need some pink soap

[powerlibrarian]

I had a great discussion with a former TaiChi person about what's missing from club. I have to say I agree with her when she says we're missing the battle scars and sweat. Everyone gets all caught up in "the paradigm" and in progressing slowly, and then they get all indignant when membership drops off like um...niagara falls. We blame people for

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[arcana_mundi]

I wanted to learn Tai Chi for relaxation and stress relief. I was so excited about it. I got completely disgusted by how much time was spent kicking and punching bags and pretending to throw each other around. All I wanted was to learn to make my body flow through those beautiful movements, and if I was LUCKY I learned one new move (by which I mean: move this leg, move this arm, the end) every two weeks. If I wanted to kick ass, I'd have joined a different club, one with lots of sweaty sparring and straight-up conflict-oriented kapowie. I am very good at kicking ass. I have a fucking black belt in TKD, earned from the actual Grandmaster Chae Sun Yi, not some redneck asshat who thinks "dojo" is what you call a place where you learn TKD. I have years of experience in other asskicking arts. I wanted something meditative, soft, centering, and good.

I sign up for tai chi and spend time kicking bags? Getting my arms all fucking bruised up by some asshole during the "throwing" rehearsal? Listening to people brag on how bloody their knuckles got this one time? WTF?

At the end, all the movements I knew took exactly ten seconds - moving SLOW - to do. That's bullshit. I joined club because as a grad student I can no longer enroll in HPER classes. Club was going to be the only way I could learn tai chi at the university, but it rapidly became insanely clear that I wasn't actually going to learn the form. It was always going to be just out of reach. Always tomorrow and never, ever today. And once my crush on that hot tall stoner guy wore off, there wasn't much reason to go anymore.

You have to have something to perfect. I don't mind perfecting slowly, but god - give me something to practice. I spent a month coming to every single meeting and only got up to the whip thing? Crazy. Just crazy. I'm still dying to learn tai chi, but it's just going to have to wait until I have the money to take it at the YMCA (about $100) or someone offers it in one of the martial arts schools.

Yeah, I'm still a little bummed out. That was supposed to be part of my VR rehab in recovery from vestibular neuritis. I think it would have helped a lot. The rest of that stuff might have value for people who already know the form, but for me it really sucked.

[powerlibrarian]

I think we're sort of talking about the same thing though...
because the kid-gloves thing applies to teaching people the form at a rate that is comfortable and rewarding, not painstakingly, insultingly slow. and it's that insulting slowness that seeps into everything we do, always holding back the information because it might not make sense to someone who hasn't been there for a year...
So I guess I should be more clear in venting my frustrations - because what I don't want is TKD...I've got my black belt too, and not from some redneck asshat either. What I want is to explore the depth of Taichi as an ass-kicking martial art, and it's frustrating to me that i spend a lot of my time in club going over the same five drills forever and ever and ever, never actually learning anything.
The other thing that frustrates me about club is the politicking... trying to be the sort of club that fits the RecSports model, trying to make sure that instructor R doesn't insult instructor B and vice-versa, and trying to keep it all concealed from people who don't already know.
anyway, I'm glad you responded with all this. I had no idea. I wish I could say that telling me makes a difference but I can't make headway either except to practice on my own. I do think this is a conversation worth having though...

[arcana_mundi]

I can understand wanting to move beyond the form into the fight, I really can. But taking people who don't even know the form yet there seems... ugh. Confusing and pointless. And there never really seemed to be an instructor, just various people who would decide what was happening next. Madeleine was the only one I found particularly teacherly. I can't remember who else was a teacher, if you know what I mean. I remember people helping me, but that was most often you, and I think you told me you weren't an instructor.

I remember watching the people who already knew the form doing it together and I was so envious. I was so sick of doing the introduction over and over and over and over and over and over again.

I don't understand how any of you learned the form or ever got far enough to do any testing considering how slow it went. Has something changed in tai chi club? Did it used to have more content? Are there going to be more tai chi people if nobody new ever gets to learn the form? I mean, this is how the Shakers got wiped out. They didn't produce more Shakers. I guess more will come out of the tai chi class.

What makes me mad is that I very, very specifically asked Brent et. al on the first day: can I learn the form in club, or is this where people practice what they learned in class. And they specifically told me I'd learn the form. And I paid my money and got my shoes and came. But I don't think I was ever going to learn the form. I think that wasn't totally true.

If you want to spar, you ought to ask that chick Brenda. She always looked like she was about to totally blow her stack and start in pummelling anybody who came near her. Whole lotta anger in that girl.

[powerlibrarian]

Yeah, the mode of instruction really HAS changed... and everything about club has changed in the past two years. Part of it has to do with Charles getting more entrenched in Kinesiology (hence the overload of talking about practicing and not actually practicing). But when I started, we were having club two nights a week. There would be three or four advanced students there and sometimes two or three instructors. So they would divide and conquer - with a group doing form, a group doing applications (the punch/block drills) and a group doing push hands or sword form or somehting. It was cool.
Then some people left and we had a drop in membership and some of the instructors started having a bit of the ol' black-belt-itis and we tried doing damage control, thinking that if we had the whole group who showed up follow a curriculum of 30 minutes of form practice (divided by beginner/intermediate/advanced) and then applications and push-hands, that we'd form a more cohesive group. But then it just turned into a whole lot of wet-blanketness....totally killed what seemed to be dying.

And yes... the testing program is totally defunct. I did ONE test. It was after three months of doing a few form applications and my testing partner and I didn't feel very well prepared... and we did so poorly that we got filleted. None of the instructors backed us up, even though we were unsure about the stuff because we'd get conflicting instruction... it was bad. I haven't tested since.
So believe me, I feel your frustration. Also, and Brenna has expressed this opinion as well (we've both been club presidents) that trying to take some initiative in club and make a difference in what we actually DO is impossible. There's no way to overcome the inertia. Or the ego.
Yes...we're like the shakers at this point.
And though this won't make you any less mad...you would have eventually learned the form. It would have taken a year to get through it all, but eventually.
I'm actually going to get together with Kathryn on some weeknights to do some push-hands (about as throw-down as we'll get) at Bryan Park. We're going to go through the form too as a warmup...and since she doesn't know all of it I might be informally cast in the role of instructor (don't tell). If you want to join in for that, let me know.

[arcana_mundi]

I appreciate the offer, but learning push-hands is really not what I'm after - learning the form sounded like a tall glass of cold water on a hot day, but since nobody wants to actually teach it (I mean, come on, a month and a half to learn four maybe five moves? It would have taken five years, maybe more, to learn it at that rate, not one - and I wouldn't have been awesome for taking so long to get to it. I would have just been forced to ride the short bus. Y'all aren't secret Chinese masters or something to be telling people that they have to watch dewdrops form for a year to learn kungfu or some shit like that. Nobody ever corrected my execution of those four damn moves. You think I was doing them perfectly? Because I'm betting not. Which means: take a long goddamn time, don't get any better at anything. Yay for radical misapplications of ancient Chinese secret.

I'm kind of done with the whole thing until I can take classes on the form from the Y, or maybe from the woman who teaches it out at Karst Park. She sounds cool.

You're teh besto and I'm just crazy about you personally, don't get me wrong. But tai chi club? Ha.

[powerlibrarian]

well, you're really awesome too. which is what sort of drives me crazy about the whole damn situation with club.
I hate to tell you... Madeleine is the one who teaches at the Y, though I think they go faster. Also, I plan on doing form a few times before doing push-hands in the park. So you can meet us for that part if you want. (I'm not being pushy, just letting you know)And since i'm not an instructor, anyone who shows up is just like, practicing with me, so it would be one of those try-and-keep-up, answer-if-I-know sort of deals.

And yeah, watching dewdrops form..is like totally dumb.