- Anyone do Tai Chi?
- I keep reading about the long-term benefits of practicing that particular art and am intrigued.
- I’m too old to do the actual punching-in-the-head martial arts anymore.
- Wait.
- Let’s go with too wise.
- For my birthday the year after the Teenager was born, the wife got me a month’s worth of lessons at a martial arts studio.
- We’d driven by it one day, and I’d seen “Kali” written on the window.
- Kali is Filipino stick-and-knife fighting.
- I’d gotten a lesson or two when I was a kid and the want never really left.
- The place also taught Jeet Kune Do, which is Bruce Lee’s martial art.
- Four years later, I was an apprentice instructor in both.
- I still remember going that first night.
- These two guys faced off on an open mat with rattan Kali sticks and they looked like the kung fu movies of my youth.
- My brain went, “Wait, I get to learn to do that?!”
- Ended up teaching out of my garage for a while, mostly with one of my friends and his teenage sons and their friends.
- One morning session, we were talking about some sort of stick technique.
- I had one of my sticks tucked under my arm.
- And then this wasp buzzed my head.
- I windmilled the stick, thrashing the wasp from the air, then stepped on it with my wrestling shoe, all without stopping talking.
- True story.
- Truer story: c’mon, man. Dumb luck to hit a wasp out of the air with a skinny stick.
- But you should’ve seen the looks on their faces.
- Lol.
- What’d Barney always say? Legendary.
- Still makes me laugh.
- Anyway.
- Tai Chi.
- Want to try it.
- I’ll have to do some internet looking.
- It’s supposed to do wonders for all the things you need when aging.
- That’s part of what I was thinking about when I woke up at 3:51 a.m.
- It’s not that I don’t occasionally wake up at night.
- But the brain doesn’t usually kick on.
- Like the brain temp got too high so the brain compressor jumped to action.
- And then it was basically Brain Rather doing the “things we need to worry about from now and forever” bit until sometime in the mid-5:00s.
- Oof.
- The Monday Dreads happen while you’re awake on Sundays, not during the small hours of actual Monday.
- Today should be fun, is what I’m saying.
- You cannot kung fu with Monday.
- It always wins.
- It’s like the guy she studied under in Kill Bill.
- (And now we’re listening to the Kill Bill soundtrack.)
- Question: better to musically link you to YouTube or Spotify?
- I have no idea what you guys use for music these days.
- My world was shaken by the Teenager ditching Amazon Music for Spotify.
- Get off my music lawn?
- Today, I have leftovers from India Palace for lunch.
- Lamb Vindaloo, medium spicy.
- I felt I was gambling when I ordered it medium.
- I’ve ordered medium there before and it melted my face off.
- Like that scene in Ted Lasso.
- But so good.
- I know, I should not be so excited about two-day leftovers.
- I am, though.
- Po-tay-toe.
- I hadn’t gotten it before.
- India Palace, if we’re not doing the lunch buffet, is one of those places where I’ve settled into a dish.
- The naan … different every time
- I have to admit, as much as I like that place, I was surly about it.
- We had plans.
- Holé Molé.
- But the Wife forgot, invited one of our other friends out for Indian food, and there you go.
- Two weeks of craving Holé Molé and wanting to see the new location and still nada.
- Imma just go by myself.
- I do not know why I’m writing about food.
- I’m not hungry.
- Maybe my brain thinks it’s lunchtime because it’s been fully operational since 3:51 a.m.
- Like a dummy I looked at my watch.
- Never do that.
- When faced with the Insomnia, do not engage with Time.
- Losing proposition.
- Time is probably better not engaged with anyway.
- Dwelling on it never bears good fruit.
- Tick, tock.
- Weekend Media Report:
- Uglies on Netflix: 90 percent bad.
- It’s like a dumb version of Divergent.
- Dumber?
- …
- I said it.
- You know what else needs said?
- Friday, on the way home from school, the Teenager cried.
- She’d heard that day about the stuff that’s going on with Neil Gaiman, and that was the crack that unleashed the dam.
- She believes the world is a terrible place.
- 16.
- And that’s what she thinks.
- That’s what we’re doing to the kids.
- Need to do better.
- As for Neil …
- Oof.
- I punted on that over the weekend, but plan to talk to her about it this week.
- What do we do?
- I have been a fan of his work since I was 17.
- Not him, per se.
- I typically do not follow the lives of celebrities of any kind.
- I do not really want to meet my heroes.
- (You can go look it up if you’re interested; I’m not lining it out.)
- I have pretty much his whole collection of books and tons of comics.
- A couple are autographed.
- What do I do with them?
- Stick them in a box and toss them in the attic?
- Every year since the List started, I’ve shared him reading The Raven.
- I bought his Masterclass on writing.
- I’m leaning toward the packing-it-all-away-thing.
- Canceling him, at least in my house.
- Can we separate the art from the artist when we know they’re not good people?
- Should we?
- There are days when I want to lock the Teenager in her room like Rapunzel.
- But I won’t be around to keep her safe forever.
- And that’s not fair to her anyway.
- Anyone who says life is easy is selling something.
- This is what 3:51 a.m. gets you.
- Maybe I should’ve given up, gotten up, and written.
- Would the List be different?
- We’ll never know.
- Now I’m sitting here feeling slightly guilty about bringing up a weighty topic on a Monday morning.
- Maybe I should not.
- Then again, maybe I should.
- This is academia, after all.
- I interviewed for the Director of Marketing gig for OSU’s College of Education the same week I took this job seven plus years ago.
- One of the questions they asked me in the panel interview had to do with a debate between a shady character from off-campus and a professor.
- A scheduled public event.
- Shady character was portrayed as a horrible person with horrible values and inciteful rhetoric.
- “Would you cancel the event?”
- I thought about it for a moment, then said, “Absolutely not.”
- Because College is supposed to be about ideas and the development of critical thinking, not just job prep.
- It’s to challenge students.
- To develop them.
- To get them ready to change the world.
- And that’s our job, right?
- The kids need to believe they can change the world.
- Frankly, maybe we all need to be reminded of that, too.
- We can make the world better.
- Even now.
- Happy Monday.
The Monday Dreads
Comments
2 responses to “The Monday Dreads”
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I laughed several times through this one. (Swatting the wasp with your sticks for one). And loved your answer about not canceling the event. Hate the stuff about Gaiman and hope it’s not true (wishful thinking)? I just don’t believe anything I read anymore. Have a good Monday!
LikeLike
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F
your
god
damn
bullet
points
I
want
to
superman
punch
you
in
the
junk….
but
I
still
like
reading
these
damn
your
face.LikeLike
skepticlysm 
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