Oh Everest, My Everest

Run your favorite website through www.gizoogle.com, sit back and chillax. It's straight up O-G, yo.

I like to put the milk in the freezer for a couple of hours and then eat it with my cereal or drink it with chocolately goodness. Just put it in the freezer long enough for ice crystals to start forming, but not long enough for it to freeze solid. I've known few greater joys.

I just wanted to plug this website I found on CrossFit for women who [want to] lift weights: [stumptuous.com]. The author, Krista, freely shares her wisdom in what I hold to be the true spirit of a sunshine policy (not to mention she's a total beast and my new hero). Just look at the heights of her beastiness!

I have much love and admiration for the stumptuous Krista.

I always remember my brother, James, being really cool when I was a kid. He was pretty responsible for most of the friends I had in high school besides the big three girlfriends for life. That was because he was a professional skater and all the skater kids wanted to be my friend because they thought my big brother was so cool. Obviously I make my friends a different way these days, but it wasn't a bad gig to be James Qua's little sister at Eagle Rock High School. Anyway, about a year before I left home, a lot of stuff happened and we didn't really talk for a while. Then college, growing up and such. Being on the other side of the country aided in my feeling of isolation from Qua family closeness in general, but sometimes being so far away just kept me too wrapped up in the fact that most of my family would forget that I'm a person and, more importantly, that I'm a changing person. I have to remind myself that my family is a loose aggregation of other individuals just like me, and that they change and I have to adapt as well.

Overly analytical as I am, I came to this conclusion a couple of years ago and revisit it pretty frequently. This time, though, I'm revisiting the idea because my brother started a blog. If you've been a faithful reader of The Supple Cow for the past two years, then you probably already know this is why I decided to start blogging under my own name, why I felt like I needed a change, and from where the inspiration for this new blog's title came. My brother not sharing my gender nor the encouragement of over-emotionalism that it attracts, his blog is more about biking and less about his thoughts and feelings. James now mountain bikes to feed his need for speed and thrills, which I think is awesome. He took me out on a really easy trail once several months ago and I had a blast. I don't know why it surprised me so much to realize how strong the James : Riding :: Krischelle : Karate analogy really is. (This realization inspired me to plug his Ride Log for my readers to check out. Of course, it has been in my sidebar for a couple of weeks now, but an official plug never hurts.) It really helps me not feel like I'm here in New York to escape my terrible family and more like I'm here to do what I need to do whenever I realize something like that. It sounds simple and straight-forward, but it's reassuring to have stuff in common with my brothers and sisters, and it hardly ever seems as simple as this. We both want to make ourselves tougher. Good deal, right?

Speaking of tough, I'm slowly but surely getting over my tendency to whine and be wussy in general. I realized this when I got home to discover the deepest defensive bruise I've had on my arms in the two months I've been doing karate... and I didn't even notice when it happened during class. This is it, but the picture is from a bad angle so you can't see how black and blue it really is:

Karate really lights me up. I don't know how else to say it. It's like all the great inspirational stuff I've ever gotten out of playing music or sports or getting good grades, only it's just for me. I'm not doing it for my bandmates or my teammates or to get into a good school. I'm just doing it to make a tougher me. I cut my lip at least once a week these days from missing a block, I've sustained a bruise like in that picture on both sides of both my forearms since day one, and I've been kicked in the head and stomach more times than I want to remember, but I keep getting up and asking for more. It's not because I'm a masochist, and it's not because I have something to prove. The only person I want to impress is myself. I have no reason to keep going other than because I want to. That's right - me.

The bonus is that I appear to be building muscle, too. I don't think I've ever seen my arms look this un-noodley in my entire life:

What can I say? I like. I'm hopeful that this ridiculous schedule of cramming CrossFit WsOD (Workouts of the Day) in between karate days will remain just as exciting to me, but the jury is still out on my ability to sustain these kinds of workouts at the same time. I've only done two CF WsOD since I discovered CF (on Sunday and today) but after tomorrow's karate class, that will make five consecutive days of intense workout. So far, all I've got to show for it is a slightly stronger resolve to be tough, a shitload of lactic acid in my body, and the pervasive odor of Tiger Balm following me wherever I go. Oh yeah, and also a reasonable explanation for my formerly ridiculous appetite. I guess that would be my favorite part.

At the end of today's karate class, the instructor informed everyone to congratulate me because I just finished testing and didn't even know it. I wasn't expecting to test until the week after our workout/barbecue on the 21st. Now I get to put a little black stripe on both ends of my belt when I come to class on Tuesday. Hot stuff. Practicing in the living room when my roommates aren't looking and then getting laughed at when they catch me is totally worth it.

My last couple of classes have been good practice for me in (a) getting dropped quickly, (b) getting hit "gently" in the face, and (c) trying to achieve mushin, the state of newborn-like fearlessness and extreme readiness. Of course, I was only successful in doing (a) and (b) skillfully, because they both require only one real skill: minimizing the contact my head has with offending hard surfaces (namely, the floor or somebody's fist). That skill is pretty instinctive, I'd say. Mushin, on the other hand, is a lot more like a pipe dream for me right now. As I learned the hard way, I'm going to have to practice all of the basic blocking motions with another person a thousand more times in order to commit them to muscle memory, which is Step 1 towards extreme readiness (obviously). At this point, it seems like that day will never come because we practice this way so infrequently. Regardless, I spent a lot of my last class concentrating on the newborn-like fearlessness part, which is a mistake I will not make again, if I can help it. Spending all that energy on unfounded fearlessness meant also spending a lot of time getting kicked, punched, and generally smacked around without much (or any) defensive action to mitigate the blows.

I shouldn't complain, though, because I didn't get the worst of it. This older fellow in the class was practicing a blocking technique with me, and when three focused blocks from him warranted more spirited jabs from me, I started worrying less about controlling my punches and more about making them realistic... since he was going to block them anyway. (Right? Right?) That was when his completely unforeseen brain fart occurred and he just didn't step out of the way or deflect my fist. I made pretty good contact with his nose - VERY UNEXPECTEDLY - and watched in horror as it turned bright red. It was the kind of red your nose turns when you're about to cry. He didn't cry, but instead paused for a minute until the pain passed, and then placed a hand on my shoulder and leaned toward me like a person about to share a hefty secret. "You know," he said, "I've never been in a fist fight my whole life, if you can believe that." At first I thought he was just embarrassed and trying to make excuses, because he was, after all, turning bright red. But he continued: "You're the first person to ever hit me in the face!" Then he announced the same information to everybody else. (There were only two others there, including the instructor.) He just seemed so tickled by the whole thing, simultaneously shocked and tickled. I guess if I were a man with fifty odd years of living under my belt and the first time I ever got hit in the face was by a young lady - a girl in comparison - I would be pretty shocked and tickled as well.

His nose stayed Rudolph red for the remaining half hour of class. I'm just glad it didn't bleed.