Archive for boston

違う場所、違うsnix

2010/06/29 at 10:50 · Filed under atlanta, boston, eww feelings, japan, life, tkd, travel

the past month has really shown me how much a change in location changes how i act. despite all the character building of the past year, i didn’t really act that differently when reintroduced to old, familiar locations.

for example, when i returned to stockbridge, i quickly readopted the unhealthy eating and lack of exercise that marks, well, most of the south, probably. i was almost certainly by far the smallest person i saw in two weeks of georgia, despite being on the large side of normal in japan, and one of the few who weren’t at least overweight, if not obese. (okay, so i did see a high school gymnast – a friend of a sister of a friend – who looked like a stick.) my house was dark and depressing, with the lights off and windows covered in the middle of the day. i tried exercising a couple of times, but the heat and humidity were oppressing, and i had no means to transport myself to any place where exercising wouldn’t be miserable. in the end, i gained at least a few pounds (1-2 kg) in two weeks.

to summarize being in boston: i still have real emotions. i still don’t know how to deal with them responsibly. seriously, i think everytime i return to boston, i experience a year’s worth of emotions in the space of a week. it’s kind of miserable, but keeps me sane for the rest of the year. (probably. hopefully.) also, i really miss doing tkd in boston. only working on sparring all the time is really starting to take its toll. i need an outlet for the side of me that wants to do technical, poomsae, pretty things. maybe this is the time to start shaolin kung fu. or any other martial art that doesn’t cost a lot of money upfront and doesn’t focus solely on beating other people up (i have sensei for that). but i really liked the way that kung fu felt during the one class i took.

in sendai, there are few emotional/social distractions, and i can focus on working and research and studying. what emotions i do have are fairly superficial and simple, and they’re usually pretty easily taken care of. at least, i know how to easily take care of them (whether or not i actually do so is a different matter). つまり、i’m the best snix i can be when i’m in sendai, so that’s why i’m still here. even if i’m secretly really boring.

ps, i really don’t like capital letters. i can deal with them when dispersed from other people, but it just looks weird to me when i use them myself.

Leave a Comment

impressions of summer tkd in boston thus far

2010/06/15 at 21:22 · Filed under boston, tkd

I haven’t done poomsae in ages. I probably haven’t done a front kick or side kick since the last time I was in Boston. As good as tkd in Sendai is with respect to sparring, I really miss the well-roundedness of the club. The fact that I think the club is well-rounded kind of proves my point. (at least they do poomsae)

Doing lifting legs is weird, though. Every time I do one, I feel all scrunched up and that I need to open my hips more and that I’m not moving forward enough.

I feel like my kicks aren’t hitting very hard. Maybe it’s because I’ve been wearing shorts to practice. (kicks in shorts look weird)

Doing tkd in English isn’t that weird, but saying things in tkd in English is a little weird. For example, my first instinct is still to count in Japanese.

Ty has a reverse turning kick. I guess this is to be expected, since she’s a black stripe now. Still kind of a shock to see my kouhai with decent advanced kicks.

Sauza’s kicks look really good. I guess this is to be expected, since he’s been doing poomsae training forever now. But his sparring kicks look nicer too, I think.

I was struck by how pretty Rene’s poomsae style was. She just looks so right doing poomsae.

People don’t freaking kiyap. 5 elementary school kids can kiyap louder than the 20-odd people at practice yesterday.

Leave a Comment

2010/06/14 at 23:59 · Filed under boston

Now that I’m in Boston, I really, really don’t want to leave. But at the same time, I feel this foreboding sensation, that I really need to get back to Japan and lab. (I actually do – I have an exam in <2 weeks.)

Leave a Comment

flashback! boston

2010/02/07 at 19:46 · Filed under boston, nerdy analogy time, tkd, travel

Being in Boston was rather fun, in a manic-depressive way. I don’t want to bore the internetz with my mundane emotional issues more than I have already, so let’s focus on the fun parts!

As expected, the best parts of being in Boston were getting to hang out with people who are normally very far away and doing tkd. I’m normally rather bad about communicating with people who are far away, for whatever reasons, so it was nice to engage in some low-work social interactions. Especially with people who are still in school (which is… most of them), it seems like people I know are always busy, so I don’t really want to bother them unless I have some ulterior motive to contact them. (that sounds so ominous… hahaha)

Of course, since about 90% of my friends in Boston are Chinese, I ate a ton of Chinese food while in Boston. It was amazing. I hadn’t realized how much I missed Chinese food until there was so much in so little time. There was other food in my life, of course, like Miracle of Science with Risu-san and Longhorn Steakhouse (I know, right? I didn’t realize they existed in the north) with the MIT-Tsukuba contingent and California rolls with Carrington. And Anna’s. And boba! (which, I know, is Chinese) It exists in Japan too, I realized recently (mostly in Tokyo), but it’s usually more expensive for maybe half the volume compared to Boston.

On a side note, it was good to see that the Carrington variable in class snix_exes has been set to the pre-dating value. I guess the awkward_ex state can only be populated by up to one person at a time. Maybe this means that the snix_relationship_karma value has been set to zero. /end nerdy analogy

As for tkd… wow. A month of not working out (due to holidays + dojang renovations) left me unprepared for a week of tkd in Boston. It was good, though. I left with a good idea of where I am right now and some thoughts of things to work on. (and some new, painful ab workouts. thanks, master harb. :) <- only half-sarcastic) Here they are, in bullet format:

  • my long off-the-line turning kick is too slow for real-life sparring situations (so i need to work on throwing multiple shorter kicks)
  • i don’t motion unless i’m about to kick (i’m better about this in japan, actually. haha. i just need to keep motioning in the corner of my mind at all times while sparring)
  • i back up too much – usually when i’m thinking about throwing counters (this ties back to the second point)

I also learned that 15 minute sparring sessions with a person of similar level is probably more immediately beneficial for me, personally, than lots of matches with a number of people. Not that the latter isn’t useful. In the former, there’s enough time to experiment and really hammer out one or two moves and get them real-life-sparring-ready. I kinda wish that, in class someday (here or Boston), someone would announce “pair up with someone of a similar level, and for the next 10 minutes, just experiment and have fun in your match with them.” Especially since I don’t have access to the people – well, person – I would do this with, given the chance.

One last thing I took from Boston. At the end of my last class in Boston, on Friday, Master Chuang was addressing the club, especially the new people, and he said something that really stuck with me. I don’t remember the exact wording, but it was something to the extent of: “if you stick with taekwondo, and you work hard, you will improve. this isn’t the case with everything else in your life, but it’s true here.” It reminded me of why I joined the club in the first place. At MIT, it’s so easy to get caught up in the psets and exams and feel like, even if you work hard, you could still fail the next exam. Especially when you’re majoring in something that doesn’t come easily to you, like physics and me (before I stopped taking physics classes). Even I could start tkd, with my slow reflexes and my inability to think on my feet, and become decent at it. I’m continually humbled by my peers, and my senpai, and elementary school kids, but I’ve come a long way since I started 3 years ago. Taekwondo has truly kept me sane these past years, and my life would be completely different – and probably the lesser – without it.

Next part: Tokyo is freaking awesome and so are anime musicals~

Leave a Comment

boston, part 1

2010/01/23 at 17:28 · Filed under boston, japan, tkd, travel

It started with a million hour trip across the world because I misestimated the amount of pain involved in a 12-hour flight with a multi-hour bus ride on each side. Actually, I missed the bus from Sendai to Tokyo, because I was waiting at the wrong part of the bus stop (apparently “Sendai station, east exit” is bigger than one might think). I ended up taking a more expensive bus run by JR that left around the same time, went to the same place, and was waiting at the part of the bus stop that I was. With the help of my “confused gaijin face,” the bus driver was convinced to try to call the bus company of the bus I was supposed to take, but to no avail. I’m not really sure what that was supposed to accomplish.

I had to chill out in Shinjuku broke for a while because the bus arrived before the station opened, and I’d spent all of my emergency money on another bus ticket (and the ATMs didn’t start working for my bank until 7:30 am). With the 300 yen I had left, I bought a train ticket to Tokyo, and secretly traveled to Funabashi, where I could transfer to the line that would take me to Narita Airport. I begged the attendant in the station to let me go find an ATM, since I couldn’t use the one in the station (region-specific banks = fail). I ran over to the closest convenience store, and bam! 7:30 am. I took out some money and made it to Narita Airport with no further trouble.

At the airport, I was patted down near the terminal at a security point made especially for flights to the US. It went by surprisingly quick and painlessly.

The plane ride was about as nice as could have been expected for a ~$500 ticket. ANA flights are pretty good, though, as far as travel to/from Japan goes. The plane I was on had four sections of varying quality, and of course, I was in the cheapest section, in the back, middle seat. At least I had a personal TV, and the bathrooms were big enough to stretch in when sitting became too painful. In addition, there was free Japanese beer – always a plus.

Once I arrived in New York, I BSed the subway to Penn Station, where I caught a bus to Boston that had internet that was incompatible with my laptop. :( Then, I was happily in Boston!

More later.

Leave a Comment

Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.