First to the park again. A couple was playing badminton when I arrived, badly because of the wind. I warmed up with the forms, expecting all the while to be hit with an errant birdie. Slowly the other students began to arrive. The V and the guy who is not from Hong Kong gave each other advice, while the little guy and another student wrestled violently under the protective gaze of the tree-root master.
First up was Mr. Hu, who is often away on business in China. His vulnerabilities seemed easy to find, and pushing with him was relatively easy. Then Mr. You arrived and, instead of warming up, beckoned to me for a bout. He was a man on a mission tonight, in full tree-root mode. No softness to be found, just fully intent on force. It was surprising, because he is not usually like that. Most of our bouts ended in draws, with both of us falling over at the same time.
Yang Qing-feng arrived and started doing jumping forms with his scimitar, a heavy, shiny weapon with his name and the year engraved on the blade. He seems really into it. Teacher Xu showed us a way to twist our opponents in a fashion to make them tense up and offer more vulnerabilities, but I didn’t quite get the hang of it.
I practiced with Mr. Yu, who started out softly and properly, but after a short while he resorted to hard shoving. I found I had to be careful as it seemed to me that he might not hesitate to break something. As I was practicing, I thought to myself, I should push, but then I realized that I can’t just push; I have to wait for an opportunity presents itself. Wait for an empty spot and fill it. This is something that often doesn’t occur to my conscious mind, but rather turns up as a mere feeling or inclination. Perhaps this phenomenon gets clearer with practice; I hope so, but I’d still like to understand it better.
All the yanking back and forth was a strain on my back, but nothing serious. All the more reason to be as soft as possibly. Resistance is futile, indeed. The Borg should be great at tuishou.
posted by Poagao at 11:56 am
已經花了不少時間把這個網站轉到wordpress的
posted by Poagao at 12:03 am
New links!
Poagao’s Journal (here): poagao.org/pjournal
潑猴的日記： poagao.org/chinese
Monkey Learns to Push: poagao.org/taiji
The film production journal, Running with Swords: poagao.com/blog
It’s been a long, exhausting process, and it’s by no means finished, but thanks to Mark‘s generous donation of his time and effort over the past week, we’ve managed to force this site, kicking and screaming, into the realm of WordPress. Mark and I spent a couple of late nights wondering how to convert six years’ worth of posts and other ephemera, and it ended up involving ditching doteasy, upgrading my other hosting service, a nearly fruitless search for Blogger-to-Wordpress converters, converting all my blogs to Blogspot, then to WordPress.com blogs and then to WordPress.org blogs on my domain. I designed a new splash page with simpler links, but it’s still aligning to the top of the page whereas it should be in the middle. I also took the opportunity to make new banners for the Chinese and Tuishou blogs. The sidebars of all the blogs, however, are still pileups of bad links and leftovers. The film blog still hasn’t been converted, as that’s on poagao.com. I accidentally mislabeled a link yesterday in the WP admin section, effectively breaking this blog until Mark told me over gmail chat how to fix it. I knew it would be a difficult process, but neither of us could imagine what a pain it would turn out to be. I know nothing about coding and have relied on Dreamweaver for my web design efforts up to this point, something which Mark finds rather shocking. All I have to do to make him shudder with apprehension is mention the word “tables”.
So here I am in ur WordPress, postin’ blogs. It feels a bit alien and cold after six years of the Blogger interface, but it does seem to offer more usability. Hopefully over the next couple of weeks, with Mark’s help, I’ll be able to clean up the mess and get everything working properly again. For those of you who link directly to this page, the new URL should be http://www.poagao.org/pjournal
posted by Poagao at 11:49 pm
