way too many commas

Our cells have access to limited resources/energy and must allocate these resources between  Maintenance  (base energy demands within each cell),  Repairs (fixing damaged cells/correcting transcription errors), and  Growth  (cell reproduction). For the last little while this idea has been floating around in my head and I have started to look at my kung fu as a living breathing organism with these same energy demands. Maintenance: These are the little things I need to do everyday to keep my kung fu alive and healthy. Pushups, sit-ups, coming to class, interacting on kwoon talk. This also involves keeping my fundamentals clean and making sure that what I have "on my wagon" stays put. (this is things like watch your crane stance, don't leave your back foot behind, check your skeleton, etc..) Repair: This involves anything that follows a "I know you guys know this stuff..." or "you need to keep working on..." These are things that I know, and have heard t...

 I am joyful. At the end of tonight class we were asked to reflect and check if we thought kung fu was fun. I immediately mentally scoffed and thought "of course!"  but I wanted to try and search a littler deeper. I was having kinda of a rotten afternoon, but as soon as I walked into the Kwoon I felt instantly better, (and I'm not just saying that because of the AC 😉). All the stretching we did, all the combinations we got to throw, doing forms, and working on our side heel thrust kicks, I had a blast doing it all! And then I started to think back on previous classes. Throwing back kicks for half the class, yeah my legs were sore, but we haven't worked on them in ages so it felt good to dust them off a bit! Getting to practice with the dragon some more, getting a chance to try out the head; intimidating and tiring, but so much fun! Going back to when we were practicing lion dancing, I learned so much and I always have a great time trying to think of small things I ca...

 I am an explorer. Hello! And welcome back to Expedition: Kung fu, I am your host Kayley Burke and today we will be exploring further into the cavernous depths of the Temple of Rotational Tarsal Strikes. What new secrets will we discover today, and what treasures will we take back with us from this palace of discovery? That's what it feels like every time I'm working on my spinning back kicks and I find out something new. At the beginning of the year my spinning back kick was incredibly high up on my "kicks that I suck at and hate doing and would be very content never doing or thinking about again" list and I knew that I needed to get better at them. For the most part I feel like my main repertoire of kicks have steadily increased in quality as I have moved up the ranks in Kung fu, but this is not true in the case of the spinning back kick (I think I was thinking along the lines of " oh well it's basically the same as a side-heel but you just spin at the begi...

 Somehow I'm managing to write this re-cap even later than my Canada day demo blog but I'll blame it on the fact that I had to recount the events 3 or 4 times since it's happened so I needed a bit of a break from thinking about it until now. 24 hours before the first event:  I was feeling excited and I was feeling an odd brand of nervousness, because I knew the day was going to be fun, and I wanted to go into it with the mindset of learning from and experiencing live tournaments again, especially at this point in my martial arts journey, but I was nervous at the idea of getting nervous once our division began.  13 hours before the first event:  For some reason, either self-sabotage, or just plain stupidity I decided at around 10:30 pm I needed to add something to my weapons form. I've know for a while that it wasn't quite done, but since I knew I would have to perform it in it's entirety in a few hours that it was now or never. I had to practice it indoors and ...

 I am disciplined. I had to walk 40 minutes, half of which was almost pure stairs, getting to and from the university this morning. I had to do field surveys in the hot sun. It's been 32 degrees in my house all day. I have around 60 pushups, and 120 sit-ups left for my daily quota and it's pushing 10:30 pm. I'm sweaty and tired and the last thing I want to do is train.  But I am also disciplined, so despite all the excuses and complaints in the first paragraph, I head down to the basement and throw the sweatiest kicks I've ever done at home.  The week is moving by at lightning speeds. Still recovering from the whirlwind that was the tiger challenge. I went to visit my grandparents and lost a whole day to driving. I had a big deadline at work this week that absolutely needed to take priority because I already went past the due date a couple of weeks prior. I had to do a double day of work, both in the field and processing audio data once I got home. I had multiple meetin...

 "There's no class, but that doesn't mean there's no kung fu"  is a familiar enough phrase but I'm finding more and more that the tiny voice in my head that would chime in from time to time during everyday life whimpering " hey that's just like in kung fu... " seems to be getting louder and more insistent as of late. Weird opening tangent all to say that my friend lent me a book series centered around volleyball and on almost every page my brain was drawing parallels to kung fu. There are a ton of great quotes that with a little paraphrasing can be directly applied to practicing martial arts and I wanted to compile them in a blog post for me to have them all in one place, and for anyone else to read if they want since I think some of them are quite good! “We’re what? Second in the nation? Or was it third? Ah who cares which it was? It doesn’t matter, that was all yesterday. Yesterday is gone. Yesterday, and the day before that, and the day before...

 Little delayed writing this post, but I still wanted to jot down my thoughts after doing my first demo and dragon dance since that seems like exactly the thing blogging is meant for.  Like I mentioned in my previous post, I was shocked at the lack of nervousness I felt beforehand, and I was surprised to find that this stayed true on the day-of as well. I was a bit nervous, but in a jittery-excitement kind of way rather than the usual, "I want to crawl out of my skin and bury myself 10 feet underground and begin a new life as a subterranean being" kind of nervousness.  The secret practice we were doing at the bottom of the hill really helped me to get used to moving the dragon through the wind, and I think the conversations we were having felt like the best communication we had as a team as a whole so far, which also really helped to calm my last bit of nerves! Running through the actual performance my headspace wasn't all the different than when we are practicing in clas...