Há uma linha muito tênue entre 'hobby' e 'doença mental'. - Luis Fernando Verissimo
This one will inevitably be mostly about capoeira. What can you do.
I’ve been struggling to keep my pants up since I started playing in February so it’s about time I got a belt. Tomorrow! Tomorrow I cross off “earn the first belt” from my list of life goals and add “earn the second belt.” It’s been a crazy ride.
We finally met our cult leader, I mean, uh, mestre on Wednesday for our belt test. All twenty three of us who tested passed. I was a little intimidated at first but he’s a cool guy. Didn’t get a chance to talk to him Wednesday but yesterday Roberto got lost on the way home from the airport for the second time in two days (Mestre Railson, half-joking: He doesn’t know his way around at all. We kept getting lost. You know how he is. He doesn’t remember things. He’ll park his car somewhere and forget where he put it. Maybe he needs to go to a psychologist, a memory specialist.), and Emma and I were sent to pick Railson up from Roberto’s apartment, and we talked a bit. Funny guy. For someone who spends seven months out of twelve traveling throughout seventeen countries doing batizados and workshops, he is impressively monolingual. His English consists of a few “vedi gudgi”s and “eychi” (eight) thrown into otherwise Portuguese phrases. Oh, Portuguese. Love it.
Mestre Railson is great and Professor Chin is at least as awesome as I remembered but Instructor Salê is my new favorite. I was genuinely afraid of him the first time I met him and had a workshop with him in April for the school’s opening, and I remembered thinking I was glad my teacher was Roberto and not him. He’s still just as no-nonsense and discipline-y as I remembered him (which after Roberto is a breath of fresh air), but he’s a great teacher and capoeiristas and guy (do you like my ability to use words to express myself at 4 in the morning?). Railson inadvertently took over Salê’s class yesterday so I don’t think he will get to give a workshop while he’s here. Railson is, of course, the mestre, 5 belts higher than Salê, and it was a lovely class, but still, such a waste of great capoeiristas! At any rate, add San Francisco to the list of places I wouldn’t be against living in should a reason to do so arise.
Other than capoeira, I’ve just basically been skating by. I’m having serious doubts about my masters program, my teaching abilities, and my career plans, but I suppose as long as I have capoeira and as long as I’m saving money it’s fine for another seven months. After kicking and screaming about spending any unnecessary time in Maryland on previous vacations, teaching the winter session was my first choice of how to spend January (and I got it!), primarily for two not very good reasons: 1) the excuse to stay in MD means I don’t miss four weeks of capoeira and 2) money, which I can use to pay for either room, board, and other expenses for an entire year of volunteering, eating avocados and mangos and passion fruit and playing capoeira in Brazil or for the plane ticket to get there...
Anyway, sleep. Chin's class today went from 7.30 to 10.45 of crazy hard work and the batizado is going to at least four hours followed by some form of celebration...
PS If you want to see Roberto teach you capoeira, check out his monkey see monkey do videos Ha.
I’ve been struggling to keep my pants up since I started playing in February so it’s about time I got a belt. Tomorrow! Tomorrow I cross off “earn the first belt” from my list of life goals and add “earn the second belt.” It’s been a crazy ride.
We finally met our cult leader, I mean, uh, mestre on Wednesday for our belt test. All twenty three of us who tested passed. I was a little intimidated at first but he’s a cool guy. Didn’t get a chance to talk to him Wednesday but yesterday Roberto got lost on the way home from the airport for the second time in two days (Mestre Railson, half-joking: He doesn’t know his way around at all. We kept getting lost. You know how he is. He doesn’t remember things. He’ll park his car somewhere and forget where he put it. Maybe he needs to go to a psychologist, a memory specialist.), and Emma and I were sent to pick Railson up from Roberto’s apartment, and we talked a bit. Funny guy. For someone who spends seven months out of twelve traveling throughout seventeen countries doing batizados and workshops, he is impressively monolingual. His English consists of a few “vedi gudgi”s and “eychi” (eight) thrown into otherwise Portuguese phrases. Oh, Portuguese. Love it.
Mestre Railson is great and Professor Chin is at least as awesome as I remembered but Instructor Salê is my new favorite. I was genuinely afraid of him the first time I met him and had a workshop with him in April for the school’s opening, and I remembered thinking I was glad my teacher was Roberto and not him. He’s still just as no-nonsense and discipline-y as I remembered him (which after Roberto is a breath of fresh air), but he’s a great teacher and capoeiristas and guy (do you like my ability to use words to express myself at 4 in the morning?). Railson inadvertently took over Salê’s class yesterday so I don’t think he will get to give a workshop while he’s here. Railson is, of course, the mestre, 5 belts higher than Salê, and it was a lovely class, but still, such a waste of great capoeiristas! At any rate, add San Francisco to the list of places I wouldn’t be against living in should a reason to do so arise.
Other than capoeira, I’ve just basically been skating by. I’m having serious doubts about my masters program, my teaching abilities, and my career plans, but I suppose as long as I have capoeira and as long as I’m saving money it’s fine for another seven months. After kicking and screaming about spending any unnecessary time in Maryland on previous vacations, teaching the winter session was my first choice of how to spend January (and I got it!), primarily for two not very good reasons: 1) the excuse to stay in MD means I don’t miss four weeks of capoeira and 2) money, which I can use to pay for either room, board, and other expenses for an entire year of volunteering, eating avocados and mangos and passion fruit and playing capoeira in Brazil or for the plane ticket to get there...
Anyway, sleep. Chin's class today went from 7.30 to 10.45 of crazy hard work and the batizado is going to at least four hours followed by some form of celebration...
PS If you want to see Roberto teach you capoeira, check out his monkey see monkey do videos Ha.