My Wushu Blog

It’s been a looong time since Mark has been in charge of a class, maybe 2005 or so, right before he moved to Shanghai. I had forgotten how relentless he is, even though over the past few years Pierre and I have threatened younger students, “Oh you think this is tough? Wait till Mark gets back!” or “If you don’t stop talking, we’re calling Mark and flying him back here to make you do burpee’s!

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A friend of mine got my the coolest birthday present I think I’ve ever recieved, and that was a bunch of new and super kick ass hardware. This will soon replace my current server, which is in such bad shape it cannot compile java code, or perl from source. Before I replace it, I wanted to play around with ZFS that comes with FreeBSD 7.0. Here is a quick rundown of it all:

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For me, wushu hasn’t always been kick ass and fun. I’ve gone through periods where I hated going to class, and I either wouldn’t have gone at all had it not been for my strong habitual nature ( I run on auto-pilot on Tuesdays and Thursdays, I just show up to class no matter what) or lately I would have found any work excuse to not go. Somewhere along the line, I stopped being excited about wushu, I stopped dreaming about learning cool styles like bagua, fanzi, longfist, etc…

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Let’s back it up a bit and go on record for exactly how I got the nickname, and the insane amount of flexibility in my left leg. I began learning the newer longfist compulsory with Isao. Stephanie was teaching us the first section. I remember it was towards the end of class and I was exhausted and hungry, probably dehydrated too. We got to the part where you do the jumping inside-kick and land into the splits where I faltered.

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Okay, ham-ish title, and it’s not like it Wushu West is bad now, just me and my motivation. As I explained before, the first year or so of wushu I was a wushu craving lunatic. I spent a lot of spare time at work searching for clips, which at the time were hosted on furiousg.com and then moved to wushucentral.com. I’m not sure why I don’t watch random wushu clips now, maybe its because youtube has taken all the work out of finding something, but I really take for granted how easy it is today to find any style you want.

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One evening Michele was a little frustrated with me, about how I never really say anything. I’m a pretty private person even with my own family, so I don’t talk all that much beyond superficial “how’s the weather?”. Well, since I had this secret obsession with wushu, and I figured if Michele really wanted to know what I was thinking of I’d let her in. I believe she thought it was a little far-fetched, again, we didn’t know people who did martial arts especially adults.

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I broke it… Okay, I didn’t “break” anything, I decided to upgrade my server to fix some corrupted files (this is what happens when you let your server melt in 100+ degree weather), and in the process I sort of forgot to backup the large MySQL Database…. And to think people pay me to do this for a living.

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Mark’s Wushu Retrospective journal has made me all nostalgic about my own experience with getting in shape, loosing weight, and starting wushu at our beloved Wushu West. I had gained a lot of weight right after Michele and I got married in August 2000. Well, after high school (1998), I gained 20lbs, but I proceeded to put on more once we tied the knot. You would have thought it was my second full-time job, eating crap.

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This movie had Guillermo del Toro’s name attached to it, and I anticipated that it would be awesome and have some really cool creature effects. I was off on the latter, while the movie is a really good horror/suspense there is very little physical gore. One tiny part was graphic, and I made Michele mad that I had her watch the movie :) The premise is a little orphan girl grows up, and as an adult she adopts a little boy, and then buys the house that used to be the very orphanage she grew up in.

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Westerns never caught my attention, I avoided them at all costs. It’s mostly because my whole family was into all of that, and since it conflicted with my indoors only activities of computers and guitar playing, I rebelled against then and refused to watch Lonesome Dove. Also, it was an older movie, and I’ve discussed my aversion to watching older movies. Well, I was doing my usual workout where I’m half-way lifting weights but mostly preoccupied trying to find something entertaining to watch so the workout wont feel so boring and lifeless.

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