The useless organisation that is British Telcommunications plc has managed to stuff up my phone line in various ways over the last two weeks, leaving me with no access to the Internet for the most part and a huge backlog of emails and RSS feeds to catch up on, and this is a minimised update of what I’ve got up to in the meantime.
Silly Games
The annual Silly Games event at Warped was last week, and it’s started to sink in that I’m actually the longest serving male member of Warped who is still turning up on a regular basis. This means it’s my job to run the games (and other events such as the pub crawl and the quiz), which is fun in a way as I get to dress up in a cloak and watch everyone else fall over trying to make human letters, but I would have liked to have been able to take part as well. I’m still not sure how the games night went, no one ran off immediately afterwards which was a good sign but I haven’t been to Warped since so I don’t know if people are still around.
Aikido
I’m not entirely sure how this is going—I graded today (I’m now 6th ku) which I suppose is a good thing but I don’t think I really deserved to as I made lots of mistakes compared to the others. There’s a competition coming up soon as well which everyone seems to have assumed I’ll be going to, even though I’m not sure about it. It’s a bit of a dilemna, because if I don’t go that will leave at least two groups short of a member, but at the same time I don’t feel confident enough and if I screw up then the whole team loses out as a result (I don’t mind individual events, at least then if something goes wrong then I’m the one who takes all the fallout). If I don’t go I’m worried that it will look bad at normal training sessions, but I don’t want to be the one who gets blamed for the team not getting a medal either. 🙁
The MA
This is going a lot better than I expected, and I’m not flailing around asking for a lifejacket just yet. Learning Latin and Greek at the same time is a challenge, but I seem to be coping and it’s not quite the insane decision that everyone makes it out to be, plus it was reassuring to be told by the programme director that if I’m still sticking with it by this point then I should be okay for the rest of the year. I’m really getting my teeth into my current course unit about Athenian Democracy as well, in fact the hard part is learning where to draw the line outside of which you try not to research too much material otherwise it becomes overwhelming.
I also have to do this pointless SAGE thing as part of my MA, which involves going to six workshops over the course of the year. However, in a moment of pure ingenius today I asked the person in charge of SAGE whether I could help run/teach some of the ICT workshops (specifically the ones on building and maintaining websites) instead of attending them as a student, and she seemed quite receptive to the idea. I think if I’m allowed to do this then I’ll actually get something out of the programme because I’ll be working on my presentation and communication skills (which is always good, no matter how confident you are practice always helps), plus it will look really good on my CV. Even if I don’t end up working for someone else because I’m running my own company, I’ll have the extra presentation skills which will certainly come in handy if I’m pitching a proposal to potential clients or running training sessions for them.
Green Living Seminar
Several months ago I agreed to do a seminar on the topic of Waste and Recycling (wearing my Manchester Friends of the Earth hat) for Heyday, which is a part of Age Concern. This Monday I finally got to do the talk and it went much better than I expected. I had the difficult job of being the first speaker of the day, which meant not only having seen no previous sessions to judge the audience by, but also having to give the next speaker their cue to come on and introduce them to everyone there. Fortunately I’ve done this a few times before, so it all went smoothly, and at the end all the questions were directed at me so I think I succeeded in getting people enthused about the issue. Giving the seminar really boosted my confidence in standing up and delivering a talk to a group of complete strangers, which was great.
Finally, I’ve started walking to and from university most days, in my allegedly ‘fast and aggressive’ style, mainly because I can’t be bothered waiting for the buses to get through Rusholme. I’m not doing it for the exercise (though I do like the fact that I can get from my house to uni in about twenty five minutes if no clueless pedestrians get in my way), although it does seem to have strengthened my calf muscles quite a lot in the last few days. I keep meaning to go to the gym on Fridays as well, when I don’t have any lectures, but something has come up every week so far, although I reckon that I can get a couple of hours in this week.
Anyway, too much rambling, not enough sense. Normal service will be resumed shortly, including some more work on the new version of Rogue Students (it’s going to be big, perhaps :).
Re: Aikido
Trust me; you’re just more aware of your own mistakes than of other peoples. Terry has held off grading people for a week or two to polish their techniques before now. As for group events at a comp I don’t think there’s anyone in the class that wouldn’t be annoyed at messing it up for the others, but do you really think anyone in the club would actually blame you even if something you did caused an event to be lost? (I don’t think this would be the case by the way, Terry trains to a high standard from what little I’ve seen of other groups and you’d be up against similar grades.)
On the other hand if you don’t want to you need to say so, or it’s going to continue being assumed (by people who don’t read this) that you’re fine with it. The only thing Terry has ever said to me about it is not to bring a negative attitude to competitions into the club. Of course he applied a bit of pressure to try and get me to do ‘em first 🙂 Even if you don’t do the comps you’ll be expected to train to competition standard (though like me you’ll possibly miss out on some stuff during the run up to a comp as he trains people in the groups they’re competing in).
It is somewhat hypocritical of me to suggest that you do one and see how it goes, but I’m going to suggest it anyway; you don’t seem to have issues with the competitions themselve, just performance anxiety – and the only way to deal with that one, in my strictly unprofessional opinion, is to perform (which probably won’t cure it, but will keep it manageable, and be good practice for formal gradings).
I just want to echo what Masati said and mention that what you’re feeling, re. aikido, seems to be perfectly normal. I’ve never done a grading and been comfortable with all the techniques and I’ve not done a competition where I’ve known exactly what I’m doing. In one of the rounds of a particular competition I was just glad Dave and I remembered all of the techinques, and we came third/last. I’m sure that you’ll do fine if you decide to do the competition, that said I’m looking forward to it being over and done with.
Hi, I noticed your site and was interested by you saying your club competes in Aikido competitions.
I have studied Aikido in the north west for some time (in the traditional Aikikai style) and as i understand it, Aikido is a non competitive martial art where the aim is to harmonise and not compete.
Thats just what i understand to be true, but if i were you i wouldn’t worry about the competition as its not essential for aikidoka to compete in order to learn the techniques.
Just my 2 pence worth….
As I understand it, our club is part of a section of aikido that does compete (I think it’s Tomiki but I could be wrong), so it is supposed to be a bit more “sporty” than traditional. I know what you mean about aikido as being non-competitive in general though.
Ah Tomiki!
Having looked into it, i understand more about the tomiki system now, and how it originates from Judo systems therefore explaining the competitive edge.
It sounds interesting, maybe i might like to try that… aren’t you in the North West ?
However, I would recommend you consider studying under the Aikikai system as i think it may be more to your, and having read their posts,your friends above (Masati & Lucy) tastes.
If you all dont enjoy the competitions, you might prefer lancs aikikai as it concentrates more on other aspects of Aikido.
Sorry if i seem nosey, i just came across your site while googling for something else and it got me thinking as id never heard of an aikido competition before….
anyway, i’d recommend the dojo in bury, ive not trained there for a while myself as im now in liverpool but i found it to be very good.
Best Wishes
Paul Jamerson
I am in the North West, in fact I’m originally from Bury but I live in Manchester now. Our dojo is in Manchester althugh I think there will be other Tomiki clubs in the general area as well and I expect there would be one in Liverpool.
I suspect that if I went to more than one club I’d get horribly confused – I’m not very good at aikido anyway so trying to concentrate on two different forms would probably throw me completely (in more ways than one :).