this will be a quicke. First of all sorry for not respond­ing to e-mails in a remotely timely fash­ion. I’m really behind. This has gone clear beyond intense to some­thing entirely new. Midterms are coming soon.

I will be vis­it­ing Rochester next week­end. I look for­ward to pos­si­bly seeing folks.

I also am finally get­ting a fixed net con­nec­tion in my apart­ment. This will make every­thing much easier. Right now I’m pretty blitzed while on campus and just have run myself out of time to do per­sonal mailings.

I really, really miss everyone.

absolute beginners

Most friends, and people who’ve read this blog for a while, know that for years I’ve been a stu­dent of the Mar­tial Arts. I started while attend­ing RIT and have con­tin­ued to this day, some twelve years later. So it shouldn’t come as a sur­prise that I would con­tinue this study in Chicago.

I’ve found a few places to prac­tice. In both cases, I’m start­ing in arts that I’ve never stud­ied before. That’s some­thing that I have not done in a while. That isn’t to sug­gest that I’ve tried every­thing under the sun. Rather its just that I’ve been focus­ing my study on a single art, with a bunch of famil­iar people, for quite a while. It’s been a while since I’ve been a raw beginner.

Truth is I’m loving it. This week I began lessons in Judo (to sup­ple­ment my throw­ing game) and Lui Ho Bi Fa (Water boxing). Between both classes I learned a total of four tech­niques in four hours. Years ago I would have hated that. I’d want to advance as quickly as pos­si­ble. Now I’m old enough to under­stand what it takes to learn some­thing well and slow and steady is fine with me. In the case of the water boxing, I lit­er­ally spent more than a hour learn­ing how to take a single step.

And I’m still not sure if I have that step down.

Chicago so far has been a hum­bling expe­ri­ence in this respect. From school to Mar­tial Arts, I’m a begin­ner. And that’s one adjust­ment that seems to be going pretty smoothly.

how things change

My class for the day is can­celled. At RIT this would usu­ally be cause for ela­tion. Now I’m really wor­ried. Chicago, like RIT (the Rochester Insti­tute of Tech­nol­ogy), is a quar­ter system school. I only have ten weeks of courses. Enthnog­ra­phy, the course in ques­tion, only meets once a week. So if it isn’t resched­uled, I miss one tenth of my ethno­graphic edu­ca­tion. As the title sug­gests, things change.

This week­end was a strange mix of good and bad. On Sunday a shelf col­lapsed in my apart­ment, caus­ing a huge mess and a lot of dis­trac­tion. On Monday, while clos­ing a stuck window, I impaled my right palm on a obelisk type knick knack that on the sill. But on the pos­i­tive side, I recon­nected via phone with some old friends, I met some new friends at a mar­tial arts event, and caught Super­size me, which I enjoyed quite a bit.

Oh and I tried Giorgdano’s Deep Dish Pizza. I can’t remem­ber if Tina like them or Gino’s pizza. Oh and I have seen Jamba Juices, but none have been in Hyde Park so I have yet to buy one.

My gosh things have gone fast. I’m at the end of my first week of school and the end of my second full week in Chicago.

This is intense. The class whose read­ing list I posted, Lan­guage and Cul­ture, is the most dif­fi­cult class I have ever taken. Not only does it require learn­ing lin­guis­tics, but also the meta lan­guage of lin­guis­tics in real time. Meta lan­guage is lan­guage cre­ated to describe and cat­e­go­rize lan­guage. Its like attend­ing a class that is taught in code or another lan­guage that sounds strangely like Eng­lish but at the same time is not Eng­lish. All of this makes note taking dif­fi­cult as I have yet to master the skill of writ­ing while attempt­ing to decode the lan­guage of the course.

Oy. I promise I’ll keep the meta and modal­i­ties to a min­i­mum while I work on inter­nal­iz­ing the lexicon.