Saturday, October 29, 2005

Giving Blood

I give blood every couple of months. Normally I take a
book with me, as watching the bag fill up gets old after a
few seconds. This time I brought Parting the Waters. It's
kind of obnoxiously large, advertising to the world "Look at
me! Look how smart I am for reading such an obnoxiously large book!"
But, nevertheless, I brought it. The young woman who was
stabbing me with the needle looked at me like I was crazy.
"You're reading that?" I just nodded and said it's a really
interesting history of the Civil Rights Movement. Her eyes
got bright, and she related a fascinating story of how she
and her high school history teacher went on an organized
"Civil Rights Tour" all throughout the South. She was in
King's home and churches, his hotel in Memphis where he was
assassinated. She met Rosa Parks (!) and was in Ebenezer
church when MLK's wife was in the basement in a meeting (but
they didn't get to meet.) She told of the memorials she'd
seen along the way, really beautiful stuff. I'd like to
go on the tour this summer with my mom. She doesn't know
about it yet though, and she doesn't read my blog, so I'll
have to tell her eventually.

My dad has a bunch of great
stories from the era. One about a public swimming pool in
Florida that was forced to be segregated. The local
government chose to fill in the pool with dirt rather than
to allow blacks to swim in it. This world is crazy... but
hey, if they're sending high school girls from Pittsburgh on
Civil Rights tours, maybe we're going somewhere.

Unfortunately, I won't be able to give blood for an entire
year after being in India this winter. Malaria. The woman
explained the disease this way, "Imagine a really bad
flu... times 10. This is a mild case." Yikes!

Rosa Parks passed away this week.

Sunday, October 23, 2005

MLK

This week's service at church
was about the Civil Rights Movement. A number of Dr. King's
speeches were read aloud. I realized I'd never heard many
of them read aloud before. What an amazing gift he gave us
all. It was a good impetus to start Parting the Waters
which Robbie recommended while we were surfing through the
street book vendors on 31st Ave in Astoria.
Here is a comprehensive website with the
text and sound clips of many of the speeches.

I was thinking during the service how he was only a four years
younger than my father. My dad was born in 1925, King in 1929.
I wondered at the unbelievably sad state of our country in 1960,
not 50 years ago. (I'm aware there is still much to feel sorrow for...)
What an awesome example of the potential impact on the world
of a single person. I was speechless the entire time.

I also realized that I've never had a close black friend.
For goodness sake, I lived in Harlem for an entire year.
I suppose that even I live a life of de facto segregation.
I can't name a single black person in the cs department at
cmu. I've never had a black professor, or teacher of any
kind. What gives? How is it that I can make it 29 years
without a single black friend or mentor? We (I) have far
to travel.




At the "I Have a Dream" speech.




The hotel where he was assissinated.


Saturday, October 15, 2005

Uniontown Grappling Tournament

I competed in the Uniontown Grappling Tournament today.
It was a fun tournament. I decided to wear a gi for the
first match and got totally destroyed in about 20 seconds.
Lost to a back mount choke. The guy was a really quick
wrestler. I was standing one second and he was on my back
on the ground in the next. I did learn my lesson, however.
I won my next match and then decided the gi should come off.
I put another wrestler guy in the guard right away and won
with a triangle choke. Next was a wrestler who beat Randy
earlier in the day. It felt very good making him tap with
an arm bar. I got Zander with a flying arm bar, and then
put up a good fight against the best grappler there, but lost
to an arm-bar after about 3 minutes.

I learned quick to get wrestlers in the guard as fast as
possible. They're just too good at takedowns and
guillotine's. So it was a good learning day. Good to get
soundly beaten once in awhile.

I believe that today is my last jiu jitsu tournament.
It might be my last jiu jitsu period. I've watched so many
people get hurt recently. Our teacher Andrew got his ankle
popped in a stupid ankle lock on Thursday. Randy threw a
guy on his head twice in the same match this afternoon and
he was icing his neck afterwards. Injury stories from the
guys I met today abounded. The worst one being a torn
groin muscle. (ug...)

Moreover, I've hurt two people lately and it feels like
shit. There's this cool guy in the CMU club named Jimmy who
I outweigh by 30 lbs, and I hurt his elbow during our club
tournament. In Judo class last night I was grappling with
this 18 year old kid and, while trying to break his grip,
re-hurt his opposite shoulder which was damaged a few years
ago in a bad fall during a tournament. These two were
particularly disturbing to me for many reasons. One, both
of these people were not as strong or experienced as me.
Two, I was fighting like my life depended on it. I was in
literally no danger, but still some animal nature in me made
me go all out. This is one of the things I've always loved
about Brazilian jiu jitsu, the fact that you can train at
your hardest and feel relatively safe. But I'm only now
learning to tamper that killer instinct with awareness of my
opponent's abilities, strengths and weaknesses. My ego is
so bent on winning, that I easily forget that I can go easy
with these people. At any rate, I'm personally responsible
for causing two really nice people considerable pain.

Granted, I could learn from these experiences, and work
slower and with more awareness with my partners. But I
think this reflection has led me to abandon grappling.
For I have another physical outlet, yoga, that truly heals
people.

My friend Fumei was visiting CMU for a job talk for a couple
days, so she stayed with me. We went running one morning in
Frick Park, and we both complained of having sore knees
afterwards. (Lots of hills...) I did some yoga stuff
with her, (roll behind the knees, forward bend standing on
the blanket rolled up in a sticky mat) and she felt better.
She wondered aloud why more runners don't know about these
stretches. Iyengar yoga is just not well enough known.
It felt so good to help her feel better. Far better than
all the egoic satisfaction I get from winning judo matches.

I thought to myself today, while one of the doctors
at the tournament was working with a grappler that had hurt
pulled a back muscle, how easy it is to hurt people, and how
much knowledge, persistence and care is required to heal
someone. For example, my yoga teacher Sara works with
Parkinson patients. She spends hours experimenting with
ways to get into the person's body and mind, in order to
make their lives easier, less painful, and happier.
It takes about a second to break someone's bone.

Despite all the somewhat negative picture I've painted, I
love grappling. I enjoy doing yoga much less. But there is
a path there which is admirable and noble, and takes all
one's concentration and energy. I don't see such a path
with martial arts. It's more of a selfish pleasure.

I've been thinking about this quote from Albert Schweitzer a
lot lately:

"I don't know what your destiny will be, but one thing I
know: the only ones among you who will be really happy are
those who will have sought and found how to serve."

I asked my teammates on the drive home why they grapple.
Jimmy lost 45 pounds doing it. Awesome, no?
Randy just loves fighting. Zander cited the zone feeling
you get when everything is working in a match.

I like it because it's unbelievably sophisticated and
complex. Beautiful, in fact. It can be like an art form.
I love working out at my limit, and the feeling of
exhaustion after a workout. I enjoy the comraderie, and the
learning. But I ask myself, "to what end?".
Of course, there doesn't have to be an end. But my free
time is so short at present, and I'm getting older so
quickly, that it is no longer enough for me to just like and
appreciate something. It's hard to explain, but that's how
I feel. I feel like I must start making sacrifices to be
the kind of person I want to be. I think I've found out
how to serve.

Tuesday, October 11, 2005

Dean Lerner

There was a great workshop at Yoga on Centre
this weekend. A big Iyengar teacher named Dean Lerner
from State College, PA. We had two pranayama classes, and 4
asana classes, for a total of 11 yoga-hours. The classes
were great, despite my congenital inflexibility. Like
Sara predicted, my body felt great (if tired) after the
weekend.

He told the following story about how he got into Iyengar
yoga. He became very ill traveling in India. While
recovering, he bought Iyengar's
Light on Yoga
because it had poses for kidney
problems. He returned to his home in Arkansas, where he
proceeded to practice from the book. After some discomfort
and confusion, he decided to write to Iyengar himself. The
letter went something like this:

"Dear Mr. Iyengar,
I bought your book, and am enjoying learning yoga. I have
a few questions however. I cannot do the poses like you do.
Some of them are uncomfortable..."
(pause for laughter)
He proceeded to ask specific questions about the poses.

He received a letter 3 weeks later from India. Its
contents:

"Dear Mr. Lerner,
I am not concerned with your comfort. I am concerned
with the precision with which you execute the poses..."
He proceeded to answer some of the questions and point him
to some of his students in the US.

I love that! "I'm not concerned with your comfort..."
If you do Iyengar yoga, this is, uh, evident.

If you're ever in State College, check him out!


Jonathan Safron Foer

I heard two great authors speak in Pittsburgh in the last
month. Salmon Rushdie came a few weeks ago, and I saw
Jonathan Safron Foer last night. I read his beautiful book
Everything is Illuminated while I was in Finland at the
beginning of my trip this summer. I heard him speak once
before, in a Barnes and Noble on the Upper West Side. This
was a much different venue. There, there were at most 30
people. There were hundreds in the audience last night.

Like Salmon Rushdie, he seems like a guy you'd love to
have as a friend. He's funny, charming, and candid.
He handles questions thoughtfully and with valuable insight, and is humorously
frank in his story telling. He mostly talked about writing
last night. One thing he mentioned on was the lack of
importance placed on the imagination in society. How people
trust or value Dan Rather more highly than someone like
Phillip Roth. This was especially appropriate considering
this is "banned book month" in the public library system
here.

He also told how his first book came to be. He was a
philosophy major at Princeton, where he wrote much of the
book. Upon graduation he held a series of odd jobs, one
including Tony the Tiger at a cancer walk. He spent a year
and a half as a secretary and even wrote an article about
prostate health for a men's magazine. A friend convinced
him to find an agent, so he went to Barnes and Noble, picked
up books that he liked, and saw who the authors thanked.
"To Sybil, the world's best agent", etc. Out of 8 letters,
only one agent took him on. The first five publishers
rejected his book. They wrote what he dubbed "what I know
now as a typical literary rejection".

"Dear Jonathan, you have undoubtedly written a work of
enduring genius. However... no thank you..."

He spoke about how it was difficult for him to write, and
that he hated doing it. (I think he was half joking.)
One audience member asked the question, "You mentioned that
you write about things that trouble you. After you write
about them, do they stop bothering you?"

After some thought, he answered that writing helped him to
become more close or intimate with whatever that pain or
sorrow happened to be. In this way he developed his own
relationship with it, and it allowed him to go on. Not that
he wasn't bothered anymore, but that he had come to some new
or different understanding of it.

One of the things he loved about writing was that you
could really let loose. He mentioned that he'd never left a
conversation satisfied. There was always something he meant
to say, or wished he hadn't said, or said it right, but the
person clearly didn't register the same sentiment. With
writing, he could change history, and not have to regret
using the wrong words. This was an interesting comment. He
considered reading his own work aloud strange for the same
reason. One important thing about writing is that it can
force you to slow down, or speed up, or read a passage a
second time. In an aural experience, those things are all
lost. Thus, literature will never be as popular as music or
movies, for you can have a passive movie or music
experience, but not so with books. He also used the image
of a tree being shown in a film, compared to on paper. In a
film, everyone is seeing the same tree. When read, the word
"tree" conjures different images in everyone. We are all
complicit in the creation of a work of literature.

After suppressing my bubbling jealousy (he's almost exactly
my age) I glanced at the sky, saying thank you that JSF
became a writer, and can share his unique insight with me,
with us all. Indeed, a work of enduring genius...





Sunday, October 09, 2005

Construction Junction

There's a wonderful store in Pittsburgh called
Construction Junction. It's a nonprofit building supply store
that gets its materials from destruction sites and
landfills. They keep tons of "waste" out of landfills and
make things with it. Or rather, you make things with
it. Last night there was even an art show featuring art made with these recycled materials. Some of it was really
good. (To my eternal regret, I forgot my camera.) One
that made me laugh was some metal electrical device that,
when looked at in the right way, looked just like an African
mask. They added a porcelain body and had a caption coming
from its mouth. Really funny. There was also a creative
device made with old bike materials. Roughly, you pull a
bike brake lever, some marbles come flying out of a can onto
a bike wheel equipped with little grooves to catch the
marbles. This made the wheel spin and it popped a hub onto
a pipe which rolled down etc. etc. etc. until finally
a bike light got switched on. The kids were in awe!
Speaking of children, there was also a craft workshop making
collages with glue and recycled small ceramic tile. They
made all sorts of pictures. I just think this kind of
effort is so beautiful and necessary. Thank you
Construction Junction and Salvo Arts!

In lieu of pictures of the event, here is some art from the
Walker in Minneapolis where I
had a long layover last week.