So has it already been a week? I don't know where this last week went, though it was nice to have a three-day keiko streak, with Sensei consistently letting practice run late in order to squeeze in more shiaigeiko. I really shouldn't be so excited about shiai--shinsa is what I should be working toward, but it's really all that's been on my mind these days, not my screaming kids and the halloween hijinx of the way that I'm rushing through the very textbook I've worked so hard to write. I really do need to get into better general fitness, though--even Wifey has been training secretly for a 5k run, which makes me wonder what my time would be--surely not even close to my PR, though I wonder how well all of this subsequent practice would be for my long-term endurance. It's hard to imagine a 20-minute bout--even the longest enchos I've seen (frankly a little boring when so tiny on the screen, though much more captivating in real life) are no more than 10 minutes--and I can't imagine going even five.

Hopefully I'll become more interested in work than I am now--I'm a little disaffected.

So somehow we've managed to get locked in in the apartment, which is unfortunately as there're a coupla deep dish pies getting cold over there at Uno's which we can't retrieve through the deadbolt. Wifey better cook dinner, though, that's all I have to say.

So I'm still trying to figure out in this new ad for this game for kids starring various heroes FROM ACROSS ALLL TIME including the fierce Vikings, the ruthless killerbots of 2659 and don't forget the cunning samurai. Cunning? Samurai? Is this the new century yet? Since when were samurai cunning? "Mindless" would be more apt, I'd say than "cunning."

So Rob Chin informs me that there are interviewees who are former math majors who can't even state the First Isomorphism Theorem--not even for vector spaces! We went to see Proof today but somehow it managed to be sold out, which was appropriate given the company. No, really--the trailer we saw though was worth the price of admission--and I don't mean TransAmerica which looks like a grand slam, but rather the worst piece of Orientalist trash since, um, well, um, I guess The Last Samurai--as Rob succintly put it, it's like Crouching Tiger all over again.

Wifey, meanwhile, has been on the hunt for suits and quite successful. It kind of makes me want to be one of this besuited teachers for once.

Meanwhile, my insane quest, in which I am teaching two parallel classes at once is coming off rather well--all things considered. It's just hard these days for me not to feel grotesquely overqualified and underappreciated given that all of my wonderful problematic-significant-residue problems and sideways, backwards, diagonal (apologies to Cantor) entrees into standard topoi in the Curriculum are simply ignored--or else nodded-at and then ignored.

So I've come to expect that intensified kendo training includes more bruises and wounds such as the large silverdollar-sized bruise right underneath my collar bone, or even the missed-tsuki that my kids (and Wifey) are convinced is a hicky. But what I'm not used to at all is how the hair in the front of my head is apparently thinning--at least from one angle, and I think that these are the wages of years of wearing too many hats and not guarding my men adequately. Time to speak to my barber.

So it's back to this other routine of taking this class, what with a paper due too in but a week, but it's a good slate of activities overall, and now that I've been roped into facilitating a tech workshop, I have yet another thing to worry about, but then again I've been pretty laid back, and reveling in that eventually silent-lull which comes up after a little while--the class comes in and is all piss and vinegar and noise, but then, the lull when they are all somehow reading or thinking or something which is silent enough to let me catch my breath and do my best not to disturb them again. And Thursday means a computer lab, which means a breather, and then of course there's even a bonus shiai-geiko practice this Friday evening, which means that next week I won't miss out that much when meeting with parents--I should be just fine for shiai by then.

So there was a scary moment when a kid in do and tare collapsed during ashi-sabaki, but luckily Sensei didn't let this delay practice by more than a couple minutes.

It's been a strange coupla weeks, but now I'm glad to get into a regular stretch of time with which to work on this textbook and the other assorted things I need to really just sit down and take care of. So it's odd how these shorter weekends actually seem longer, somehow--yesterday I managed to not only shepherd a half-dozen catatonic kiddies through three hours of nothing, but at least they were not jumping off the walls. That and a long schlep with Wifey through the delights of lower Manhattan, which mostly involve jeans what cost more than the pittance I earned that morning by sitting around rearranging squares of paper. I'm just happy with how the technology side of my curriculum is going--this goal of going at least once a week has been working rather well, and it's a marvel how well the students are adjusted to that--they eat it up, even as they not-so-surreptiously surf their various friendsters/myspace/hi5 variants, and spread rumors that I myself am actually on hi5.

So Sensei announced that one fundamental purpose of kendo was to help make yourself happy. To enjoy it. For example, for all of those who are single. Maybe you have girlfriend. But if your girlfriend is a pest, and she always makes you feel tight right here, then you should not marry her.

So today has been thoroughly unproductive, sitting at home and going through old comics I haven't read in ages, catching up at the old Chinese restaurant I never go to any more, where the little kids are now running around and almost tall enough to knock pots of hot oil all over themselves. Golden brown. Tasty. That, and more sleep--it's amazing how easily I just fall asleep these days. Can teaching really be that exhausting? Or am I too opportunistic? Certainly this summer I felt like I was more of a go-getter, whereas these days I'm more laggardly. But at least I've returned to a respectable practice routine, even though again compared to a year ago I'm nowhere near as dedicated. Still, having been in the mudansha division as long as I have, perhaps I'll have an edge in a couple weeks at the next tournament.

So Thursday my kids kept on telling me--you've got blue in your ear. I thought they were just trying to pull a josh over my eyes, but sure enough, when I finally managed to make it to a mirror after a doubleheader, sure enough there was this blue marker at the base of my lobe? The culprit? Wifey, who has nothing better to do than to draw on me while I sleep.

So I think I much prefer this kind of long weekend to the choppier breaks of last week. For some reason, I'm just really tired now, great big black circles under my eyes and passing out fitfully all of the time. So this sort of extended break is probably exactly what I need to rejuvenate before I go and launch another unit. The closing of the first month's work was not too bad. Disappointing in terms of exportable product, but overall not so bad. The main thing now is to get back to work on algebra, which I've left on the side for some time now, but that 1 December deadline is looming again.

So it's getting harder and harder to blog regularly, a fact further unhelped by Wifey's malfunctioning iBook, which has its logic board fritzing for perhaps the fourth time since he got the damned thing two Septembers or so ago. And yet today should be thoroughly bloggable, as it was a day off from work, which I spent mostly sleeping, first fitfully until waking just before 1 o'clock, after which we managed to dragged ourselves to the local Japanese restaurant, eat a little too much, and then decide to just go home rather than to the Graduate Center, where we napped until 5, when we watched the new Tyra Banks show, in which this geeky white girl apparently has a thing and a connection with Asian guys, who show up as the "mystery man" at the end of the show, but then are left holding the bouquet awkwardly as Tyra shakes her moneymaker and the geeky-girl shakes her analogue.

I did at least make it to practice. I think I'll actually be able to dedicate myself for a while to all that, at least until the tournament in a month's time. It's encouraging to see the new crop of Eastern European beginners in do and tare for the first time, as of late we've not had a very good record in terms of retaining people once they finally manage to get into bogu. Of my generation, there are only two or three whom I see at all any more. And in that I include Rob Chin.

Pleasantly, I found my copy of Bishop and Goldberg, the Manifolds-and-Tensor-Algebra text I am going to work through with Rob Chin today--it was in the sundries pouch of my bogu-bag, and I had been afraid that I would have nothing to read on the long train ride home with Thai Green Curry Chicken in tow.

So somebody had the brilliant idea that somehow it would right to have a school day today followed by two holidays in a row, which is not very good, but things went okay today, even though I felt thoroughly half-assed all throughout. I can't wait to finally close this project, as it's taken too long and now is just in the draggy part.

So it looks like there will be a new teacher's contract, with retro-payraises in the backing, though of course this isn't why I'm here in the first place. It would be easy to make far more just a little further out in the burbs. But there's time enough for that, come retirement time.

So children are great things. I mean, people. That is, Wifey accompanied me today to the country estate where I had to take care of a few things, such as the rent and forgetting to cut myself a new tenugui from the bolt of cloth for tomorrow's praqctice. And on the corner of Crescent and Ditmars I saw a Chinese father showing his daughter how to tang qin, for her future subway or Julliard career, massaging her feet as she slowly strummed, sitting under a tree on the sidewalk.

Meanwhile, as I was doing some tax planning for next year, just to possibly off-set the additional thus-far-untaxed stipendary income this year, I see that the IRS has prepared information all about how you can still claim an exemption for kidnapped children, as long as the kid is still presumed alive, and wasn't kidnapped by a relative, on whose tax form the kid is probably being claimed as an exemption for. Or something.