pain, really.
They say the animals don’t, either.
The pleasure is this: I savor the sensation
Of human flesh in my grip
Of straining sinew
Of an opponent squirming under me.
Once on top, I inch my weight forward,
working my hand under her head
like a knife. She gasps. The oyster shell opens
And I dig in.

Jerusalem at night

2005-12-25T03:34:00.000-08:00

Now, it seems very strange to me how scared my family was when I said I was going to the Armenian quarter of the Old City last night to hear midnight mass. But at the time, it made sense - as I walked down the rain-lashed street I had visions of darkened market alleyways and leering old men, me alone with my umbrella and cell phone. In a country where fear is present in almost anything you do, whether you avoid doing it because of fear or persist in it in spite of the fear, my sister's comment "it's just so dangerous there" felt true.
Before I got there, that is. Once inside Jaffa Gate, I found all the quarters of the Old City brightly lit and all of its lanes streaming with coated and hatted people out for Christmas. Somehow I fell in step with a couple who spoke English, learned that they lived in the neighborhood where I am staying, and we all found our way to a church near Zion Gate.
Inside it was warm, bright, and packed with people. A few swayed devoutly, murmuring Amens and liturgy in German; most others looked on with interest. It smelled of frankincense and old stone. The familiar Latin of the mass came back to me, memories of the Saint Laurence Choir and the Montreal Symphony Orchestra, and I sang along. Far from being in danger, I was in one of the safest places I could be. And after having spent so many Christmases in North America, surrounded by the supermarket drone and the shopping mall jangle, it was wonderful to be in a place where Christmas actually meant something - tradition, faith, religion, and very old songs with even older words. The priest's voice echoed warmly in the dome, and the congregation's responses rang in assent. The priest and the choir were dressed all in white.
So where would I be if I had listened to my sister? I would have missed out on this experience, and the Old City at night would have remained shrouded in mystery and danger, all in my mind. I was prepared to turn back, kept myself alert to the atmosphere and to my surroundings - simple prudence. But prudence would be nothing without the living and the experience it is meant to protect, and I'm glad I took a chance and went to take a look. Things aren't always as scary as they seem.

Live with me!

2005-12-08T13:34:00.000-08:00

My roommate and I are currently looking for a third roommate to replace Tricia, who is moving out. Our apartment is amazing, very comfy, lots of plants, lots of sun (especially in winter). We are both grad students. We get up at 7 to go to the gym sometimes, we both like hiking and the outdoors, we don't have a TV, nor do we want one, and we have pot lucks and arts & crafts parties. The lease is from 1 January - 31 August (renewable), $428/month, 2 blocks from campus, 2 bathrooms, lots of plants and overflowing bookshelves. We have laundry in basement, and we are 4 blocks from the metro. Here are some pictures. By accident I posted them all sideways, and it would take me a million years to turn them around and re-upload them on this computer, so turn your head sideways.

Here is our living room:

Our kitchen:

The room we are renting:

The bathroom: (we have 2, this one belongs to the room we are renting)

Many Things

2005-12-01T10:49:00.000-08:00

Amazingly, the flammulina velutipes in my neighborhood is still fruiting! However, the mushrooms are too small to be worth picking and too high up for me to reach anyway.

If I ever become a professor or a teacher, I will give bad grades to people who write badly. This might be an indication that I should not become a teacher or a professor, because I would not fit into the system.

Since when do I want to fit into a system, anyway

Better late than never

2005-11-24T05:03:00.000-08:00

So finally here is a picture of me as Delirium on Halloween. Unfortunately I do not have a picture of Norm as Dream.

And here is Delirium being attacked by Dr. Octopus:

Days

2005-11-17T21:05:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I ate spinach.
Today I gave blood.
Tomorrow I'm going to the library.
And the next day I'm being interviewed for TV.

Creative Writing

2005-11-10T06:40:00.000-08:00

I submitted a portfolio to try to get into a creative writing class. The first time since high school that I have submitted my poetry to a critical eye. If I get in, I'll post a poem here.

Schools I am thinking of applying to

2005-11-07T08:17:00.000-08:00

Yes, I love leaving prepositions hanging, dangling from the cliff holding on by their fingernails, until they plunge to a watery death.

The subject will be Arab Women in Sport. With a focus on contemporary issues but undoubtedly any future dissertation will need a history section.

1. Indiana University, Bloomington: Folklore Department
Pros: I have a friend there, and Folklore just seems like a damn cool thing to be studying. Plus they have a men's wrestling team and I'm sure there are wrestling opportunities in Indiana.
2. Simon Fraser University, Vancouver: Sociology and Anthropology
Pros: They have a great wrestling team, women and men. And I'll probably get in.
3. New School for Social Research: Sociology of Culture
Pros: It's the New School! How cool is that? I've been interested in it since undergrad.

I've also looked at Columbia, UCLA and UC Berkeley. The main fault of these schools (beside the fact that I probably won't get in) is that they don't have anything of note to recommend them, besides the name.

I'm Here

2005-10-24T09:51:00.000-07:00

Ok, ok, for the 2 people who actually read this blog, here I'm posting.
Part of the reason I haven't been posting is because I've been busy with the following things:

1) Having major shoulder surgery
2) Recovering from major shoulder surgery (I'm still in a sling)
3) Recruiting for the wrestling team, managing the team and assistant coaching it
4) Taking two graduate seminars, fourth year arabic and TAing an undergraduate class
5) Applying for various scholarships
6) Applying for PhD programs (so far: UCLA, U of Chicago - suggestions?)
7) Designing a paper to submit to a conference in Morocco
8) Staying in shape until I can start training again
9) Coming up with a portfolio so I can get into a creative writing class that will not advance my degree or academic prospects in the slightest
10) Plus, need I mention, having a social life.

All of this is not only probable, but possible, and not only possible, but actual.
When I get the pictures from my surgery, I will try to scan them and post them.

What a week

2005-09-04T20:21:00.000-07:00

Needless to say, I'll be glad to get back to Montreal on Wednesday. I've been traveling for too long, and though the places I've been are homes, of a sort (Los Angeles - my parents' house, and Colorado Springs - the Olympic Training Center), they are not my apartment. I miss my bed, small little mattress on the floor. How I love sleeping on the floor. I used to sleep near the ceiling, and that wasn't good.

I feel like saying something about New Orleans. I just read Jared Diamond's "Collapse" and if you want to know one explanation of what happened there, you should read it. Diamond gives endless examples of societies that destroyed or damaged their immediate environment and then had no leeway during lean times or natural disasters. You can read about the dying wetlands around New Orleans and how they provided a natural buffer to hurricanes. Here's a throwaway article for those too lazy to search themselves.

It makes us think, us Angelenos. We haven't thought about The Big One in a long time, and now we find ourselves discussing possible outcomes. My dad and I had a whole conversation about the possibilities of riding bikes through earthquake-rubbled streets, out to the port at Marina Del Rey, or into the mountains. Being a mountaineer, he has a water filter and plenty of iodine, but what if the water is not flowing? I can hear people saying, well they should have known better, building a city in a fault-ridden desert!

All I can do is live deliberately, the way I want to live, and be aware of what is happening around me. I have become convinced that the best activism is personal and local.

Last Day of Training Camp

2005-08-23T13:11:00.000-07:00

I guess I'm writing out of a feeling of obligation to write. So much has happened in the past week. I am questioning and re-questioning the things that are important to me. And so far they have all passed the test.
I don't think doubt is a bad thing, as long as it doesn't overwhelm the mind and bring terror or confusion.
I may have to have surgery on my shoulder.
My friend said to me, "Are you still getting something out of wrestling?" And I said, "Every day."
Then you're not done with it, she said.

An old piece of writing

2005-08-10T14:08:00.001-07:00

White halls white walls and white vibrations towards the base of my skull. Walking, walking down the corridor perspective, a dimly lit world where the slaves, the flunkies, the unwitting children and dumb adults plod past on either side. Papers, white papers with blue writing, pink papers, yellow papers, carbon papers. Stamps and writing - unclear and unimportant, no waste of energy necessary to read them. Walk to a door, read the nurse's lips. Chairs. Rows of chairs, lines of chairs, chairs with armrests, hard chairs, chairs next to coffee tables, chairs with magazines on them. Chairs facing the white halls and white walls. Sit.

Motion, get up, it's a race, it's a maze, it's a joke. I am not really here. The nurse does not put a strange black headset to my head with soft pads over my ears. Dull pressure of blood pumping.

"Raise your finger when you hear a sound." Ok. Ok white dress nurse in white halls and white walls. But nurse. You are black. Do you belong in this whited-out place? I see the whites of her eyes and wonder. Her pearly teeth. The tips of her painted nails. "Ok ready?" Ok. Deep breath.

I wait. I wait and nurse waits. I wait and the walls wait, I wait and my toe itches, I wait and the nurse's face twitches imperceptibly. She looks at me. And like a gull calling from a bright day on a far blue sea, I hear the tone. Finger. Ok.

"All right, here's another one." Ok.

I wait and my breath tastes like the eggs I had for breakfast; I wait and Beethoven speaks to me from his grave, I wait and the clock moves silently in a circle along with all the watches in the world, and I hear a sound. Finger. Ok. And again. Ok.

How long must I sit here and wait for the black machine to tell them what I already know? I wait for the sounds growing nearer and they wait for me to hear so that they can write in a little green chart (getting thicker daily) what I already know.

I already know that I will never hear that gull again. I already know that only sirens and megaphones can call to me. I know that Beethoven is already dead, that the cats yowl and fight below my dim window, that they have fought there for years and will continue. I already know that no clock will tick unless I hold it to my thick head, that time moves forward ever more quickly, ever more smoothly. The crisp turn of a page is lost to me. And I already know, dully and with death in my heart, that I can no longer hear the high hat in Miles' quintet, that Vivaldi's seasons blend and liquify and melt into a snow-covered muffle, that Mozart's requiem will bother the neighbors if I turn it up so that it sings to me and to me alone. I have lost the clocks, and I have lost the car horns, I have lost all but the meanest violin, and my ears have become nothing but soft empty husks.

Yum

2005-08-07T19:33:00.000-07:00

Squash Soup:

1 1/2 acorn squash (from the backyard)
milk
butter
flour (whole wheat)
onions
garlic (from the backyard)
cinnamon
sherry
lemon juice
basil (from the backyard)
salt

Salad:

lettuce
radishes
tomatoes (from the backyard)
red onions
blue cheese

Garlic Bread:
bread
garlic
butter
parmesan cheese

Iced Mint Tea:
mint tea bags
water

Strawberries and Cream:
cream + sugar + vanilla
strawberries

Yum!

Book List

2005-07-22T11:30:00.000-07:00

Il Pendolo di Foucault
something by Joan Didion
Desert Solitaire
Reading Lolita in Tehran
Everything Is Illuminated
The Heart is a Lonely Hunter
The Confessions of Max Tivoli/The Path of Minor Planets
My Sister's Keeper
The Last Unicorn (SJ Gould)
Biographer's Tale
Tim Cahill

Some Pictures

2005-06-29T10:34:00.000-07:00

I swear, I don't smile on purpose! I prefer to think of it more as a tough grimace.

Here is my friend Tina, who came so close to being in the final of the challenge tournament.

Here's another funny picture of me wrestling.

And here is a picture of my alter ego, Ben Askren, in the NCAA semifinal.

Test

2005-06-27T06:55:00.000-07:00

The examples explored in this chapter suggest various conclusions: programmatic, methodological, and theoretical. First, though the family is obviously not the only sphere implicated in minority language survival, efforts to preserve minority languages are doomed to failure if they do not take into account familial patterns of language choice (Fishman, 1991).

Calories Out, Calories In

2005-05-23T11:18:00.000-07:00

I have discovered the joys of eating while I ride my bike home. I eat a sandwich, an apple, or an energy bar. I sail alongside traffic in the sun, enjoying the wind and the occasional whiffs of jasmine from someone’s front yard, nibbling on a sandwich with one hand, steering with the other. It is the most delicious affront to propriety: eating while exercising. And entirely appropriate for me.

Cutting Weight

2005-02-25T11:18:00.000-08:00

Wrestlers know how precious liquid is. When we have cut 5% or more of our body weight in water, water appears everywhere to taunt and tempt us: dripping on our head when we take a shower, swirling in the toilet bowl, trickling down the gutters from snowbanks. Some wrestlers hate the sight of it, can't stand hearing talk of food or drink, and avoid all places where they might encounter it. Others, like me, love to see water, smell food, watch people eating and drinking, and can spend hours describing sumptuous steak feasts and lemonade waterfalls.

I walked through the grocery store for half an hour, admiring the rows of milk cartons, the refrigerated ice cream and popsicles, the packaged cuts of meat. Stacks of water bottles were placed in strategic locations around the market, and every time I came across one, I gazed lovingly at the blue water through the clear plastic with perfect labels. I spent a long time looking at the cartons of fresh orange juice, apple juice, organic cranberry juice. I picked them up one by one and felt the weight of all that juice, looked through the translucent plastic to see the air bubbles move as I turned them upside down.

Best of all was the produce section, a paradise of greens and yellows in an abundance that had always been there, but that I was seeing for the first time. The oranges rose in pyramids of a color so bright that it vibrated against the linoleum floor and seemed to emit a gentle hum. Each dimple and dot, each nestled navel, gave the oranges the visual clarity of rock. I knew I couldn't eat any of them, so instead of a feast for my (limited) stomach, the fruit became a feast for my eyes. And unlike my stomach, my eyes had room to take it all in.

Laurel's Reverse Throw

2005-02-22T11:11:00.000-08:00

Erica Zelfand: Hiking against Hunger

2005-02-11T11:26:00.000-08:00

The Appalachian Trail has already changed McGill student Erica Zelfand, and she hasn't even started yet. What began as a whimsical idea has turned into an imminent reality for which Zelfand and her boyfriend-cum-hiking partner Timothy Crespi are preparing in Boulder, Colorado. Hard at work acquiring gear and food, they take frequent training hikes in the mountains to get their minds and bodies ready for the physical and mental challenge of hiking roughly 3500 km. So far, Zelfand has gained five pounds of muscle and a considerable amount of endurance.

Zelfand and Crespi will start hiking on March 1, walking 24 to 32 km a day so that they can finish in time to start school again in September. March weather in Georgia, where they'll start from, is cold and snowy, and their packs will be heavy with winter gear: synthetic-fill sleeping bags, a three-season tent, snowshoes. They plan to hike every day for five months through three seasons and 14 states, stopping periodically in towns to restock their food supplies.

People hike long trails like the Appalachian Trail and the Pacific Crest Trail, its Western counterpart, for all kinds of reasons: to commune with nature, to get in shape or just so that they can say they have done it. Bill Bryson popularized the Appalachian Trail with his comical account A Walk in the Woods, in which he concludes that hiking the trail gave him, among other things, more respect for wilderness and nature.

But Zelfand seeks not only personal change. After participating in a workshop focusing on third-world debt and global hunger, she realized that she could use her trip to benefit others. She has given her walk in the woods a social purpose, and it has become a Hike Against Hunger. She says, "The idea of a fundraiser validated the idea of hiking the trail. It became a plan, not an idea." She is soliciting donations for Action Against Hunger, an international non-profit organization that provides both emergency food aid as well as long-term projects to help communities in the developing world become self-sufficient.

Zelfand hopes that her hike will also raise awareness of world hunger. "If you are from North America you have to be two things: grateful and willing to take on responsibility. There's a responsibility, being born into comfort, to look out for others."

She will symbolically carry her sponsors with her as she hikes; each sponsor's name will be written on one of the 108 beads of a Buddhist prayer garland, a mala. To Zelfand, the mala represents "the unity of my sponsors and myself, and reminds me that they believe in me." Although 90 percent of would-be through-hikers drop out, she is confident that the combination of her own enthusiasm for the outdoors and her altruistic goal will keep her on the trail.

Zelfand is taking the winter semester off from her double major in religious studies and english. When asked why she couldn't wait until she finished school to hike the trail, she says, "It's a once in a lifetime opportunity, and once in a lifetime opportunities can't wait.

"It's so soon," she says. "But every time I get nervous about it, I remind myself how much fun it will be. It's going to rock." Two weeks from now, she will be on the trail with nothing but sky, trees and over 2,000 miles ahead of her.

To learn more, visit www.hikeagainsthunger.com, and read Erica's and Tim's trail journal at hikeagainsthunger.blogspot.com.

Ode to My Bed

2005-02-04T11:25:00.000-08:00

It lacks feathers, water, and springs
no headboards, posts or canopies adorn it
and a glaring defect, you might say
is its nearness to the ground
and its inability to roll.

It has not breathed the sweat of passionate love
nor borne betrayal of any kind
its nights alone have been carved, one by one, into its folds
like notches on a wooden post.

Like all beds, it caches its store
of dreamy sweets and ragged nightmares
in its fibers
releasing them at slow and regular intervals
like air from a diver's mask.

It has no monetary value.
It is not beautiful.
It is hard and useful.

But when I lay across the city
couched in the rhythms of another's home
inhaling the dust of unknown trysts
suffocating in the softness of midnight
I long for its coolness
its smell
the shaft of streetlight that invades its corner
and my sleep and dreams are halved and halved again
as the clock taps out
an eternity of separation.

Dreams and Goals

2005-01-01T11:19:00.000-08:00

In response to my last post, I received two emails from friends, both urging me to consider my dreams and goals and the success I can achieve in wrestling before I quit because of the damage to my personal life. One friend advised me to consider the possible might-have-been "of consciously knowing that you could've done better, had you not been lazy..." He told me not to cheat myself out of future success "out of fear for the future, out of lack of courage."

My other friend said that "following your dreams and having your goals may in fact be the best way to find the right person," because anyone who didn't care enough to deal with my crazy life wouldn't be the right person anyway.

I appreciate the sentiment and I know that these two friends do care enough to try to keep in touch with me in spite of my sporadic comings and goings. But they both refer to "dreams and goals" as if they were a given. What are my dreams and goals, really? What do people perceive as dreams and goals, and what do they really have in mind?

We all know that the people who hold up fame and fortune as their only goal end up unhappy. Stories abound of successful writers and artists whose success ruined them. Many "great men" have led tortured private lives. And yet we chase those same ephemeral dreams, especially revering those who make sacrifices in pursuit of them.

I am of two contradictory minds about this: on the one hand, I believe that the nature of wrestling makes it one of the most constructive goals possible. On the other hand, thinking only in terms of "Dreams and Goals" can leave no room for personal, individual happiness. Sometimes I think that if I didn't want to win so much, if I didn't want to succeed so much, if I didn't WANT so much, then I would be able to lead a normal life.

I do understand that if that were the case, then I would be normal, and then I wouldn't be me. But I need to give myself a reality check every once in a while to stop tunnel vision from setting in.

Dreams and goals

2004-12-28T11:21:00.000-08:00

Sometimes I want to quit. Sometimes I want to be normal. Sometimes I want to have a life.

From the comfort of my parents' house, I can contemplate my life from outside it. This year, I spent January-March going to CIS tournaments almost every weekend. In March I went to Sweden and Denmark for a week. In April I went to LA and Las Vegas for US Nationals, then back to Montreal to train. June, Olympic Trials in Indianapolis, then Chicago, then LA. During the summer I went to Colorado Springs for a training camp, then Toronto for a tournament, back to Montreal for a week, then another training camp in Colorado, then back to Montreal. School started in September. I took two weeks off in October to go to New Zealand to visit family, then before I had a chance to recover from the jet lag I went to Ohio for the US Maccabia Trials. Weekend after that, wrestled/coached a tournament in Montreal. Weekend after that, road trip to Hamilton for another CIS tournament, weekend after that, Vancouver. Then I got a break and reffed a tournament in the West Island. Two weeks later I turned in my final papers and got on the plane for LA.

And what do I do in between tournaments and training camps? Every morning I get up and train; I go to class and write papers; I try to make some money writing and doing other odd jobs; I do my best to manage the team; I practice every night except Tuesday.

Ah, Tuesday. When I can come home and pretend I'm a normal person. When I can come home and relax, if I can keep everything I've put off for the rest of the week from surfacing and demanding to be done. But is it possible to have a social life that consists only of Tuesday nights?

I am always arriving and always leaving, always committed, always disciplined. I try to squeeze all my relationships, friendships, acquaintances, flirtations, trysts, heart-to-hearts, hockey games, drunken sprees, hallucinations, soul-searchings, jam sessions, tea parties, afternoon sex, roommate dinners, philosophical discussions, cuddling, sisterly advice, playing, and new friends and lovers into the Tuesday nights of my life. The one night layover, the two week visit, the breakfast before I fly out. The New Year's party, the one day off, the night after the tournament.

My true friends accept this the same way I accept it when they cancel plans because studio time becomes available. We know we will be friends no matter what.

But there is always the wish and the hope for more time, for a relaxed time, for time not limited. Is this just the condition of life? Is this what being an adult means - dinner appointments, one night San Diego road trips, a social schedule always bounded and defined by where I have to go next?

Then what happens to lovers? Although I may succeed in fitting my spontaneity and passion into a schedule, how can I expect someone else to do the same? How can I expect anyone who doesn't love me yet to be content with getting to know me in bits and pieces? And the intensity of feeling I show in the time allowed to me doesn't help. I leap without looking, jumping with both feet every time because I don't know when my next chance will come and I want to make the most of every moment. It's no wonder I'm single. I'll probably be single until the day I quit wrestling.

Literature Is Not a Tool

2004-12-06T11:27:00.000-08:00

It's common for academics and people who study literature to think and speak of it as a tool: for gender theory, for nationalism, for resistance, etc. They tend to ask the questions, What is the author trying to do? What are the author's concerns? What is the historical context of this work? What are its biases, inclusions and omissions?

Fine, I want to say, but did you enjoy reading it?

Literature is art, and art of any kind may serve as a political or social tool; it is true that much literature is created for this purpose. But these authors could have chosen other media and other methods for communicating their messages. Why did they choose literature?

Accessibility and appeal aside, I believe that all authors write because they enjoy it, because it affords release, because it is freedom, because it is creative. At heart, literature is a celebration of the bliss of living (I mean bliss in the Alan Watts "ecstacy of pain as well as pleasure" sense). So although in subsequent discursive iterations it may provide complex theories and become a tool with myriad functions, designs and goals, it begins from the seed of pure creativity.

Yes, I believe in "art for art's sake." All art begins from this basis. But I am not an extremist. I understand that in the real world, it cannot exist purely for its own sake, because if it does, it is ultimately revealed as empty.

I do not advocate an end to discussing, theorizing and categorizing literature. I admit there is even some value in dissecting it. But the awareness of literature as a fundamentally pleasurable endeavor is conspicuously absent from most academic discourse. Would you dissect a frog in order to learn about it without also watching living frogs leap into the water when a child tries to catch them?

I wish that academics would step back for a moment, stop squeezing things like "alterity" out of "metonymic junctures" (Ashcroft et al, The Empire Writes Back) and just admire the fantasy, the play, the emotion, and the spectral soul of literature.

Insecurity: Women Wrestling Men Part III

2004-11-27T11:09:00.000-08:00

Does anyone have a monopoly on aggression?

Though some claim that they do, the answer is no.

I meet with male defensiveness occasionally, and the intensity of the knee-jerk reaction makes me wonder. I suppose people become defensive when they feel threatened, and people feel threatened when they think something will be taken away from them. In many cases, they fear the loss of their power.

When women show positive, active aggression, it threatens the men who are already afraid of losing their power, because they bank so much on the maintenance of unconditional power. They come to realize how precarious their position is, based as it is on social norms that we are constantly having the wisdom to question. It resembles the defensive reaction of some corporations when faced with unionization: if they depend heavily on maintaining total control of their workers, they act to preserve their power.

However, males do not hold total power over females, and many of them correct the imbalances they see, when they can. Although the power relationship between the genders is skewed, people are neither animals nor profit-making systems, and most individuals consider the dynamic and think before they act. There are too many machines crying out for monkey wrenches for me to work on this one for long.

But why the nervous few?

I would guess that these men have always felt on the verge of losing their power. Afraid that no one will listen to them, they shout. Afraid that no one will respect them, they disparage everyone around them. Afraid to be seen as weak, they become hostile at the slightest provocation. And in order that their aggression not be used against them, they claim their monopoly.

Nothing I do will help these individuals, so why do I bother to write about them? Maybe I'm trying to assess their potential as a threat. But in the end I find no real threat to my own power, which is secure and depends only on me. So I can forget them.

Women Wrestling Men Part II

2004-11-22T11:08:00.000-08:00

Science says a lot of things.

Scientists came up with a theoretical limit for weight bearing: the maximum weight that the spine could support. However, weight lifters have since proven that the human frame can support more than twice that weight, and the limit has yet to be reached.

Science used to say all kinds of things about women: that they shouldn't exercise while menstruating, that they were intellectually inferior to men, etc. And scientists still make assertions, some credible, some less so, about the abilities or inabilities of women.

Women have been competing in many sports for far less time than men have. Women's sports receive less funding, interest and fan support (the WNBA for example). But women's world records and results have been improving fast, and are beginning to approach men's records in many sports - especially the ones in which women have competed for a long time. The fact is, the upper limit has yet to be reached.

If we accept that there is a limit somewhere out there, then we might as well stop now, because that's as far as we can go. Part of what makes us human and not animal is refusing, against all logic, to accept limits. The only animals that went into space were the poor monkeys that we sent there.

Dream #8475039476

2004-11-16T11:22:00.000-08:00

I dreamed about you again.

I met you at a party this time. I had short hair and was cross dressing that night, for fun. You were attracted to me, and somewhere in your sweet, straight, Christian face, I read poetry I had seen before.

It wasn't such a great stretch of the imagination for you to believe I was a man. Every time I saw you I made myself more and more masculine, because that was the way you liked me, and because you wanted to believe it, you did. I wasn't faking or wearing a mask; I was being myself in a way I had never imagined. You brought out the beautiful masculinity in my personality, and we fit together.

I loved the way you flirted. I loved the attention you gave me and the way you put your arm around my neck, as if to say, this is my boyfriend. The way you looked at me, the way you laughed, the way you kissed me. I had to be careful when we made love, but somehow I managed it, and it was good. You accepted my mouth and hands, letting me take control, and you quaked like a butterfly under me.

I should have known it couldn't last. You were too straight, too conventionally brought up, too religious. You believed in sin and the wisdom of your parents. We belonged together - but only as long as you could believe we were a "normal" couple. You could be my girlfriend only as long as you could keep making yourself believe I was your boyfriend.

When I was cruelly revealed to you, you broke down. I saw the desperate question in your eyes, why couldn't you have kept me in the dark? Crying, arms around each other, we tried to delay the final goodbye. You knew you loved me and admitted it to yourself and to me. But you couldn't stay with me because it went against everything you had always believed. Deep down, you really believed that it was a sinful relationship, and as long as you stayed in it, you would feel as though you were doing something wrong.

When will I see you again? Where? Who will you be? And who will I be?

Dreams #87346576, #92757656, and #19483655

2004-11-02T11:23:00.000-08:00

I dream about mushrooms. They appear frequently in the background of strange events or commonplace meetings, growing in the corners of my internal landscape. Sometimes they are the sole focus of a dream, and sometimes they wait on the side. I trip down twisting paths in bloom with mushrooms round and regular or spindly or warped and asymmetrical. I loop and look, I eat and I discard, I find species never described in any field guide. I seek mushrooms of all colors, sizes, and odours, and they entice me. Sometimes they are poisonous. But mostly they evade categorization, populating my dreams with their creature-like shapes weird and luminous.

Women Wrestling Men?

2004-10-22T11:06:00.000-07:00

It still shocks me when they sing the national anthem at wrestling tournaments. I look around and wonder if people are watching. Am I really performing? I ask myself. Is this really me?

There was no doubt that I was being watched during my one match this weekend at the Maccabi USA Wrestling Trials. I wrestled in the men's 50kg weight category because there was no women's division, and everyone in the room looked on. When I won by a convincing technical superiority and a pin, I got a standing ovation.

Most people were standing already, crowding around the mat, and he was only a high school senior, but everyone except my coach expected me to lose, which made the victory greater.

In fact, simply by entering the tournament, I scored a victory for women's wrestling. It showed that at least one woman wanted to wrestle badly enough to enter a men's tournament - and she had the guts to do it.

I am constantly surprised by the fear I encounter from both genders when it comes to men and women wrestling together. They are reluctant to wrestle each other even in practice, and men often consider wrestling women a waste of their time. At the Olympic Training Center, the practices are sex-segregated, instead of divided by size (one practice for the smaller people, one for the larger). Occasionally, a boyfriend, friend or coach will wrestle with the women, but by and large the two sexes avoid each other.

Internationally, at the highest levels, men are still far ahead of women; even a female Olympian would probably be eliminated quickly at a high-level men's tournament. But how many people understand that this is due to a lack of funding and support, experience, interest, and development, not innate weakness? Sadly, I find that most people consciously or subconsciously locate the deficit within our (female) bodies. They don't see the point in women wrestling men because they don't believe that the gap can be narrowed, much less eliminated.

Why else would they avoid wrestling each other, leaving aside male fear of losing to a female? Everyone stands to gain - women will improve, men will have new partners with different styles, and in the long run, both sets will earn more respect from each other.

Wrestling is about pushing your limits, about rejecting the limits that others set for you, but I see both women and men passively accepting the limits set for them by society. Wrestling is not purely about physical strength unless we make it that way, and all else being equal, men's strength would only win for them a small percentage of the time.

The only way we will improve ourselves is by trying things that challenge us, even if we are uncomfortable; we will only gain if we take the risks. If we don't, we will be left wrestling with our own shadows.

Contact

2004-10-18T11:28:00.000-07:00

For the pure music in it, touch. Luxurious guitarist hands. Naked fingers tracing lines of gossamer across my skin. Leaving webs of design, tremors. Mother-of-pearl. Shining hands luminous. Sailing, playing, soaring, laughing hands. Sea-salt hands, petal-hands to wrap me. For the pure music in it, musician to instrument. In moments of ecstacy the ego is blinded and neither knows which is which. Blind hands, traveling hands. Naked fingers creating and effacing. In the darks of my body like moonlight. Bright hands, light hands, silk. Breath-hands, wind-hands, stroking pleasure-hands. For the pure music. Crackles like electricity between synapses: hands and body. In moments of ecstacy neither knows which is which. Shivers down my spine, hands compact and alive. Naked fingers like flint, sparks off my body, lights me on fire. River-hands flowing, billowing, pulling, dipping, tugging, pressing, urging, telling hands, spelling hands. With the vocabulary of the skin, sweat and follicles. Growing hands. Draws me tighter in, I embrace. Wreathing feathery loops round my hips, hot hands surround me, gale winds, arching hands, straining hands, twin currents carry me toward the center, the explosion, I surround. Musician's hands rake my raw voice across the walls in streaking music of moment, focus and fulcrum of my pleasure, hands playing painted notes, fields of color behind my eyes. For the pure. In moments of. The fugue lasts, stutters, fades to murmur. Whispering hands. Naked fingers drawing shadows down my back. Sure hands, music hands, stringed hands, instruments. Body, neck. Hands to handle me, delicious, contact electric. Sweet hands, smiling hands, fur and lambs-wool, feather-hands. For the pure music in it, touch.

Industrial Rainforest

2004-10-17T11:28:00.000-07:00

I am riding up rue St. Denis with my tires throwing grit and raindrops in my face, when scattered hollow pingings bring me to a halt. On my right, dusk is making cool blue-gray shadows under the scarred I-beams of a building under construction. Fallen chain-link sheets form a groundcover with rubble and refuse that has collected tidally against the feet of the half-grown structure, its skeleton steel, its skin corrugated aluminum. Rain taps the metallic sheeting as though it were broad rainforest leaf: banana, elephant’s-ear, bird of paradise. My mind drapes lush foliage and vines dripping greens over the unliving metal. Rust-encrusted, rain-pocked, and a thousand insect legs scrabble for purchase on the slick gray surface; the voices of birds echo strangely along corrugated chambers. Tiny frog eggs inhabit minute pools in grooves worn by constant dripping. Spiders’ silent webs drift, framed by perfect right angles, and wary snakes coil round cool silent metal, rasping their scales against the heads of screws. Poisonous flowers bloom explosively out of perfectly drilled threaded holes whose bolts have disappeared, eked loose by water and rust, carried away to the macaw’s nest. Trees inch their roots to embrace the foundation and ferns extend timid tendrils toward miter joints. Soon, vines will cover it completely and moss and fungus will obscure it. A layer of humus will settle over the rust, and only the birds who dig and peck will be startled anymore by the dull ping of ancient industrial steel.