I jammed my thumb tonight really, really hard. Way harder than one normally jams a thumb. At the beginning of class we were doing rolls, and a guy rolled a little out of control and into me, whereupon I lost my balance and put my hand back--and tried to support myself with my fingers down. Now, as the senior student so emphatically told me last week (I've since discovered he has a bit of a macho complex with the male junior sutdents), I'm pretty big--about two hundred pounds, easily enough to break a bone on someone if I lose my balance and land wrong...imagine me falling onto my straightened arm going into someone's ribcage, for instance, or my weight going onto my knee when then lands on someone's foot. So supporting myself on my outstretched fingers is maybe not so great even when it's not my full weight. This time it was my full weight, falling, and my thumb just gave way with a crack that I'm 99.9% sure was just the thumb joints being put into a new and exciting position. Naturally about five or ten minutes later I lost my balance and tried to support myself again, and again my thumb collapsed. But there's no trace of the kind of pain I'd associate with a fracture, so I'm pretty sure I'm okay with Advil and ice. (I'm icing things a lot these days, really any of my joints that hurt at all. It's a marked departure from past experience, and I guess an acknowledgement that not only am I slowly getting older and less bouncy, but the fact that I want to take care of myself so I can still be doing aikido and falling and getting put in joint locks when I'm sixty.)
In a fairly uncharacteristic display of not caring what other people think, I physically went down to the office of the erotic entertainment guide to drop off a printed resume and cover letter (I wrote a mostly-new one for the occasion). This was directly ignoring their instructions to email resumes (which I already did); in fact their address isn't listed on their website or in the job listings, and I got it from the WHOIS database of domain names. The receptionist said resumes should be emailed, but since I already had it she called someone to ask if I could leave it, but then handed it to another guy who walked by, who said he'd pass it on. I had a note attached doing the best I could to drop Kermit's name, although it may be meaningless to whoever gets the resume, if they don't just throw it out. The receptionist and the recipient seems a little put off by my being there in person, but what the hell; I'm pretty certain they weren't going "Wow, we just just about to hire this guy, but then he came and harassed us, so fuck him".
So, remember I wasn't being really forthright the other night about what happened with the breakup with Mona...well, the person in question emailed me back and said it was okay and thanks for my honesty. That helps, because it's someone whose respect and friendship I value a lot. As always it'd be nice to not make the mistake in the first place, but overall I think I've been doing pretty well, and despite my tendency to do so, I'm not really interested in beating myself up about it.
Jorm found this god-awful kitchen tool and I have to share.
Heh, somebody reached this site yesterday trying to find the schedule for The Thirsty Mind coffeeshop in South Hadley, Massachusetts. This is because I hang out there whenever I'm in town, and I'm one of two results on Google for '"thirsty mind" hadley hours'. (It's one of the best coffeeshops I've ever been to, by the way, doubling as a used bookstore, and it's a must-visit if you're in the South Hadley area and have some time to kill. Sometime in the past couple years they moved to a bigger and warmer space upstairs, with a most excellent fireplace. And, of course, the people behind the counter tend to be cute women from Mount Holyoke College across the street. Or they look and act like Mount Holyoke women, anyway. Like Smith women, only nicer to men.)
I'm really looking forward to visiting the family over Christmas. I haven't bought plane tickets yet; I started to, but the cheapest rate involves staying there for two weeks, which I can manage, but if I'm working then (and I really, really hope I am) I don't know if that would be allowed, or if I want to take that much time off when I might only have two or three weeks' vacation total for the year. Also, I could be working a really low-paying job at that point (delivering bread or something for seven dollars an hour, say), and if that's the case not only will I not be able to take that much time off, but it will cost me $100 to change the plane ticket, at a time when that will be a huge chunk of the money I can make in a month. So I'll wait another couple of weeks and see if a job shakes out--if it does, I won't mind paying an extra $100 to visit for, say, ten days instead of fourteen.
I got my bokken back tonight, which means not only can I practice bokken moves outside of class, but I again have my favorite "I think I hear something downstairs" self-defense tool. There's something gentler about it than a knife (a knife or real sword would be my second choice), and also it's not quite so close-quarters as a knife in the vastly unlikely event I'd actually have to fight someone. And really, if that noise downstairs is a psychotic rabid badger rifling through my cache of cookies, I want something I that gives me distance (ruling out the knife idea) but that I can still maneuver in fairly close quarters (which would be why not to use my bamboo staff, which is over five feet long).
Man. I want to go shooting now.
Yes, I like weapons, and oppose war and hate HATE HATE the NRA. Life is complicated, no?