Of Play and Promotion

PastorGrappler just got his blue belt!! I stopped by the gym to work some spider guard and a half guard pass that's been giving me trouble. Afterward, I checked my phone and saw a picture of his brand new blue belt.

Seeing friends promoted is such a great experience. I see see it on Facebook and blogs all the time, and sometimes I take it for granted, but tonight was a great reminder of how cool promotions really are. I don't know if there are many other situations where adults get to be so genuinely and regularly happy for, and proud of, other adults. I remember when BrownBeltInstructor went to black and how ecstatic I was...I was honestly surprised.

I've said it before, but training is also one of the few places where grownups get to just play with each other. Sure, rolls can be competitive, but they can also be light, friendly, polite, genuine, fun conversations. The world needs more BJJ.

Jiu Jitsu taught me how to be a sports fan again.

It taught me how to trust sports. 

When I was around 11, I fell in love with the New York Knicks. This went beyond my burning pre-teen crush on John Starks. Somehow, the shooting, passing and ball-handling drills my father had me doing as a child had sunk in at some level. My blood ran strong with basketball, and while I never played, I appreciated it. My family, immediate and extended, didn't just watch basketball and cheer along, they discussed, analyzed and diagnosed. They debated technique, coaching strategies and player behavior. My father's and uncles' decades of experience poured into frequent protests over how the players of that day were losing their fundamentals. How athleticism was being pushed over technique. How Julius Erving's grace would never be matched.

When the Knicks lost to Chicago in the 1993 conference finals, my chest burned with anger. Michael Jordan was the bane of my existence. When they lost to Chicago again three years later in the conference semifinals...a tear rolled down my cheek and I realized I might have been too emotionally invested. I backed off sports, attending only one football game in college out of curiosity of Dante Culpepper, and one basketball game to watch my school trounce my parents' alma matter. I later risked my heart again with hockey, attending a couple of live Panther games...and then. Lockout. I gave up almost completely, only mustering the strength to watch the occasional Olympic competition.

Then came BJJ. I found myself last year, glued to the first Metamoris, focused and unmoving for the better part of three hours. The posters, the online and in-gym discussion of Ryron and Galvao, the VIDEOS...it all had me hyped like I hadn't been in years.

...and here I sit again, drooling over Metamoris 2, the Japanophile in my giddy at the very sound of Aoki's captivating voice. I'm trying so hard not to watch this again, but the awesomeness, man...the awesomeness.

My continually complex relationship with Joe Rogan

One of the things I've come to love most about training BJJ is the conversations you end up having.

I was talking with a brown belt that left my school and moved to Germany before I even set foot in the gym. Through the power of jiu jitsu weirdness and Facebook (aided by a couple of visitation rolls), we've still managed to connect as teammates and discuss all sorts of forbidden topics like religion, race, economics, politics...you know, fight starting stuff. He brought up Rogan because we were discussing people and movements being scared to take off the "training wheels" of their ideologies, and how common that is in conservative movements of various kinds. He didn't want to take credit for the "training wheels" phrase, and directed me to this compilation of some of Rogan's thoughts on religions, what's wrong with the world, etc.

Rogan poses such a conundrum for me. I agree with a lot of what he says, even to the point of occasionally admiring his thought process...but deep down, I think he's got a heavy axe to grind against some of the most basic elements of my existence...those being my gender and chosen faith.

Rogan, I do think, dislikes women for being women. I'm not talking about the references to "hot chicks" or whatever language he uses to refer to women he find acceptably attractive...that may be an obvious sign, but I'm talking about deeper things, like a point he made early on in that video.

He talks of the foolishness of ideologies, and starts listing religions. (The critique of religion alone while completely ignoring concepts like, say, capitalism or ownership of property, that impact our thinking and behavior on possibly deeper levels always irks me, but I'll move on.) He then, in discussing the ridiculous things that people do around their ridiculous beliefs, cites women in Africa that put plates in their lips...but they're not "women in Africa"...they're "African bitches." For their behavior? Their attitude? Something they said? Nope. They're bitches, and apparently ridiculous, because they engage in body alteration.

Let me just say that I am not the body altering type. I have one set of ear piercings that I didn't get until I was 19. I was done after that. Though I find them generally unattractive, I have no inherent problem with piercings or sub-dermal implants or whatever. This though is what gets me about his choice to single them out for simultaneous criticism and insult. He has paid someone to run a pigmented needle into his skin LITERALLY hundreds of thousands of times. He has tattoos. He, too, engages in body alteration, and I doubt he'd claim he's been ridiculous.

You could argue that his choice is based on personal expression and not cultural norm (debatable since those lines are far from clear and many of the women today choose whether they have another woman start the process for them), or because it's not connected to religious practices (from what I've read, neither is the insertion of a dhebi a tugoin). Even those thoughts would be based in the Western bias toward individualism. I think though, that it's nothing more complicated than the American man in a suit and tie (my personal preference) ridiculing the American boy wearing low-slung pants. "They look ridiculous! What a safety hazard!" laughs the man with the flowery noose-bib around his neck.

This is why I've come to believe that, while Rogan's got some good thoughts going on, at the end of the day, he is, somewhere deep down, a cultural supremacist disguised as someone who's willing to question culture. The kind of person who will loudly ridicule another for similar behavior with zero regard for cultural context. I can listen to and tolerate a lot of different views, but considering the evils that have been, and are perpetuated under that umbrella, that I just can't get down with.

Those who are able to see beyond the shadows and lies of their culture will never be understood, let alone believed, by the masses.~Plato

All that has me questioning his overall intentions. He talks of wanting humans to just be "good people" and treat each other well, but still uses his platform to spread the attitudes that are the seeds of the war and persecution that he also urges these "good people" to leave behind. Wrapping a very subtle message of supremacy in one of human improvement...what is he really trying to accomplish? Maybe he just doesn't see it. Maybe he knows that the quickest way to get people to listen is to echo their cultural assumptions and he puts on a subtle attitude of supremacy that will resonate with his listening base and get him more fans. Maybe personal reflection just isn't his thing. Really hard to tell. All I know is that he's one of the many agnostic/atheists lately that have come to sway my naive thinking that bigotry was exclusive to the religious conservatives of the world. 

War is War: A Captain, Spousal Abuse and a Cause

I ran across this video today and I now have even more respect for Patrick Stewart...not only because of the actions he's taken in addressing domestic violence, but in the way he is able to relate what he has to say on both personal and corporeal levels. I especially appreciate the fact that he addresses the issue as one in which men, as a community, bear a responsibility.



Especially with the recent issues we've been having as a community and Mundials coming up, it highlighted something a few people in jiu jitsu do that's always kind of hit me the wrong way. I've seen post after post about "going to war" and "armor", and they always made me cringe just a bit. Though I don't suspect any ill intent, they make me wonder how I'd feel about people using the terms in reference to a sport, albeit a combat related one, if I'd seen combat, or lost a loved one, a home or a country, to war. I'm not a member of the military and my family has very few members in the armed forces, but it still rings sour in my ears. This video was one of the reminders why.

As much as I appreciate the bravery it requires to risk life and safety doing anything for any cause, the glamorization, and trivialization of the concept...I find them both disturbing. The video, and Patrick Stewart's intimate relation of the effects of war beyond the battlefield, and into the household, highlight a cost of war that tends to get glossed over.

I've been wondering if people who have been more directly affected by any war feel similarly and would love to hear their take. 

Jiu Jitsu Style and my (lack of) Confidence as a Writer

Blogging has pushed me in ways as a writer that I would never have expected. I am...well...I was pretty confident in my writing. Then came BJJ. I didn't realize how much wider exposure can rattle confidence until I was asked to expound on this piece by Jiu Jitsu Style magazine.

It should have been a breeze. I thought back to my junior year in high school, the year my special little school decided English class should become a writing bootcamp. Three, four, sometimes five times a week, we were given 40 minutes to analyze and write 700 words on pieces like Hemingway's Big Two-Hearted River or Keats' Ode on a Grecian Urn (my stomach turned a bit just typing that). 1800 words on a topic in BJJ that I'd already started thinking about? I could do that in my sleep. I was beyond needing to feel inspired to write...or so I thought. Funny thing how NOT doing something can inflate your sense of skill.

I've written for publications before, but none in communities I cared as much about as I do BJJ.  I found myself worried--doubting my grammar and my voice. Was I being too casual? My syntax! Is proper use of the subjunctive too stuffy? ...do I use too many ellipses? (The answer is yes. Yes I do.) I texted my brother, whom I've watched go through the painful cycle of writing death and rebirth many a time. He assured me that he'd only be worried about me if I weren't concerned about my work.

...so if you run across a copy of the Gunnar Nelson issue, check out page 80. That project calmed a lot of my fears, but between that and upping the ante with projects over on the journal side of GiFreak, I'm less confident than I've been in a really long time. 

"Kids aren't any more cruel than adults...they just haven't learned how to mask it yet."

That statement will always stick with me. My therapist aunt made it during a discussion of bullying.

Reading Ryron Gracie's post on Mother's Day brought it back to mind. Specifically this statement:

"Through every year of my life and to this day, I have heard men mock, lie, tease, belittle, and place themselves above women and I completely understand why.  The same way a child bullies another because of insecurities, men bully women.  Keep the women down and we will stay on top."

I've talked before how kids, women...honestly, any minority, frequently plays the canary in the coal mine of society, but I think that analogy is a bit off.  To say that sounds like the toxic conditions that affect the birds manifest themselves naturally or on their own. Ryron's post opened up a different connection for me...I realized that sometimes, those in power or privilege are emitting the gases themselves. The gasses of sexism, ageism  racism, class-ism, weight-ism, homophobia...they're all carefully crafted bullying, mostly carried out by adults.

That all, is why the current discussion of bullying disturbs me just a bit. Children, to an extent, are mirrors. They learn their behavior from adults, and while the effects are more poignant to watch in the form of a child's tears or a teenager's suicide note, they are no less real in the alcoholism of a co-worker or eating disorder of a friend.

When people tell me they're surprised that I spend my free time around fighters and grapplers, I tell them that what happens in a cage is nothing compared to the subtle and quiet violence against the ego that I watch people so masterfully carry out in the spaces that we've deemed "professional" and "polite".

I wonder why we never have this conversation plainly...why we have a need to dress up childish oneupsmanship in sophisticated terms. Maybe because if we paint it with too broad a brush...if we simply call it a need to control, or a need to dominate, or a need to look down on another to feed our need to feel special...maybe then it will just become too hard to run from, too hard to push off on an "-ist", too personal.