Planet Utah

Tough guys don't want to fight...and they don't need to, either

There's no spiritual, philosophical, or quasi-religious component to Krav Maga, nor is there any aspect of it that is treated as a sport or competition. It's all about the practical matter of personal physical safety. Once you sense that a physical confrontation is unavoidable, you become the aggressor (i.e., strike first), you fight as if your life depended on it, and you don't stop until you're certain the confrontation is over (that is, until your attacker is incapacitated or has given you an opening to escape).

Given Krav Maga's very practical approach--boiled down to its essence, it's about street-fighting--it's been surprising to me that the 10 or so instructors I've met are all very down on fighting. By that I mean that they haven't been in a fight (at least since they began studying Krav), and they don't want to be in a fight.

I didn't really understand either of these things until recently. I went to a special seminar in San Antonio, though, where one of the instructors explained fight-avoidance as follows: "Only bad things can happen."

That's probably an overstatement, but I understand his point. I mean, think about the best case scenario: Someone forces you to fight, you knock them out with one blow without hurting yourself, and that is that.

If that were to occur, most likely it would ruin your evening. (You're not just going to return to light-hearted, beer-soaked banter with your friends after you've been forced to fight someone.) You'll probably get kicked out of whatever establishment you happen to be in, and you might not be allowed back. You might get arrested if someone calls the police. You might get sued by the guy you KO'd. His friends might be waiting for you outside once you leave. One of them might decide to stick a screwdriver in your eye. Etc.

Long story short, even the best case can turn out pretty badly. That's why the San Antonio instructor said, "You want to avoid a fight at all costs."

But then I started wondering, "Do all of these bad-ass instructors really walk away from fights?" So I asked, and the answer is, "Yes." And I thought, "That's crazy! They're going to back down even though they know they could beat the snot out of someone?" Again, the answer is, "Yes."

I had a hard time understanding this at first, but only because I was thinking about it from my non-bad-ass perspective. If you don't know how to fight and someone challenges you to a fight, a decision to walk away usually means (at least in part) that you were afraid. Not fighting, therefore, is an admission of fear...even cowardice. Men don't want to admit fear or physical cowardice, so they fight when they shouldn't--or they walk away under a cloud of shame and humiliation.

Because the tough guys know how to fight, have trained to fight, and have sparred a million times, they aren't afraid of taking a beating.  Walking away from a fight, therefore, is not an admission of cowardice. So, that's what they do: walk away.

It's real or it's dead

I have a total of eight siblings and step-siblings. They've been pretty good about providing a steady supply of nieces and nephews. Some are in college, some are just a few months old.

Last week I got to see a couple of the younger ones--one niece, one nephew. I brought the niece a little stuffed teddy bear wearing a UT sweater. I had wanted to get the nephew a bobble-head armadillo, but the store I go to for Texas stuff was out of them. So, he got a Texas-shaped glass paperweight with a scorpion inside.

When I gave it to him, he seemed intrigued by the scorpion, which is what I had hoped. He asked me, "Is it real?" I said, "Yeah, it's real." He said, "Then how come it's not moving?" I said, "Because it's dead." He said, "I thought you said it was real." I said, "It is."

His sister, my niece, who had been listening to the conversation, stepped in to clarify: "It was real, but then they had to kill it to get it in there, so now it's dead."

So I guess in kid-word, something is either real or it's dead...but not both.

I really did go to Ireland, I swear

I've been saving my Ireland live-blogging for a time when I get blogger's block, but it hasn't happened yet. It will, though, soon enough.

Have I been doing it wrong?

Here's a good quote from Florence King:

A worldly man looks for the woman and then finds love, but the Family Man, like a new subscriber to eHarmony.com, has the love ready and waiting and then sets out to find the woman to go with it.

How I spent my hiatus

So, while I was away the last couple of weeks, I was in...Ireland! That's right, the Emerald Isle, Eire, the Land of Saints and Scholars, the Old Miss, the Old Man, the Mighty Mississip.

I kept notes along the way so that I could be only the second person in Internet history--as far as I know--to retrospectively live-blog a vacation. It sounds oxymoronic, but it can be done. I should know, because I was also the first person in Internet history to do this. (Long-time readers may recall that I live-blogged my London/Scotland trip two years ago...after I had returned to the states.)

That's all for now, but stay tuned for details of the adventure.

The dilemma of the unfinished story

I'm going to be starting my fall break in a couple of days, so this may be my last substantive post for a while. Just a heads up.

So, have you ever been in the middle of telling a story to a group of people when someone, or something, interrupts? You know, you're telling four or five people about your date last night, you say, "Finally, after two painful hours, I'm about to suggest that we call it a night, but then out of nowhere she says, 'I just had the best idea...'"

Just as you're getting to the good part, though, someone's phone rings, or someone interrupts with a joke, or someone new joins the group.  Suddenly, your story is frozen in its tracks, and the momentum and attention of the group seem to be moving in a different direction.

What do you do?

This is always a tough one for me. If I'm telling a story and it gets interrupted, it creates a feeling in me similar to the feeling I get when: a) I'm about to sneeze, but it goes away; b) I stick out my hand to shake, but the person whose hand I want to shake momentarily looks away, and I'm left there with my hand thrust into the void between us, awkwardly waiting to be shaken; or c) I ask someone a question in public, but the person appears not to have heard me, and I'm sitting there wondering whether they actually heard me or not, trying to decide whether I should ask again and risk having them say, "I know, I heard you the first time."

Because having a story interrupted makes me feel this way, and because the only way to get rid of the feeling is to finish the story, I want to swing the attention of the group back to me and my story at the first opportunity.

HOWEVER, if you've ever seen someone execute this maneuver ("Let me finish telling my story..."), you know how needy and pathetic it sounds. Plus, if you do successfully re-focus the group on you and your story, there's the very real danger that you might be interrupted AGAIN before the story is done. If that happens, you've pretty much established yourself as life's equipment manager.

You want to know my solution to this dilemma? Embrace the interruption wholeheartedly. Let's say, for example, that you're telling your story, and someone in your group happens to look over at the TV and say, "Oh my God...did you guys just see that?!" Boom--right there, you accept that story time is over. Immediately, you pivot. You become the PR agent for the guy who interrupted you. You say, "No, what was it?" He says, "They just showed a school bus full of kids plunging straight off a cliff." You say, "Oh my God. Was it real? When was it? Did they say anything about what happened?"

And so on.

Yes, your story has been interrupted, and yes, that makes you feel awkward and uncomfortable, but the group doesn't need to know that. By all appearances, you couldn't care less about your story--you're now fully engaged in the new topic of conversation. You're an active participant, helping to push the new conversation forward.  You recognize that you'll have plenty of other chances to tell your story...but you may never again get to bond with your friends over the horrifying death of a dozen schoolkids.

Dilemma demolished, problem solved...no thanks necessary.

Good setup for a spooky story?

If you were to visit my home, you would find a notepad and pen in every room, including the bathrooms. Why? Well, I'm constantly coming up with thoughts and ideas that I want to jot down before I forget them. If I always have paper and a pen nearby, I can always jot down my ideas.

There's one room, however, that I rarely enter--the guest bathroom. At most I'm in there once a month to do some dusting, blow out the AC vents, and so on.

Well, last Tuesday afternoon, after returning from a long weekend of travel, I went into the guest bathroom to turn off a light that I apparently had left on while I was away. When I entered the room, I immediately noticed that something was different. The notepad, which for nine months had been sitting unused on a shelf next to the sink, was flipped open to the first page. And there on the page, in block letters, were written these three words: WE MISSED YOU.

So, what do you think? All of it's true, except for the part where the notepad had been written on. But when I got home and went into the bathroom to turn off the light, I thought, "How spooky would it be if someone, or something, had actually written on the pad in here while I was away?"

Anyway, if you're so inclined, take the idea and run with it.

Six more weeks of winter

About five months ago I mentioned that I was getting Invisalign. Well, I've got two weeks left before my treatment is complete, and I can tell already that I'm not going to be happy with the final results.

Is there improvement? Absolutely. Do my teeth look the way I want them to look...the way the computer model indicated they would look when I was finished? Absolutely not.

So, here's the choice I may have to make: another couple of months on Invisalign (presumably at added cost, and definitely with added hassle, made worse by the fact that I was really looking forward to having my mouth back in mid-August), or--gasp--MAN-BRACES!

Either option makes me want to cry.

Disclaimer: I realize that wanting to cry over this sort of thing, as opposed to, say, wanting to cry over having been paralyzed in a car accident, or maybe wanting to cry over having a cleft palate that I can't afford to get fixed, is an incredible, almost absurd, indulgence.

What can I say? I'm an incredible, almost absurd, man.

A kid interviews ME for a change...sorta

For a long stretch of my academic and professional life, I was a young researcher who interviewed fairly senior policymakers and subject matter experts to fill in the gaps in my understanding of whatever issue I was working on.

As I've gotten older, I've done this less frequently. One reason is that I've been working on the same issues for so long, there are fewer gaps in my knowledge than there used to be. Another is that there's so much information available on the Web now, I can learn a lot of what I need to know without talking to anyone. Yet another is that I've become a fat, lazy, middle-aged guy who doesn't feel like hustling up interviews the way I used to.

In light of all that, it was kind of a kick last week to get a call from a local college kid who wanted to interview ME for an honors project on a subject about which I had written. We met yesterday afternoon near campus.

The kid showed up with a blank notepad and a mind to match. He had no idea how to structure our conversation, or what he wanted to accomplish during our time together, or what questions he should ask me or points we should cover. In fact, he freely admitted all of that.

Trying to help, I said, "Okay, how about if we structure things this way...", teeing up the ball for him. He took a swing at it but sliced wickedly and ended up in the woods. I gave him a mulligan, basically, and redirected the conversation back to a good starting point. Same result.

Things went on this way for about an hour, with no end in sight. It was like being on a first date with someone with no conversational skills--one of those dates where you have to say things like, "Well, since you didn't ask about my family, I'll just go ahead and tell you. I have two brothers and one sister, and I'm the youngest..."

After an hour of this I said, "Okay, I need to take off. I've got some work to do tonight." It was a lie, but as I said, the kid came in with no idea what he wanted to accomplish, and therefore no idea when we were finished.

It's so rare that I get to talk about anything I've written, I have to admit that I was disappointed...and that I was angry for having wasted an hour of my life. But if this somehow helps to repay all of the people who've let me pick THEIR brains over the years, then I suppose it was worth it.

Pamplona

This is the time of year you see news reports on the bull run in Pamplona--who got hurt, who got killed (which is rare), etc. I ran with the bulls in Pamplona 21 years ago, so I can give you a few insights into the event.

First, by far the greatest danger is from the crowds. The path that the bulls run is full of drunken and hung over revelers (almost entirely men). It is very easy to get knocked down, tripped up, stepped on, etc.

Second, if the bulls and steers had their way, they'd run straight to the bull ring. They tend to stick together in a pack and continue moving at a very good clip toward their ultimate destination. But the combination of chaos all around them, bodies and garbage on the ground in front of them, and cobblestones on their hooves makes it inevitable that some will slip and fall, or get distracted, or otherwise get separated from the pack. When that happens--that is, when a bull has reason and opportunity to focus on individual runners, rather than the great blur of the crowd and the pack of steers/bulls around him--that's when people can get seriously hurt.

Third, the hardcore bull runners are not content simply to run in front of the bulls and then get out of the way. Instead, they want to touch a bull (or two, or three), run alongside the pack, swat a bull with a newspaper, and so on. It's pretty easy for a bull to do serious damage to these guys simply by tossing its head to the side and catching a little bit of flesh with its horns. (And by the way, those horns are covered with stuff that you do NOT want administered subcutaneously.)

Footnote: My advice, should you ever decide to run with the bulls yourself: (a) Do it sober; you'll want your head clear and your motor skills working reliably and effectively; (b) Do it on a weekday; smaller crowds mean less danger from your fellow runners; (c) Don't be a hero the first time; get in front of the bulls and then get out of the way. Save the fancy stuff for your second time, once you've learned the lay of the land.