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poetry_lady's questions
Mar. 18th, 2004 11:49 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tylikTHE RULES:
1 - Leave a comment, saying you want to be interviewed.
2 - I will respond; I'll ask you five questions.
3 - You'll update your journal with my five questions, and your five answers.
4 - You'll include this explanation.
5 - You'll ask other people five questions when they want to be interviewed
Questions frompoetry_lady
(By the way, the fourth question is about sprial energy, and it might be useful for people in the Taiji class)
1. Do you feel that you missed out on anything/have any regrests in starting college so much earlier than others your age?
No, with one minor exception.
First a quick timeline, for those who don't know the story. I started in the Early Entrance Program at the University of Washington when I was thirteen. I subsequently had a spat with administration there (primarily over my insistance with continuing to study music) and dropped out and went to a weird little Marxist private high school (isn't that an odd image, both Marxist and private?) for a year. Then I returned as a regular student at fifteen. And then as part of the general turbulence surrounding my parents' divorce and my own coming of age I moved out on my own and my father cut off all tuition and child support... so for the next bit I worked and grew up and attended community college classes when I could. Then there were two court appearances, when I was almost seventeen and almost eighteen where I sued his pants off for back child support, and secured the tuition he was required to pay by my parents' divorce agreement, and went back to school.
There are things I would have skipped from the EEP experience. I only started dealing with the sense of failure I'd been carrying around about leaving it a couple of years ago. Heck, I only really started questioning it a few years ago, when a friend and former classmate of mine told me she'd wished she'd had the courage to leave. (I don't think courage really describes it for me. I left because people were using threats to try and intimidate me into toeing their line. This pissed me off. And maybe I had some latent sense of self preservation.) And I think EEP primed me for the whole "work until I collapse" bit at Microsoft. Of course, how much I was primed for that sort of things even before I went to EEP is another question.
But... I'm really glad that I had some familiarity with college, and pretty much knew was it was about early on. And I'm really glad I had the chance to live on my own and go through all the coming of age stuff associated with that while I wasn't seriously focused on my education. (Personally, I think most freshmen would benefit from taking a couple of years of, holding down some crappy job, having their own place, paying their own bills, getting drunk, getting laid, and generally getting it all out of their systems, so when then got around to going to college they actually were focused on that.) I got a lot out of my one year in highschool, and am one of the few people I know who remembers their highschool fondly. And when I finally was able to get back to school full time, I wrung more out of my four years than pretty much anyone I know.
The one minor exception is that there's a lot of common frame of reference stuff that I don't really have. I don't know what it's like to be fifteen, in a general sense -- to me it means moving out, working for a violinmaker, dealing with my first shared housing experience, running a dressmaking business, and getting laid. (Just to mention a few highlights.) I never went to a school that had a serious athletic program. I didn't spend the prolonged teenage "I'm perfectly capable of independent thought and action and yet legally under the thumb of my parents" bit. I never took driver's ed.
Frankly, I don't really miss it, but it's one more thing that makes the more common experience of most people I know a little harder for me to connect with.
2. What is your favorite holiday or celebration, and why?
Er... Darn. I like Yule, except I'm usually pretty busy playing hostess.
I really like Tracey's birthday, because he's the cutest kid in the whole world.
Chinese New Year is fun -- lion dances and fireworks always get a vote from me...
3. What lead you to the study of the chinese language? Was there a specific trigger?
A couple. I had a massive language inferiority complex, since I have all these bilingual (either Japanese/English or Chinese/English) cousins, and all these friends who spoke latin (and things like Old High German).
I needed language credits, having never managed to get any. (Well, okay, I had a quarter or two of French, but every time I took French I got bronchitis. It just wasn't working out.)
I was getting into modern Chinese history (reading Edgar Snow's "Red Star Over China" when I was sixteen or so was kind of pivotal there).
Oh, and I was afraid that I wasn't any good at languages. It's pretty typical of how I deal with things I'm afraid of.
Then I fell in love with it. It wasn't really supposed to be my major... Actually, I tend to fall in love with any language I study (well, except French, which was kind of boring even when I wasn't sick). I like the way languages make my thoughts into different shapes. They all *taste* different, or something.
4. Explain a bit more in-depth about the "spiral energy" of taiji, and your views on how central (or not) this is to your practice.
Oh, gods, you would throw in a tricky one, wouldn't you?
Let me start off by saying I really don't have a definitive answer. We talk a lot about spiral energy, and I feel like I can recognize it... but these are mostly my personal descriptions.
The basic idea is that you learn to move your internal energy in circling, spiralling motions. (These are can fairly subtle, as they are in even basic front reeling, where the most obvious shapes is that of a circle or oblong, drawn in front of you... but there are also movements in and out from the dantian, the rotation of the hands, and the whole thing is supported and moved from the dantian -- the weight shift being a crude way of looking at that.) Master Chen talks a lot about the power of spiral energy being like that of a screw jack, where the spiralling movement of the jack allows a very small thing, turned by a relatively small force, to move something very large. (So that you can, as the saying goes "use four ounces to deflect a thousand pounds".)
I talked a little bit in class about how fa jin can be like the movement of a whip. If you can imaging the energy spiralling through your body, spiralling up from your feet, out from your center, this makes for a much longer whip than it could be if it moved more linearly. So the force at the end, where the whip cracks, will be similarly greater.
I also like to think of springs. This is part of why it is so important to relax, to let all your movements be round and the shape your body makes also be found. From any position you should be able to either coil inwards or spring outwards. You never want to over extend, or get rigid, in a way that lets you get stuck. A slightly bent arm can still extend further outwards, in a push, or can bend further, absorbing (and perhaps redirecting) an attack.
How important is it? What you work with sprial energy to achieve is absolutely essential, and spiral energy is the traditional way (in Chen, at least) of developing these things. But I think at another level it is just one metaphor for discussing these underlying concepts, and I can't say that other metaphors might work just as well.
5. What guilty pleasures do you indulge in?
Ben and Jerry's New York Super Fudge Chunk.
Reading. Okay, I'm only guilty about a subset of what I read... Georgette Heyer is high on the list. Romance writer, publishing from the 1920's through (I think) 1970's. She's very good... but, well, she's a romance writer. Robin McKinley is another kind of guilty pleasure -- I have no trouble admitting how much I like her, but I'm a litle sheepish about how often I'll re-read her books when I'm sick or stressed.
Long hot baths.
Out of season produce. I really love cooking seasonally, and really believe in it... But darn it sometimes those February eggplants are more than I can resist. Or I'll buy hothouse tomatoes and basil and pretend it's summer. Or artichokes, out of season, and eat them all by myself.
Someday I will lock myself in the bathroom, with a couple of pilllar candles lit for ambience, and a selection of light reading, an artichoke, and half a container of Ben and Jerry's... it will have been a pretty rotten day, but it can only get better from that point, right?
1 - Leave a comment, saying you want to be interviewed.
2 - I will respond; I'll ask you five questions.
3 - You'll update your journal with my five questions, and your five answers.
4 - You'll include this explanation.
5 - You'll ask other people five questions when they want to be interviewed
Questions from
poetry_lady(By the way, the fourth question is about sprial energy, and it might be useful for people in the Taiji class)
1. Do you feel that you missed out on anything/have any regrests in starting college so much earlier than others your age?
No, with one minor exception.
First a quick timeline, for those who don't know the story. I started in the Early Entrance Program at the University of Washington when I was thirteen. I subsequently had a spat with administration there (primarily over my insistance with continuing to study music) and dropped out and went to a weird little Marxist private high school (isn't that an odd image, both Marxist and private?) for a year. Then I returned as a regular student at fifteen. And then as part of the general turbulence surrounding my parents' divorce and my own coming of age I moved out on my own and my father cut off all tuition and child support... so for the next bit I worked and grew up and attended community college classes when I could. Then there were two court appearances, when I was almost seventeen and almost eighteen where I sued his pants off for back child support, and secured the tuition he was required to pay by my parents' divorce agreement, and went back to school.
There are things I would have skipped from the EEP experience. I only started dealing with the sense of failure I'd been carrying around about leaving it a couple of years ago. Heck, I only really started questioning it a few years ago, when a friend and former classmate of mine told me she'd wished she'd had the courage to leave. (I don't think courage really describes it for me. I left because people were using threats to try and intimidate me into toeing their line. This pissed me off. And maybe I had some latent sense of self preservation.) And I think EEP primed me for the whole "work until I collapse" bit at Microsoft. Of course, how much I was primed for that sort of things even before I went to EEP is another question.
But... I'm really glad that I had some familiarity with college, and pretty much knew was it was about early on. And I'm really glad I had the chance to live on my own and go through all the coming of age stuff associated with that while I wasn't seriously focused on my education. (Personally, I think most freshmen would benefit from taking a couple of years of, holding down some crappy job, having their own place, paying their own bills, getting drunk, getting laid, and generally getting it all out of their systems, so when then got around to going to college they actually were focused on that.) I got a lot out of my one year in highschool, and am one of the few people I know who remembers their highschool fondly. And when I finally was able to get back to school full time, I wrung more out of my four years than pretty much anyone I know.
The one minor exception is that there's a lot of common frame of reference stuff that I don't really have. I don't know what it's like to be fifteen, in a general sense -- to me it means moving out, working for a violinmaker, dealing with my first shared housing experience, running a dressmaking business, and getting laid. (Just to mention a few highlights.) I never went to a school that had a serious athletic program. I didn't spend the prolonged teenage "I'm perfectly capable of independent thought and action and yet legally under the thumb of my parents" bit. I never took driver's ed.
Frankly, I don't really miss it, but it's one more thing that makes the more common experience of most people I know a little harder for me to connect with.
2. What is your favorite holiday or celebration, and why?
Er... Darn. I like Yule, except I'm usually pretty busy playing hostess.
I really like Tracey's birthday, because he's the cutest kid in the whole world.
Chinese New Year is fun -- lion dances and fireworks always get a vote from me...
3. What lead you to the study of the chinese language? Was there a specific trigger?
A couple. I had a massive language inferiority complex, since I have all these bilingual (either Japanese/English or Chinese/English) cousins, and all these friends who spoke latin (and things like Old High German).
I needed language credits, having never managed to get any. (Well, okay, I had a quarter or two of French, but every time I took French I got bronchitis. It just wasn't working out.)
I was getting into modern Chinese history (reading Edgar Snow's "Red Star Over China" when I was sixteen or so was kind of pivotal there).
Oh, and I was afraid that I wasn't any good at languages. It's pretty typical of how I deal with things I'm afraid of.
Then I fell in love with it. It wasn't really supposed to be my major... Actually, I tend to fall in love with any language I study (well, except French, which was kind of boring even when I wasn't sick). I like the way languages make my thoughts into different shapes. They all *taste* different, or something.
4. Explain a bit more in-depth about the "spiral energy" of taiji, and your views on how central (or not) this is to your practice.
Oh, gods, you would throw in a tricky one, wouldn't you?
Let me start off by saying I really don't have a definitive answer. We talk a lot about spiral energy, and I feel like I can recognize it... but these are mostly my personal descriptions.
The basic idea is that you learn to move your internal energy in circling, spiralling motions. (These are can fairly subtle, as they are in even basic front reeling, where the most obvious shapes is that of a circle or oblong, drawn in front of you... but there are also movements in and out from the dantian, the rotation of the hands, and the whole thing is supported and moved from the dantian -- the weight shift being a crude way of looking at that.) Master Chen talks a lot about the power of spiral energy being like that of a screw jack, where the spiralling movement of the jack allows a very small thing, turned by a relatively small force, to move something very large. (So that you can, as the saying goes "use four ounces to deflect a thousand pounds".)
I talked a little bit in class about how fa jin can be like the movement of a whip. If you can imaging the energy spiralling through your body, spiralling up from your feet, out from your center, this makes for a much longer whip than it could be if it moved more linearly. So the force at the end, where the whip cracks, will be similarly greater.
I also like to think of springs. This is part of why it is so important to relax, to let all your movements be round and the shape your body makes also be found. From any position you should be able to either coil inwards or spring outwards. You never want to over extend, or get rigid, in a way that lets you get stuck. A slightly bent arm can still extend further outwards, in a push, or can bend further, absorbing (and perhaps redirecting) an attack.
How important is it? What you work with sprial energy to achieve is absolutely essential, and spiral energy is the traditional way (in Chen, at least) of developing these things. But I think at another level it is just one metaphor for discussing these underlying concepts, and I can't say that other metaphors might work just as well.
5. What guilty pleasures do you indulge in?
Ben and Jerry's New York Super Fudge Chunk.
Reading. Okay, I'm only guilty about a subset of what I read... Georgette Heyer is high on the list. Romance writer, publishing from the 1920's through (I think) 1970's. She's very good... but, well, she's a romance writer. Robin McKinley is another kind of guilty pleasure -- I have no trouble admitting how much I like her, but I'm a litle sheepish about how often I'll re-read her books when I'm sick or stressed.
Long hot baths.
Out of season produce. I really love cooking seasonally, and really believe in it... But darn it sometimes those February eggplants are more than I can resist. Or I'll buy hothouse tomatoes and basil and pretend it's summer. Or artichokes, out of season, and eat them all by myself.
Someday I will lock myself in the bathroom, with a couple of pilllar candles lit for ambience, and a selection of light reading, an artichoke, and half a container of Ben and Jerry's... it will have been a pretty rotten day, but it can only get better from that point, right?
