I'm not gracefully grateful about it, though. When I want to do something that doesn't just come to me naturally, I get frustrated, and then discouraged.
You guessed it, I'm talking about Tae Kwon Do again. (Sorry, Shel. You talk linguistics, I talk martial arts.) I've got no problem memorizing all the forms, and have practiced them every day since November, except when I've been out of town, and then I've made up the time with double-practice on other days. It's the most disciplined I've been in anything I've ever done. I don't have to work like that on aikido. My body understands what to do, and does it. I never had to practice like that for band, either. I always got a 4.0 grade without really trying. I always worked hard on theatre, but that was generally just in rehearsal, and then the week before going off-book, when I crammed on lines.
So now for the first time I'm actually using discipline and applying myself to something, and I'm frustrated because I'm still missing major things. I still can't get the sidekick to turn over all the way and stay balanced. My front kicks are better but not as high as I need them to be. Last night Elizabeth taped each of us with her video camera, and she, Forest and I sat up late and watched ourselves, so we could hear Forest's critique. First off, I hate being videotaped for any reason, so I was tense, and making a conscious effort to relax. Second, we had been working out for 4 hours straight, and I'd only taken about a 30 second break to run to the water fountain in all that time, so I knew they weren't going to be the best I could do. I should give myself that much room. (Although to me those sound like excuses.)
The good news is that the tape at least told me that I was generally doing at least as well as most people in the class at this stuff. I'm not terrible. My front kicks looked better, and I generally ended up with the right footwork, ending up about where I started. That's a good thing.
The bad news is that in working hard to make the forms look less tense, I've lost a major concept of how they are supposed to be done. Punches are supposed to have their maximum thrust at the end of the punch, not the beginning. I was basically doing it backwards, and didn't notice. (For the past 6 weeks. Ugh.) I had been feeling pretty comfortable in my defensive stances; they felt natural to me. I assumed they were okay because no one told me otherwise. Forest's rule of thumb is that if it feels good, it's probably right.
Of course on the video tape, you can plainly see that the weight on my left defensive stances isn't correctly distributed. I'm also not backfisting to the right target, and in the first form I forgot to focus, and looked at the ground too much.
So now instead of a few mistakes, I've got bad habits to correct, that I've been reinforcing by practicing them wrong all of this time. I wish someone had told me I was doing this stuff wrong!! I vented my frustration at poor Forest, whose response was basically the reason for the title of this entry.
He said, "You'll easily pass the test with an A. I was more worried about the students who would pass with a C."
So I have decided to take that as a good thing and a bad thing. Basically, I'm bad by my own standards, but doing okay by the class standards. I ought to be able to live with that.
I hate being a virgo sometimes. We're all such stubborn perfectionists! It's also got a lot to do with being just plain impatient. I figure if I work hard, I ought to be able to perfect it by now, when in fact people who work on these things for 15 years still aren't perfect.
Even more frustrating than that is that Forest says I'm working too hard on it, and that's the problem. I fail to see how I will improve if I don't work on it! I just don't think he understands, this doesn't just come naturally to me. Any progress that I have made is because I kept at it until it was right. I'm inclined to think that Forest is quite talented at this stuff. It does come to him naturally, and he doesn't have to struggle with it like that. He does the mental work, I see him running through things in his head, checking his memory, and all that, but he doesn't have to practice that much to get his kicks to look nice. It just happens. So maybe he can just relax and his body will learn this stuff, but I tried that at the beginning, and it didn't seem to be working. I kept backsliding all the time, and if something was right, it was luck, and I didn't see it right again for a month later. Augh.
Grasshopper will have to learn better patience.
I also need to work something different out for babysitting on class nights. Forest's sister was originally going to do it, but her work schedule keeps moving around, and this week I was without a sitter again. I ended up taking Kirstin with me to class, which always makes Master Kim happy, but mortifies me, because even though she's a well-behaved munchkin, I would die of embarrassment if she disrupted his class. I called practically everyone I know last night, but most of them were at read-through for Dr. Faustus, my mom and Jean were at bell choir, my sister was at a party, and so on. People I know are just too busy to do something like that on short notice.
We also don't have a sitter for tonight, and against my gut instincts, I'm going to be gaming tonight and leaving Forest at home with Kirstin. It's not that I don't think he can do that. He will be fine. My problem is that I've been stuck home with kids while other people were out having fun many times, and I know what a drag it gets to be after a while. I particularly don't think it's fair in this case, because Kirstin's not Forest's responsibility. He doesn't let me take on his obligations, so I shouldn't let him take on mine, right? So he's promised that the next time we can't both go, I will stay home with the munchkin, and he will go out and game. That way it's fair. I guess it should work. We'll see.
It's funny, though. I think he looks forward to wednesday night gaming as much as I do, if not more so. It's something I'm accustomed to doing, that's been going on for years and years. For him, it's new and great, and he is always eager to go, even when he's feeling sickly or injured or tired. It cracks me up.
Today Forest is helping Will move, and I feel bad that I can't be there to help out. I'm at work, though, and really can't see using sick time to move someone, much though I feel guilty about it.
I've been getting phone calls today, because apparently they are playing a scene from Midsummer Nights' Dream on the local cable station again. I haven't seen it, but I hear it's the scene where I pretty much beat Demetrius to a pulp, and then run off. People I work with live in Meridian Township, and I guess I'm easy to recognize, because of the closeup shots and stuff. Then apparently there's a professor who goes through the scene snippet by snippet explaining and commenting and critiquing it. It's mortifying. I wish I at least knew how it turned out, so I knew whether to be embarrassed or proud. People have been saying it was a really good performace, but I never trust audiences to tell the truth on stuff like that, and these people have reason to suck up to me anyway.
Auditions for "Shrew" and "Coriolanus" are this Monday and Tuesday, and I'm ill-prepared. I've been working on them for about a week and a half, and find that this cold has really set me back. I've gotten almost no chance to hear myself speak them with my actual voice, and no chance to work on projection, inflection, phrasing, or technique, because I'm either coughing through them, or my throat is so scratchy that I sound like one of the Dark Overlords of the Universe from Howard the Duck. It's a little worrisome.
I'm starting to get a little worried about money. Gas prices and the fact that I commute in a minivan are really starting to drain my pocketbook, particularly since Forest and I haven't been able to carpool at all this week. I also have the unexpected expense of buying treats for my choir this past monday, and I owe them money for a uniform, plus I have to pay to register for a conference we are attending in two weeks. Ack. Ordinarily, I'd make up for it out of Forest's pocket money. When he was waiting tables, the deal was that I kept the bills paid, he chipped on the house payment, and our spending money came from his tips. It worked out pretty well, and kept the gas tanks full. Now, though, he isn't waiting tables, and hasn't gotten a paycheck from the Store yet. So we're both strapped. I think I'm going to have to go through the bills and decide what not to pay for a bit. I hate that. I haven't had to do it since two Decembers ago, since I got this job. It stinks. But, basically, I allowed $30 extra spending money to cover gas in this pay period, and that's not going to cut it.
