Learning what you already know

I swear there's nothing better than a post-class shower.

I really needed class tonight. My brain's been all wonky at work since I picked up two new hospitals to clean up and class is a good reset button for me. The space between my twice weekly classes is starting to seem really long. It's tempting for me to add Fridays on right now, but I'm going to give it another month or so. Maybe I'm gun shy or lack confidence, but I can't imagine doing two days back to back.

I feel pretty good about my sparring tonight. I only went two rounds, but I feel like I got some really useful feedback. My second round was with one of the blue belts and he pointed out a lot of what I was doing wrong...sadly I already knew not to do what I was doing, but I've picked up some bad habits over the last few weeks.

1) I was pushing. I think I developed this from rolling with another white belt that likes to crush my throat and face. I started focusing on trying to prevent that above all else by pushing her head off me.

2) I was grabbing the collar when I was mounted. I started doing this because well...I just learned collar chokes and figured I'd start grabbing collars willie-nillie just to see what happened. What happened was armbars.

I got a new drill added to my warm-up! Instead of kimura, I'm now doing shoulder locks/omoplata. I've gotten used to doing them from a failed collar choke, but I think I'll be able to pick up the drill since the concept of moving an opponent's head toward the ground is essentially the same, I'm just not pulling him toward me since I'm not trying to execute a choke.

The masochist/linguist in me is deeply tempted to learn all the moves in English, Portuguese and Japanese. No, there would be no real point in doing this, I just uh...like the idea. Hearing Portuguese spoken every day in class makes it REALLY hard for me not to pick up yet another set of Pimsleur CDs and go to town. I like the sound. It has the bounciness of some Romance languages, but there's a pleasant edge that hits my ears much in the same way Russian does. The fact that I just got confirmation (as I was changing for class) that I finished my business Spanish certificate makes it even harder. But no...I'm going to focus. I need to be solidly conversational in Mandarin before I take on any other languages.

...but then...I could understand even more instruction in class...hmm...