A different kind of rape culture

Background reading: For a fairly decent understanding of the typical meaning of "rape culture" (should you happen to need one) check out the wikipedia entry.

This is not my favorite topic. First, it fits a little too well into the stereotype of the man-hating feminist. It also doesn't create a helpful environment for fixing the obvious social problem (that rape exists at all).  It is all too easy in a discussion of "rape culture" to both criticize a (probably male) individual for his actions while simultaneously diminishing his individual responsibility. Take this story in which a male video game producer was accused of a casual rape joke. The outrage seems to simultaneously blame the man for being intentionally disrespectful of the female gamer and being shamefully ignorant of how his casual remark might be upsetting. How can the poor dude be guilty of both malice and ignorance? This story is also overblown in terms of gender bias, though it would still have been sexist I can honestly say I think he would have said the same thing to another man. If you want to get outraged over   a cultural issue pick the one where men taunt each other by equating weak with female ("You fight like a girl!"). The men I know take rape very seriously. 

So imagine my surprise when I find myself submerged in what I can only call a "rape culture". Here's my story.

I was out at a bar in downtown Denver for the first night of my 10 year high school reunion. A friend of mine was getting picked up by another friend but she needed to get some stuff out of my car, which was parked about two blocks away. Neither of us had been drinking at all that night, but I'm not sure that's relevant except I was sober enough to over-analyze this. We were stopped at a crosswalk waiting for the light to change and I was looking around to assess the situation. I observed the following: the street was well lit and traffic was light (Conclusion: tolerable place to stop for a moment). There was a group of three young men across the street who didn't look like they were going anywhere (Conclusion: potential threat). There were two men standing behind us also waiting for the light to change and standing closer than the totally empty sidewalk justified (Conclusion: moderate threat). There were other people about but further away and generally male (Conclusion: no threat but potentially no help either).

I looked down at my phone to answer a question from my friend when I realize that someone is now close enough behind me that I can feel him. It was the same dude that was just a little too close a moment before. I turned and looked right at him and I honestly don't remember exactly what I said. I was a LITTLE JUMPY. He slurred his response and I immediately reevaluated (Very drunk. Conclusion: Minimal threat). His friend helpfully pulled him away from me and I calmed back down. When I went to walk back to the bar there were a lot more couples and people clearly walking to cars instead of just milling about and I felt better.

Until I realized that I had basically just spent the last 10 minutes ruthlessly assessing every male in a 30 yard radius for his probability of violence. Sheesh. I've always been a little paranoid, but last night it was just depressing. I don't even have any thoughts right now other than a wistful dream that maybe it doesn't have to be like this.

My family of control freaks and why I love them

Most of the women in my family are control freaks. I mean that with love. We get shit done, as long as it's done our way. We mostly manage it well - a feature I credit to having to deal with so many other control freaks all the time. You learn to let go of some things but for the most part when we sense weakness we pounce and lock down everything.

I, largely through my over inflated sense of righteous indignation, get caught more often than the other women in battles I can't win. So I have a bit of a reputation in my family for not really being able to deal with life when shit doesn't go my way. 

Most of my family has some idea that I am having trouble getting pregnant. If they don't, well, maybe this post will come as a bit of a shock, but I don't know how they could miss it given that this is the current center of all my control freak tendencies. One of my awesome aunts (the one I see less often) is visiting this week and we had some time to chat. I mentioned this infertility problem and she immediately said I'm too stressed. I need to just relax.

I read the forums, I know this is like the most hated advice ever, but I also know my reputation is mostly deserved. I hear that phrase and suddenly I want to explode in a temper tantrum about how little people get my problems and how I'm tragically misunderstood and why can't anyone just believe me when I say I think I have a real medical problem. This would then rapidly degenerate into a generic rant on how unfair life is.

I didn't do that. It would've been rude. Besides if anyone is physically capable of maintaining a level of stress hostile to pregnancy for 16 months, it would be me.

At some point, you just have to decide to keep going. The world is full of family events that I want to be a part of even while I try to fit in doctor appointments over lunch breaks (2 next week!). Maybe I'm just a tiny bit less of a control freak than my younger self. Or I just deflected my efforts onto other things, like murdering the plants and bugs in my yard. Yeah, that's more like me.

Let's just be friends

A common theme among lady BJJ bloggers out there (maybe the men too, I don't know) is to describe the attachment to BJJ like a relationship. There's the BJJ honeymoon when you first find BJJ and it fills your life and everything is awesome. There are also the awkward phases where you remember that your life contains more than just BJJ and you try to balance all the pieces.

Anyway, Valerie Worthington has a nice little summary here. Seriously, she's gone through way more of the relationship phases than I have. I'm only a white belt.

I feel like quitting. It sucks but it's true. But I don't plan on quitting. I'm still trying to struggle through. I expected certain things from BJJ that were maybe unreasonable, and it's not working out. BJJ seems to have expected things from me that I haven't figured out yet. Maybe I'm afraid of commitment.

Dear BJJ,
We need to just be friends for now. I promise to stop being angry that I didn't get everything I wanted out of the relationship. I promise to stop feeling guilty that I don't measure up. Most importantly, I promise to stop avoiding you.

Competitive Rationalizing

It's late and I can't sleep but luckily it means I have a few extra minutes to blog about how my second BJJ tournament went.

It went better than the last one. I lost twice again but my division was so small that I still placed 3rd (out of 3) so I am in the deliciously ironic position of having won a medal in BJJ before I've even managed to win a match. I'm special like that.

I did break down emotionally into an embarrassing pile of tears and snot but unlike last time this phase was over in about an hour. [For those of you who missed the story: last time I cried for TWO DAYS. You could not mention the tournament or BJJ or that the sky looked blue without me tearing up. It was BAD.]

Added bonus: I remember enough about my matches to have a few things to bring to the mat to work on so that I might end up with better jiujitsu. If anyone actually wants me to talk about that part I will add a separate post, just let me know.

I really think this tournament helped me figure a few things out.

First: I don't seem to enjoy competing, so why do I do it?

Competing is excellent team-building. I might have completely different reasons for training than the next person, but a competition really simplifies things. Suddenly everyone seems to have the same goal. You get to know people better as you kill all that time waiting for matches. It's awesome.

Quite simply, I'm also just a sucker for a good challenge every once in a while. I'm a firm believer that the best way to make yourself a stronger person is to push yourself to do difficult things. (On a related note, I am doing my first 5k in July).

Second: Dealing with self-pity

One reoccurring theme on this blog is how I try to suppress feelings of self-pity. The escalation from sadness to pathetic is familiar. In tournaments, for example, it goes like this:

I am sad because I lost a match [ OK. ]
I am sad because I have never won a match [ Uh oh. ]
I am sad because I feel I will never win a match [ Yep. Pretty much off the deep end here. ]

I was able to break the cycle this time. The internal dialogue (yes, dialogue) went a bit like this:

• Pathetic me: I'll never figure out this competition thing.
• No-bullshit me: Let's think about this for a minute. Here you are, 20 years from now and you have a fascinating BJJ tournament record of 0-40. Or even 0-100. Maybe it could happen, but do you really think your future self is sitting there saying "Wow. I was right. I really suck." Or do you think she's maybe out there trying to figure out how to win, kinda like you should be doing, rather than sitting here storing up reasons for the future you to look back and say "Wow, I was being so stupid."
• Pathetic me: I know I'm being stupid, but winning seems impossible because I'm such an emotional train wreck
• No-bullshit me: Everyone has issues. Maybe tomorrow you get hit by a car and end up paralyzed, there are a million reasons why you might never win a jiujitsu match ever. Are you going to pity an infinite number of your future selves? Are you some kind of infinite well of self-pity? Can we harness it to power the earth?

It's never really quite the same trick that gets me to put away the past and try to do better next time. Some days its easier than others. Keeping busy helps, as does taking my meds on time. As it stands, I'm signed up for the in-house tourney on Saturday. Should be interesting.

Competitions for over-analyzing? No? Ok. BJJ it is.

Disclaimer: I'm posting this to see how out of whack my internal monologue has gotten. Feel free to comment! :)

First, some background. Despite the lack of BJJ in my blog lately, there's been a decent amount of training in my life at least. Not as much as I would like, especially because I lost last week to being sick, but enough. Also, there's a competition coming up. Two, in fact, and I want to do them.

Let me say that again.

There's a BJJ competition scheduled for May 11th and I WANT TO COMPETE.

Now that I've gotten that out of the way here are the internal ramblings.

1. You haven't trained hard enough and you don't go to the competition classes.
2. You will embarrass your school with your combination of poor conditioning and complete emotional breakdowns.

My problem really boils down to this: I have enough trouble convincing myself to go to class when I start thinking about competition that the actual physical preparation gets a little muddled. I'm just going with what I've got at this point.


My plan is drag myself out on that mat on May 11th. This I am prepared to do. If any actual good jiu-jitsu comes out of it, I'll consider that a bonus.

Chapter 1

Writing fiction seems to be all the rage lately. And I have a very very rare urge to try it. No warranties or promises of any kind regarding the quality of this fiction.

Joan sat at her computer in a brightly lit office on the 5th floor of a generic corporate building in some mid-sized metropolis somewhere. Joan tried not to get bogged down in mundane human names for things. This city had plenty of reliable internet and no one actively hunting her. It was as simple as that. As her fingers flew over the keys, Joan burned a little Glamour and felt her mind open a direct connection to the internet. She understood enough about computers and Glamour to know that this ability was supposed to be impossible. Such a banal human structure was supposed to resist supernatural tampering. If the others insisted on trying to remember ancient contracts based on trees and time and rules older than dirt, that was fine with Joan. She would be proven right eventually and there was work to be done if she wanted to stay free.

These thoughts were only perceived at the edge of Joan’s consciousness. Most of her mind was entranced, driving her fingers to record in code the pattern she was tracing through the web. She was hunting big game this time. Who would’ve guessed that blackmailing criminals would be so lucrative? It was an awkward arrangement, having to catch humans assigning fake numbers to ephemeral ledgers in order to supply a very real community of people who shouldn’t exist. Accounting was almost arcane enough for Joan to believe a Fae had devised it.

The knock on the door shattered her trance. The thread of code slipped and Joan cursed. It would take more Glamour to try and regain the trail. Before Joan could say a word the door opened and Sophie, the secretary from the front desk, scurried in with three men in suits on her heels.

“I’m sorry ma’am. They insisted I escort them here straight away.” She turned and blinked at the gentlemen as if not really believing they were there and walked out as quickly as she had arrived.

Joan stood and sized them up, picking the oldest one to unleash her temper on. “Now just wait... “

“Joan Darce,” he interrupted, holding up a piece of paper, “You are under arrest for blackmail and piracy. You have the right to remain silent…”

Joan stopped listening and watched the two other men. They wore their disguises well, but no one who looked at their polished shoes and silk ties could miss their deadly grace. These were hunters too. They flanked Joan, closing in on her position.

Suddenly Joan realized the danger she was in. She had assumed these men were human, if the slightly more powerful type known as “federal agent”. Easy enough to deal with for one who could draw on Glamour. As they moved to surround her she saw their true form, just a glimpse of the truth behind the Mask. Two loyalists, both Fairest, trying to drag her back to Arcadia. She had one chance to escape.

She burned what Glamour she could to create a blinding flash and to gain extra speed. This would cost her later when the fatigue set in but she was desperate. She leapt for the door, passing the man with the paper before he could finish his sentence. She thought she heard the sounds of pursuit.

“Damn them! They should’ve been stunned for at least a few seconds.”

Joan ducked around a corner, running for the south staircase. She pulled the door open and bolted down the stairs, jumping several stairs at a time. Did she have enough time to get down to the first floor?  She had to hope they didn’t have reinforcements. How could even two loyalists have made it this far into the very seat of the Summer Court for the Changelings of the West?

She peeked out on the first floor and saw only a few corporate drones moving between meetings. She stepped out, took a deep breath and headed calmly down the hall towards the door to the parking lot. At the sound of footsteps she glanced over her shoulder and completely missed the man waiting to grab her from the nearby alcove. He deftly grabbed her wrist and pulled it into a hammerlock. She twisted and dropped to her knees. Joan tried to stand up, grinding her teeth at the sharp pain in her shoulder, but the man twisted her wrist further and forced her down until she was flat on her stomach.

Joan craned her head to see who the footsteps belonged to and saw the second abductor coming closer. She noticed that he, at least, seemed to be trying to shade his eyes against even the brightness of the hallway. Glamour spent, pinned to the floor by enemy Changelings, shoulder in agony, Joan cried out her frustration. She would rather die than be a slave in Arcadia again. The handcuffs snapped firmly around her wrists and the two agents hauled her to her feet and used their radios to confirm their success. Joan glanced around desperate for any kind of help. Was that Matt ahead, what was he doing out before dark?

“Matt! Help me! They are not who they appear to be!”

Matt looked carefully at the men and looked back at Joan with something dangerously close to pity in his eyes. He shook his head and moved out of the way of the men as they passed half dragging Joan to the door. That look in Matt’s eyes... Suddenly, Joan understood. These were actual federal agents and she was actually under arrest and she had just made a mundane human problem much, much worse. And she just might be going insane.

Assumption #12

The other day I happened to catch a link to this article on my Facebook feed. It's titled "15 assumptions you should make today". I'm a sucker for lists - Business Insider especially exploits this - seriously, go read their articles. Listalicious. Anyway, most of it is random advice that you might expect. What I didn't expect was my reaction to #12.

"#12: Assume that it's possible to recapture the way you felt when you were young, how the perfect clockwork mechanism of the universe used to leave you breathless and giddy with wonder."

First there was silence. For those of you who do not have the ever present chatter of inner voices, let me assure you that this was quite a profound silence. And then way in the back of my mind a quiet voice says "It can come back? Why hasn't anyone said this before?"

The floodgates opened and the normal buzz of mental activity resumed. Maybe life isn't so hopeless after all.

The daily prompt apologist

A friend occasionally uses a daily prompt idea blog to get ideas for posts. I've been kinda sporadic lately and I thought "what a great idea!" You can see examples of her successful use of daily prompts here.

Of course, if I found the prompt too boring I planned to skip it. And so began the week of MOST BORING DAILY PROMPTS EVER.

Today the prompt is: "Dig through your couch cushions, your purse, or the floor of your car and look at the year printed on the first coin you find. What were you doing that year?"

First off, my couch and my car have no coins in them. I checked. My purse does, but I might as well answer the question "what were you doing the last time you used coins?" Coins! Sheesh.

Anyway, back to homework with me, hopefully tomorrow's prompt is more interesting to me.

CFO of the Family

I read a fascinating article about whether or not couples should share bank accounts. It doesn't really apply to my marriage, Adam and I basically merged finances as soon as we started our first jobs out of college. But one line really got my attention: "If one partner is relegated to being the “chief financial officer” of the relationship, it could cause strife if the other partner feels left out."
I am the chief financial officer of my relationship. Why wouldn't I be? I love tracking financial data. This week I spent a few hours setting up a Mint.com account (finally!). I first heard about mint over a year ago, but I was lazy. Basically, I finally wanted some graphs on how much Adam and I spend on restaurants and alcohol and I have never been motivated enough to get Excel to do it. Also, now I can give Adam the username/password and he can see all our our general financial info in one place. As he put it: "I'm the Chief Auditor." He assures me that he doesn't feel left out.


I've noticed that most of the people I associated with before grad school seemed to have one of two ideas about managing their finances. Either they were just plain bad at it or they were intensely conservative about money.
 

The bad with money camp was guilty of all the usual things: using credit cards excessively, buying things they really couldn't afford, forgetting about bills, etc. I have less of these friends now as I've gotten older; often I've noticed people get better with money as they age.


The conservative camp is also guilty of some odd financial decisions. Some always paid with cash then found at age 25 that they had no credit rating at all, even friends with past bad choices had an easier time buying houses and cars. Others vigilantly paid off loans but ignored rates, often paying higher rate loans later.
 

I was raised to be in the conservative camp, but I try not to take it to extremes. I have a credit card that I use for everything, but I pay it off every month and I use the reward points to buy discounted gift cards at stores I go to frequently, or to lower my balance when I make a large purchase like the house. I let professionals conservatively manage my retirement accounts but I will open a brokerage account for my own investment strategies later this year. The family cash flows are protected by life and disability insurance policies and a small pile of cash.

I wonder, is it really hard for people to manage their money? Do they just hate doing it? One thing I've noticed is how important having cash and good credit is. I get discounts on things because I can buy them up front (cell phones, car insurance), or I get discounts because I have good enough credit to get 12 month-same-as-cash deals (furniture, home improvements). Because I have money, it's easier for me to save money. It's really not a very fair system. One thing I would like to see is instant credit report access provided either for free or very cheaply. Once a year seems like an odd restriction.

Running from the void

Thank god 2012 is over.

There, I said it. 

I know 2012 wasn't all bad. I bought a house, I adopted a dog, and I generally met a lot of cool people and had a number of good times. None of this changes the fact that 2012 was a completely miserable year for me.

Every so often the fog of fatigue and misery that seemed to hover over me this past year would retreat enough for me to look around and try to reorganize my plans but within a few days I was always swallowed up again. The worst feeling in the world was knowing that I had no reason to be so miserable but being helpless to change my feelings at the same time.

The past couple of weeks have been better but I don't know why. I keep looking over my shoulder wondering when the feeling of meaninglessness will catch up with me again. I don't plan on being easy to chase down.

I have ten weeks left of school and I plan on having a job lined up before then. I want to work out more and play video games less. I want more of my time spent trying to advance my position. It's no longer about trying to get ahead of everyone else. What I need is a way to fight the void that threatens to swallow me whole.

Life's not fair

I need to get a few things out of my system. Please feel free to skip to the end of the whining.

*takes a deep breath*

.

..

…

This has been a royally craptastic week. I don’t have a car because a tire fell off of my usual ride. That’s ok, happens all the time, right? Maybe I could’ve been seriously hurt or killed, but it happened when I was going 5 mph so I’m just peachy. Except for that part where I’m now stuck with a rental car until the foreseeable future. I don’t even know how bad the damage is. I try to be grateful that I’m not DEAD but all I can think about is how pointless the whole universe is. Those parts of my life where I can measure my accomplishments are all stalled out. This health condition drags me down; a person like me should have at least a few reasons to live another day, reasons beyond habit and instinct.

/end rant

Ignore the stuff above. I have something more important to talk about today. My blog is not *just* for venting when I need to vent. It’s for saying what needs to be said. If you happen to be reading this, this is not directed at you. This is an internal monologue that I have decided to preserve here.

Life’s not fair. You’ve heard that all your life. Well guess what? It’s bullshit. Life is brutally fair. You have what you have because you worked hard for it. You kept working when others quit, you kept looking for ways to improve yourself and reach your goals. Yet now, all of a sudden you’ve stopped fighting. Why? I’ll tell you why. You think life’s not fair, you think you’ve gotten lucky so far and you don’t want to push your luck. You’ve cashed out of life.

You can’t do that.

The other people on this planet - they all have their own reasons to keep struggling. But you don’t need their reasons. The universe has no patience with the weak, the lazy, or the slow. The universe is never going to reallocate your share to someone more deserving – what you don’t earn, no one gets. You are becoming wasted potential. The ONLY way to share the wealth is to earn your fair share and use it to help others do the same.

Get back in the fucking game.

/end internal monologue

I don’t have a lot to say to anyone right now. I’ve had some communication issues lately. I feel like I haven’t been told everything I need to know but I haven’t been asking questions because I don’t know what to ask. What is the right question here? Am I supposed to ask at all, or is the guessing part of the fun? So much for open honest feedback – life is never that simple.

My lost summer

This summer, I seriously thought I was going insane. At the rate my life was falling apart I thought I would end up quitting my job, quitting school, and spending my days in my house avoiding the world. For some reason my decent life was extremely distressing to me.

Turns out, I have a medical condition. A really dumb one. I have hypothyroidism. I call my disorder dumb not because I think its fake or in any way less legitimate than other diseases but rather because it made my whole life really stupid.

I can't even fully describe how bad I felt this summer. I would stare at a computer and cry, I would finish working out and cry, I would go to bed and cry. When I wasn't crying, I was mostly staring at things, or sleeping. I was always tired, always sad, always bored.

Sadly, none of this made me see a doctor - I thought I was depressed and that I'd get over it. I could rant for hours about how our societal views of depression are dangerous and unhealthy, but that's a whole different story. For this stupid problem of mine, what finally pushed me to go see a doctor was that I could no longer concentrate, and I was starting to forget things.

I was losing time. I would sit down to read an article on CNN or watch a TV show and suddenly I would notice that 3 hours had passed. Worse, I would think back on the time and realize I couldn't remember what I had read or seen. It was just gone. This was scary to me.

One blood test and a prescription later and I'm like an entirely different person. I thought I was young and healthy and yet this one thing wiped out most of my summer.

So, if my blog has seemed too quiet - that's why.

Panic switch

I have been royally slacking on jiu-jitsu this summer. I'm going to try not to overanalyze that - it's just the way the last few weeks have been and I plan on being more consistent as summer wraps up and I get back to school.

Tonight's class was interesting. There's a tournament coming up (the same one I had planned on competing in until I bought a house and hit a brick wall of stress) so for tonight's class we reviewed the rules and basic strategy of competition BJJ before sparring from standing.

I thought I was coping just fine with this until I was almost through my third "match". My partner finally managed to get a full 3 seconds worth of mount on me. Not a big deal. Until my mind blew everything out of proportion and I panicked.

It was like something snapped inside my mind and I just wanted to curl up in a ball and cry. Forget jiu-jitsu, I could barely breathe. It was all panic over losing too, my partner wasn't even being heavy on me or anything. Some thought weaseled into my brain about how I just lost 4 more points and there was no way I could come back from that and all my issues with competing came flooding into my head. Ow.

I kept it together long enough to finish the class but damn. I guess I have an ego problem. I'm definitely overly concerned with these points whenever we talk about BJJ in terms of points. I also have a serious confidence problem. I have no faith whatsoever in my ability to use BJJ to help me out in a competition setting. I probably don't have a lot of confidence in regular sparring either but it doesn't ambush me the same way.

And it is definitely the ambushing the screws with my mind. So much ow. I'm off to take some advil and get sleep. Hopefully Thursday's class is better.

Inefficient Markets

My apartment complex wants to charge me 2.5 months rent to get out of 3, maybe 3.5 months of my lease. If I was simply concerned with my own financial well being, I would take the deal, after all, I save up to a full months rent, right?

However, I'm angry. First, the apartment I have is currently unavailable and our complex is generally full, so I'm thinking they will rent it out fairly easily. So they get my 2.5 months and the extra rent. Second, they have the nerve to act like they're doing me a favor. BAH. I was cool with as long as it was "2 months rent, we let you go, easy!" No one mentioned "oh and we keep the security deposit too!".

All I wanted was for them to add the apartment to there list of available apartments and let me out of the lease when they found someone. But no, they either want me to hand them extra money that they haven't earned or pay to keep a nice empty apartment until the end of December.

Financially, the choice is clear. I should hand them the money and move on. But I'm not going to do it. Instead, I'm going to try and find someone to assign the lease to (which they tried to tell me was subletting and was illegal - like, this is supposed to be your business, not mine). If I can't find anyone, then at least I will have the satisfaction of knowing that I have never broken a lease agreement.

And I'll get my security deposit back. Jerks.

And this is why efficient markets are bullshit.

First House Madness

I used to roll my eyes at people who missed weeks and weeks of their normal lives to buy a house. Like, how distracting can it be, really? My apologies to any of those people. I am in the process of buying my first house (we close Thursday!) and I am completely distracted.

The most recent casualty in this house buying extravaganza is my entry in the BJJ tournament a week from Saturday. Here are my excuses for dropping out:

• I would rather put the money towards my house
• I don't even like competing, why am I doing something I don't find fun
• It was killing my motivation for jiu jitsu in general.

This last one is the only one that worries me. I may not have any love of competing but I do love going to class ... usually. But as soon as I signed up I dropped from 3-4 classes a week to 2 classes. I can blame that on the house if I want, but I think it had more to do with the tournament.

I don't feel bad about this. I did what I needed to do and no one will be really impacted by my decision. At least I was back in class tonight and finally happy to be there for the first time in a couple of weeks.

Anyway, back to the house.

As you can see, its green. Very green. With red shutters. I hated the outside, at first, but its already been renamed in my mind as "Christmas House" and I plan on continuing the red and green theme in the back yard (which is dead and is thus a blank slate).

Its not my dream house or anything, but it has a few things I like. It has a random pond in front, which I will fill with horrors on Halloween (and maybe other things for other holidays). The driveway actually slopes down to the road. The living room has built in shelves that are begging me to fill them with clutter. Yeah. It's my house. Or, it will be, on Thursday.

Will today be any different?

"Curiosity is the very basis of education and if you tell me that curiosity killed the cat, I say only that the cat died nobly" - Arnold Edinborough

I mentioned on Facebook that my primary motivation for trying a second jiu jitsu tournament is curiosity - specifically the question of "Will this time be different?" Even to me this seems like an odd question because I know, as a good proactive kinda gal, that I control what's different - at least a lot of what could be different. That part is boring.

I don't want to spend too much time going into my problem with tournaments because I haven't exactly figured it out yet. I will say that I survive pretty well preparing for a tournament and I seem to do moderately well actually surviving matches, win or lose. It's after the tournament - I just break down. 

I have a theory that my real fear is that I'm really not cut out for BJJ (the first sport that I haven't avoided with religious fervor) and that tournaments serve only to prove that to everyone. Here, let me put it in a way that maximizes it's ridiculousness (complete with highlighting): "My deep dark secret is that I am doomed to suck at jiu jitsu forever and tournaments will expose my secret and lead to me being ostracized". I understand how ridiculous this sounds. I also understand that the only way to guarantee I suck at jiujitsu forever is to quit now, while I suck, duh. Anyway, my point is that I haven't actually figured out ANYTHING. What am I afraid of? Do I have something to prove? Is it to myself? Is it to everyone else? Can I do better? Can it be worse? The more questions I have about something the more I will suffer through to get answers. This is where curiosity comes in.

Curiosity is, essentially, the only reason I get up in the morning. This is not counting the several years in my recent past where I didn't want to get up in the morning at all. That's a whole different problem that I have mostly gotten over. In general, when I am happy and functional and waking up in order to live my life like it matters I wake up in order to satisfy my curiosity. Will today be any different?

Maybe someone reading this will be thinking some cliche bullshit like "You make today what it is" or "Every day is what you make it" but I have lived this life long enough to know that I'm dependent on other people to satisfy my curiosity in a positive way. I may wake up curious to know if I will find a solution for a problem at work on a given day but that question is too boring to hold my interest for long (hence several years of waking up miserable). The real burning curiosity I have is for things like: "Will someone really make me laugh today?", "Will someone say or do something that makes me smile?", "Will someone ask me to do something new and interesting?". I need people. The moments of power that resonate in me require the interaction of two minds (see this post). These moments recharge my emotional reserves.

This next tournament might still be lacking in fun but I don't care. I just want to know if any given day will contain any truly interesting interactions with another mind and I have learned that truly interesting interactions are more likely if I do unusual things like competing even when I hate it.

Philosophical Ramblings: Thoughts on justice, redemption, and defeat

I usually save this kind of rambling until I'm drunk, but I'll make an exception. I'll try not to wander too deeply into metaphysics. Instead, you can expect many references to literature and movies.

Certain moments have power. By power I mean it is more likely in these moments that something fundamental will change. They are forks in fate, maybe not your fate, but someone's. Sometimes that's due to rarity - a solar eclipse or certain weather phenomenon. Sometimes its because of the emotions involved - right before a first kiss or a sporting competition. There are lots of these and some resonate more strongly with certain people. If you read this and think of your own moments, I would love to read about them on other blogs. Seriously. Mercedes Lackey does a great job describing the energy that builds up ahead of these moments in her Tales of the Five Hundred Kingdoms series.

Anyway, I am obsessed with one such type of moment that centers around the idea of justice.

When someone commits a crime, ideally, justice is waiting for them somewhere. The obsession for me is not when justice gets there or even how... My first concern is the mind of the criminal.

Do they realize that they are being punished for their crime?

Do they feel fear? If they fear, is it because they were caught or because they realized the magnitude of what they have done? A really good example of this is the fight between Eragon and Galbatorix at the end of the Inheritance series. Eragon breaks Galbatorix by forcing him to understand.

I spent too many moments of my childhood contemplating how to make people actually FEEL the weight of their crimes. This is unhealthy. Take that scene in Children of the Mind where Jane (in the body of Valentine) literally freaks out over Quera (the little snot - easily my least liked character of any novel anywhere).... it is way too much stress for human circuits. And I used to feel that way ALL THE TIME. Makes my blood boil just to think about that scene.

This is why my favorite books as a kid were by Roald Dahl - that man had an excellent sense of little kid justice. Very satisfying. Another good example is Professor Umbridge in the Harry Potter series. Even though you KNOW Harry made his own situation worse through his own stubbornness, you still wait patiently for Umbridge to get what's coming to her. And it does! Peace at last. I have called this justice-porn. If you think too deeply it has all kinds of problems, but on the surface it provides a few cheap moments of pleasure as Umbridge suffers.

This is bad, of course. There's a word for this: schadenfreude and it has little to do with justice. An eye for an eye is very unenlightened justice. I have moved on. I am now more interested with that one moment when you see how a person reacts. It doesn't matter anyway - justice can happen even if you have no remorse whatsoever. Professor Umbridge remained blissfully unaware of her own sinisterness. That bitch.

My point here is that there is power in that moment when a person is faced with something really horrible and pauses just for a moment to see if they can connect it back to some wrong they've committed. It matters if it's fear or if it is the beginning of redemption. In the Lion King when Simba pins Scar, he never feels remorse, he just tries to get out alive. Redemption is more interesting, more emotionally appealing in literature, and more important to my own sense of justice.

There's a second, related, set of moments. Replace the cut and dry villain of the earlier references with two people who are simply on different sides of an epic struggle. When two warriors on opposite sides of a holy war meet, what happens? If one side vastly overpowers the other how does that translate into a superior moral position?

What will someone do when faced with overwhelming force? That person can choose to fight until completely overwhelmed (in many stories they often die in the process) or they can surrender. Often fighting to the end is considered honorable. See The Last Samurai, or my favorite: Asuka's Last Stand at the end of Evangelion. To confront the inevitable takes grit. However, I believe there is just as much power in the alternative. To acknowledge defeat and submit to it is also interesting. Take this quote from a simple interpretation of the pagan legend of the Holly and Oak Kings.

"I yield. I am defeated. But I ask of you, my brother, that you spare me." The king was defeated with or without the speech, but acknowledging it gives the moment more power. It is difficult to deny a legitimate surrender. Fate forks.

The Thri-kreen race of Dungeons and Dragons is described as being intolerant of untested leaders. They will attempt to establish dominance, but if defeated they are loyal to the victor. If every battle was a fight to the death nothing would get done - surrender is an acknowledgement of standing, a variation of an oath of fealty. Combat -> Defeat -> Submission seems more interesting to me as a source of loyalty than all the ties of honor and fancy words that often serve in the sci-fi/fantasy genre but it requires a bit more honesty than I can usually credit to humanity. If someone recites an oath with malicious intent at least no one loses any eyes.

Are you still reading this or did you just skip to the end to see how long it would take me to stop rambling? Anyway, I don't care if you skipped all the crap in the middle, I just wrote it because it was on my mind all day.

Dealing with frustration

I had so many plans for this blog post and all of them are disappointing me. It's horribly frustrating, so before I go insane I am going to go with the flow and talk about frustration and how I deal with it.

The short answer is I don't. I bottle it up until I'm afraid that if I express even a small sliver of it I'll explode and then I go some place and hide. While hiding I cry and scream and do whatever works until the level of frustration drops below the point where I worry I'll hurt someone.

Adam tried to point out to me that, at least in BJJ, I really ought to try to convert this anger into some kind of energy to apply to my technique. My problem is that when I get frustrated in BJJ, say, for example, because I've escaped from mount just to find myself in side-control (and on and on), my first thought is not "well, I'll just escape from this too, and this time I'll get on top". That might be productive. No... my frustrated thoughts tend to wander towards breaking fingers, biting, and poking eyes. Civilized people just don't do this, ok, maybe in the mythical "street fight" but never to one's training partner. So now I'm in the awkward position of trying to fight against one person to get out of side-control and fighting against myself to get my thoughts back to proper jiujitsu.

On top of this, I really don't think people perceive my reactions to being frustrated correctly. People seem to tell me things like "It's ok, everyone starts out a little claustrophobic." or "You'll figure out how to position yourself so you know you won't get hurt." Maybe I'm wrong; maybe I am dealing with a secret fear of being crushed. I think what actually scares me is how desperate I am in that moment to inflict as much pain as possible. It probably doesn't matter - either way I need to deal with it and get past it. I just feel like the advice for dealing with claustrophobia is "just breathe and realize you're safe" and breathing, though helpful, does not diminish my desire to destroy fragile appendages. 

This is not just feelings either. When I get this frustrated and angry I will self-destruct rather than hurt another person. If my lip is bleeding, odds are its because I bit it until it did.

Don't think I limit my bizarre overreactions to BJJ. Other parts of my life are more frustrating than jiujitsu ever is. I miss my bird. I can't seem to get pregnant. I have motivation problems. Normal jobs bore me to tears. I take my frustrated rage and I hit the gym until I'm too tired to think about it anymore. 

As far as jiujitsu goes, I'm trying two things. First, I need a better handle on what frustrates me. The worst, I think, is being caught in one position too long. Second, I'm starting to deal with frustration by not letting it get to the sadistic stage. Say I am caught in one position too long. I'm trying to count roughly to 10 as I am trying to escape. If I haven't managed to escape and my training partner is, for whatever reason, just not moving, I'll just tap out anyway. I need to protect my mental stability as much as my neck, arms, whatever. 

If anyone has some better ideas, please, let me know.

The soulless intern

I read this article today: 32 Idiotic Mistakes Wall Street Interns Make Every Summer and it bothered me. No, it completely pissed me off and made me so glad I have a finance internship in the laid back city of Denver. The article isn't all of it, there's a forum that started the madness... It's epic. Anyway...

Here's why I'm so GRRR about this:

1. Elitism at its best: It's ridiculous to tell interns that the Rolex watch or [insert fancy suit brand here] makes them look spoiled while also telling them that they can't wear Hermes ties until they are full time employees.
2. Dehumanizing perspective: People are more than just their work. If Wall Street wants faceless drones to produce analyst reports, I hear machine learning is getting very sophisticated. I prefer to work with people and that starts with really seeing them.
3. Conformity rules: Lip service is paid to diversity but the real truth is that no one cares what color your skin is (or if you're male or female) as long as your suit is navy, your shirt is pressed, your shoes are leather, and you work way harder than your internship salary pays you to do. Also true (in my experience) is that the subset of people willing to put up with this shit with smiles on their faces are not a diverse subset of the population - not even of the ones interested in finance.

It's a high stress world and 99.9% of the people who succeed can put up with all this. I wouldn't last a week with my purple suit, cheap shoes and complete lack of regard for all things conformist.

But that's ok. I have my own plan.

My nightmare

I am so grateful to xkcd for showing me I am not the only one with this problem. For me, it's always the same class - Intro to Scientific Computing taught by Professor Ganesh. I took this class my last semester at Mines in order to finish my degree in Computer Science. This class was legendary. The first time Ganesh taught it, he failed all but TWO students. I took the class his third time teaching it. He was clearly learning to reign in his frustration with his students.

While working I would still have this dream and I would have to remind myself that I graduated already. Now I'm a grad student and I can't use that excuse anymore. So when I wake up after dreaming that Ganesh now teaches my Securities Valuation class (which my dream mind thinks I've ditched for 3 weeks straight), the panic does not just go away.

FML. I have this dream twice a week right now. *pulls hair out*