(no subject)

I was just talking to a friend, who is trying to make a deal with her husband that if Dubya for any reasons cancels or delays the next presidential elections they will at that time flee the country. Her point wasn't that she thought it would necessarily go so far, but that rights can be chipped away little by little, and each little thing can seem tolerable by itself. This makes a line in the sand -- if it gets as bad as that, it's time to leave.

While I'm not particularly interested in speculating how bad it could possibly get (except to thinking fondly of someone dear to me who voted for Nader and believed that it couldn't possibly get as bad as it has in terms of erosion of civil liberties this quickly) it makes me wonder... how would you know that it was time to bail? I tend to default to thinking that it's better to stay here and work to keep this country a decent place (and it'd be so inconvenient...)

Oh, this is funny...

...though I'll admit to a great fondness for Ralph Nader when I was young.

( political stereotypes quiz )

A class of one

So today, after practicing Chen with who_is_she (which can generally be read as spending 3/4 of the time vaguely stretching and gossiping, and then doing a bit of Chen) I headed off to get my allergy shot, corrected the problems they're having with my insurance, grabbed a quick dinner and ran off to my Qi Gong class.

Traffic was with me, so I got there early, and it occurred to me that since the classroom isn't used before our class, I might get a chance to practice sword. (Always welcome, as indoor spaces big enough aren't common enough.) I pulled out my telescoping sword (really!), grabbed my shoes, and headed in.

Twenty minutes later, it occurred to me to wonder why no one else had shown up yet... Eventually I got around to checking the building schedule, and sure enough, it's finals week and my class is over. (Which is too bad -- a Qi Gong final would have to be interesting.)

So I spent the next hour and a half working through both sword forms, practicing stances, and working on Master Feng's form. Not a bad way to go at all.

Dropping into crouch stance is working for sword, too. I still have something that tweaks a little when I move from crouch stance over one foot to having my weight over the other without raising my hips, but I think I'm working through it. I'm also noticing that low stances in general are easier, and I can open my hips a lot more in them. This has probably been my biggest stumbling block for the last year or more -- I'm just blown away by how fast it's changing. (The funny bit is that I've been stretching enough that I could do these stances fairly decently without the back mobility, though it tended to be sore. Now, suddently, I have the mobility and the flexibility together. Whee!) I had no idea that all those restricitons came from that mass of scar tissue... Weird.