May
12
Many years ago, my brother-in-law was working a high school summer job that involved … oh, I don’t even know what it was. Something like landscaping, I guess. His crew had stopped for lunch near a school sports field in order to ogle a girls’ soccer practice, and my brother-in-law — let’s just refer to him by his name, which is Joe — saw that a seagull was trying to steal his sandwich. With the intent of scaring it away, Joe picked up a screwdriver and threw it, but some horrible twist of fate sent the tool flying end over end and plunging directly into the bird’s back. Like, impaling the damn thing. So here’s this seagull with a screwdriver gruesomely embedded into its flesh, staggering around with its wings splayed out, and Joe figures it’s going to die and better to end its life quickly before it tries to fly off with a fatal wound. So he picks it up by the head and starts swinging the body around and around in order to break its neck. That’s the point where Joe looks up and notices, for the first time, that all the girls are staring at him — a freaky-looking hunched-over guy who’s got a death grip on a seagull and is whipping it around in a circle, and it looks like he gouged it with a screwdriver first, what the fuck — with open-mouthed horror. As Joe carries on, feeling caught in a nightmare, some of the girls start crying.
I have no idea what happened after that. I’m only telling you this because you know how the trend with blogs lately is to have a super meaningful conclusion to a random story? Like my kids melted down at Target but that’s okay because parenthood is like a box of beautiful chocolates lying in the sun or whatever? Don’t you kinda miss when people just wrote about whatever, and there didn’t need to be a nice tidy ending?
Apr
22
At the Haganah gym I go to, we’re repeatedly taught about compliance. Compliance is when there’s a gun to the side of your head, or pressed into the middle of your back, and you’re trying to calm the attacker, convince him you’re going to be an easy victim. A compliance statement is something like, “Please don’t hurt me, I have two small children, I’ll do anything you want …” You say your compliance statement with hands open and slightly raised, a surrendering position without bringing your hands so high that they’ll see your next move coming. While you’re mid-sentence — “I’ll do anyyyy–“ — you strike. That part, and the parts that follow, depends on where the gun is, but the ultimate goal is to disarm the motherfucker and if you maybe de-meat his finger in the process, well, he was kinda asking for it, wasn’t he?
(DE-MEAT. I know, right? The first time I heard a trainer use that term I was like OH MY GOD EW HORK BARF and he was like dude, get a grip. And I was like yeah but not with my Skeletor finger right? OH HO HO HO GOOD ONE, ME.)
I really find myself struggling with those compliance statements. It’s a non-negotiable part of the drill, you have to say it out loud to your partner when they’re playing the attacker, and I always feel like the room has melted away and I’m standing on a giant stage, holding a microphone, lit by a single spotlight, while an attentive audience rustles impatiently in their seats. Somewhere in the very back of the theater, someone coughs. My vision narrows, my heart races, and I can’t think of anything I’m supposed to say. “Line,” I want to hiss to a helpful understudy waiting in the wings. I mean, it’s crazy, it’s not like there’s anything HARD about saying “Please don’t hurt me” and yet every single time I have to fight down a case of nervous giggles. “Please don’t haaaaaaaaaa. I’m sorry. I have two small HEEEEEEEEEEEEEE. Oh god. Sorry. I’ll do HARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR.”
Basically I am a super ridiculous person who has trouble with almost every single thing we do in class, from the groin slapping we practiced yesterday (My brain: OH JESUS I HAVE TO BRIEFLY PUT MY HAND ON THIS GUY’S WEINER AREA AHHHH WEINER MAKES ME THINK OF DE-MEATING AHHHHHH) to this weird finger-under-the-nose technique that is surprisingly painful and wildly effective at lifting someone up and away from you but still short-circuits my brain into a panicked fear that I’ll accidentally slip a finger into someone’s nostril and then I would just have to DIE, like INSTANTLY. There’s even a move called a “bump” that’s designed to push an attacker backwards if they’ve grabbed you around the waist from behind and every time I do it I think of this:
[Image removed because you turkeys kept crying fowl. It’s here, if you’re not too chicken to look.]
ANYWAY. When I was training for the marathon, I remember thinking how spending all that time running past the point where I wanted to stop was good for me in some deep internal way, strengthening non-physical reserves and teaching me, over and over, that I was capable of so much more than I gave myself credit for. Now I have a similar sort of feeling about going to my fight gym — it’s like, being embarrassed isn’t the end of the world. Pushing past all my flinch-y personal space issues is weirdly therapeutic. And above all, it’s okay to completely SUCK at something — in front of other people, even! — and keep coming back, keep trying.
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