April 11, 2007

An Inspiration to All (Or Not)

Apparently I’m inspiring. Readers used to tell me this back when I first started this blog, based on my trying Mat’s killer workout. But now it seems it’s for my words. When I wrote about how I started my journey in the martial arts, readers responded by emailing me and commenting away. It’s funny because whatever inspiration I’ve been to others, I’ve always sort of felt its the other way around. When I’m in one of my karate depressions, it’s my readers who lift me up and push me to keep going and improve. It’s been very enjoyable and rejuvenating when I’ve needed it most.

Now the inspiration has gone to a whole new level in the form of this:

If you can’t read the writing, you can click on the shirt and go to the site for more details. A very nice person emailed me and told me that my post about why I started karate inspired her to make this t-shirt. It says, "Karate: it comes from within." It doesn’t just come in blue. My words have got an entire line y’all. Oh yeah. Today, my complimentary t-shirt came in the mail, along with a cool pin for my karate bag that Big I has got her eye on.

The woman who designed the shirt and thanked me for my inspiration has two sons who are involved in the martial arts and she started her own martial arts t-shirt and other products store.

Now if I can just get her to make me a "Black Belt Mama" shirt so that I can outfit you, all of my inspirational "fans". I’m sure that will quickly be followed by Dooce-like fame, followed by a sitcom (or a drama depending upon my mood), which will be followed by a book and then a taken-from-the-book blockbuster movie.

It starts with a t-shirt; I’m going to be a star. . .

Of course, counter this with the fact that I now know why every black belt says that once you become Shodan you can only then finally start learning karate. You become a beginner at Shodan because all the stuff that comes after is a nightmare. The 11 open hand kata’s and eight weapons kata’s I have to learn to test for Shodan are mere warm-ups. I have seen the great beyond and it is not pretty, or easy.

I consider myself to be a fairly fast learner. I can usually follow along with a kata without much of a problem. But tonight, as we ran through open hand kata’s that I can’t even pronounce I actually stopped mid-stream and declared that I was giving up and would just watch.

In order for me to complete the kata, I would have needed a black belt in front of me, behind me, to the left and to the right, preferably with mirrors on all four sides as well. There was just so much turning and so many angles and all these crazy punches and hand movements and blech. I was just horrible. I couldn’t even follow along.

Sometimes you leave the dojo feeling fabulous about how you’ve done; and other times, like tonight, you come home and take a look at that t-shirt you just got in the mail, and wonder why the karate didn’t come from within tonight.