'Ow' Is Our Not-So-Secret Word of the Day

I would like to personally bitch-slap the person who invented squats.

In fact, I would also like to personally bitch-slap the person who invented 'burpees' (see a delightful animation here of what this entails) although I strongly suspect that the person who invented that particular brand of physical torture would be able to slam me through a wall with one flick of his well-defined beefcake finger.

I suppose it's not really their fault for making up the individual exercise...the fault lies with the sadistic bastards who string them all into one big hellish routine and make you do them for 1.5 continuous hours with only three 45-second breaks.

You can probably guess what I did yesterday in my boxing class. And you can probably guess why I was staggering around Melbourne today, unable to use the full function of my legs because the muscles in my thighs kept screaming, "You did this, bitch!" over and over again with each painful step. I looked like an extra who'd escaped from the set of Dawn of the Dead- each jolting, staggered step was taken with my legs straight out, and I probably had a constipated-looking, gaping-mouthed expression of pain on my face to match even the finest zombie acting.

It was only my second boxing class- I went last week with my friend, K, and that was at her university. This time, I suggested we try my university's gym.

Oh God.

Y'see, last time we went we were actually recruited by a boxing instructor at K's uni who was really short on participants. There were six people in the class, of which K and I made up 1/3. Furthermore, there was also an overweight Asian guy so there was at least someone who was lower than our current level of fitness (yeah, schadenfreude, I know...but admit it, you feel a bit better when you're not the most unfit person in the room...)

This time...the class was full. Full of regulars, and each one of those regulars had a ripped six-pack. Even the girls had bulging deltoids in their arms the size of rolled-up socks. There was an Asian guy next to me, and when his singlet rode up all I saw was rock-hard, rippled abs that made him look like Liu Kang from Mortal Kombat come to life. It was terrifying.

It's hard to describe exactly what they did in that class. First off, there was a bit of boxing. After that, Person A had to do 10 punches (caught by Person B), run to the other side of the room, do 5 squats, run back, run back again and drop the ground, run back, and then swap with Person B (who all this time had to jog on the spot.) After this, we had to do the whole thing again but with 20 punches, then 30, 40, 50 all the way up to 100...and then count down again to 90, 80, 70 all the way back down to ten.

Our sadistic instructor was also adamant that we all do this continuously and without a break- although he said that if we were first-timers we could take a drink. K and I grabbed a drink at the 100 mark- and the instructor actually came over and suggested that we start the count back down at 60 instead of 100. Even with this pity discount, we still finished at the same time as everyone else. Oh, and you know what? Always wear a sports bra when boxing...because as I discovered, you can't actually pull a wayward strap back up WHEN YOUR ENTIRE HAND IS ENCASED IN A GIANT PADDED GLOVE.

Anyway...

After that, we had three rounds of what could only be described as pure torture. I'm not exactly the fittest person in the world, but K at least is pretty good, and we were both driven the point of near-collapse. I wasn't sure if I could properly describe this in words, so I took the liberty of drawing a highly detailed, beautifully crafted diagram:

And yes, that was my exact expression the entire time. I don't think I've hissed 'son of a bitch!' that many times under my breath- I achieved a new personal best.

Anyway, the diagram above shows what the instructor could call out- we were at opposite sides of the room, and we'd be doing simulataneous but different exercises from that group in the middle. Again, continuously. And timed. With no breaks, except 45 seconds between rounds. And it wasn't a matter of just going through the list- he could pick anything from that list, as many times as he wanted. It was hideous. The pathetic thing was the 'crawling'...I dropped, exhausted, to my hands and knees and started to drag myself along the ground using my fingernails as claws. I looked like a demented overgrown toddler. Then I realised that everyone else had their butts in the air and their knees off the ground (cue another "SON OF A BITCH!") so I had to follow suit. There was more than one point where I considered just smacking my face into the ground and breathing in the smell of sweet, sweet carpet rather than get up and go on.

After the three rounds, an hour had passed and we thought that we were finished. But oh no...there was something else called the 'Circle of Pain'...but since we were first-timers we didn't have to do it with weights. I can safely say that the Circle of Pain was NOT a misnomer.

After the Circle of Pain, where my arms had gone numb, we had to do 50 sit-ups, followed by 20 splices. On the 29th sit-up, I looked over at K, where we had both flopped back on the mat trying to muster up the strength to keep going, and we started giggling hysterically from exhaustion. Fortunately, after the splices the sadistic instructor called time, and we picked ourselves off the mat and staggered out (after I had finally unleashed another torrent of "SON OF A BITCH! SON OF A BITCH!")

And that is why I am in a lot of pain right now.

But I came to a sad realisation after boxing. Although I may possibly go back to that particular class when I get a bit fitter (i.e a year at least from now) I may have to give up on my dream of being Kitana. Probably not achievable if I have to urge to flop down on the floor after only one round...

Changes

I must admit the title of this post is quite deceptive- 'changes' is such a dramatic word, full of anticipation, trepidation, promises, or even dread preceding some major announcement...but in this case, I'm merely referring to the fact that I've been attempting to change the look of my blog on this lovely Wednesday afternoon, and it's driving me freaking crazy.

Despite being fairly computer-literate, my knowledge of programming, HTML and general blog stuff is about on par with my algebraic skills. That is, if I manage to somehow fluke my way into getting a solution, it's by sheer dumb luck and I can't actually backtrack and tell you how I did it. Plus, both programming and algebra elicit the same reaction from me- frustration and the desire to smash something. So far, I've changed the layout three or four times, trying to find something that fits, and trying to figure out how to edit the fonts in HTML. Just to warn y'all in advance, I'll probably be playing around with formats for a bit in the new few weeks- you'll probably be able to get a new template every time you press F5 on your browser :D

I quite liked the simple layout of my old design, but it was a stock-standard sensible Blogger template that I had for about three years. Figured I might as well get a new one, considering it's a new decade and all.

Hope you all had a great start to 2010!

New Year!

Greetings!

From everyone here at TEotA (and by 'everyone' I really mean just me, and by TEotA I just realised that I've coined a really weird acronym for my blog that sounds like an alien name from Avatar) we wish you a very Happy New Year and a fantastic 2010.

(And I'm dropping the royal 'we' now as this is just getting too confusing.)

Anyway- thank you to anyone who's perused, browsed, followed or stumbled across this blog, to anyone who's ever left a comment or even just browsed anonymously, and to those whose own blogs have given me inspiration in the past year. Your support means a lot :)

Have a safe NYE, and I'll see y'all in 2010!!!

xox

Daph

Why My Family Is Awesome

Came home from work the other day and found that my family were celebrating my exam results :D

(For any international readers- my mother absolutely loves puns, and those little round candies around the edge are called 'Smarties'. The rest of the joke is pretty much self-explanatory :P)

Kickstart

I'm kickstarting my blog back into action, because I tend to have a bad habit of neglecting my blog for a month or two on end- and my poor little corner of cyberspace is left to sit fallow for a bit, until a spell of I need to blog sorta moseys on over and whacks me with a little prodding stick, and my fingers hit the keys.

Oddly enough, in this case it was John Mayer who inspired this update.

Yes. John Mayer.

Okay, okay, I know he's mostly in the tabloids for his reputation as a ladies' man, and I confess that I had not purchased a single one of his albums up until last week- but I heard Who Says a few weeks ago, and something in that prompted me to buy his new album, Battle Studies. And so I did. And I have to say that it's a beautiful album- simple, yet somewhat exquisite in its crafting.

I buy albums for different reasons. I have a strange fondness for commerically crafted pop- I love the familiar four-chord progression of a predictable ballad. For me, it's like having the aural equivalent of a nice warm comfort blanket. This is why you'll find that quite a few of the CDs on my shelf are of ex-Idols (Kelly Clarkson, Jessica Mauboy, Jordin Sparks). The cornier the ballad, the better. I also love hip hop/rap. Jay-Z's The Blueprint 3 was one of my favourite albums this year.

Sometimes, however, you find albums that speak to you, the ones where you connect on some strange level. I think Battle Studies has fallen into this category, along with Anna Nalick's Wreck of the Day.

Anyway, my long and rambling point was that I got onto John Mayer's website and onto his blog (and say what you want about the guy, but he has a wicked sense of humour- there's a video of him attempting to mix some hip hop where his lyrics consist solely of "I like sex, and I'm good at it...I like sex, and I'm good at it...") and he had this post here.

In case you don't read it (and in case you're bored of what seems so far to be a John Mayer plug), he was talking about conscious composition, and the importance of it in keeping him focussed and able to keep writing. That got me thinking about how much of what can be loosely deemed as the 'creative process' is a product of conscious, focussed thought. Most people would agree that overthinking a situation can have detrimental consequences, and perhaps too much of this self-awareness can have a negative effect on creativity as well. There's no doubt that most of my planned, considered essays have failed where my last-minute, hysterically-written essays have succeeded beyond even my most optimistic expectations.

One of my university tutors, a poet, once described the creative writing process as almost being in a different state of consciousness, where you let go of all your preconceptions and inhibitions (or words to that effect). This always reminds me of Samuel Coleridge- as the story goes, Coleridge saw the course of an epic poem in a dream, and as soon as he woke up, he started to write the entire thing down before he forgot it. Unfortunately for him, a person on business from Porlock came and interrupted him, so he never got to finish it. The poem was called Kubla Khan, and if you ever hear the expression, "person from Porlock", that's where it originated from. (Hopefully you're not being described as one, as I don't think the expression is meant to be terribly flattering in its present form.)

There is also a theory that this 'dream' of Coleridge's was actually an opium-induced haze, but regardless of what it was, it was still an altered state of consciousness which seemed to spark this sudden burst of creative brilliance. And quite a few writers were high as a kite when they wrote their own works of literary genius.

Then again, writing cannot be easily read without structure, and a melody line can't just run without some semblance of rhythm, so an element of technicality and conscious thought is required. I'm just curious as to whether the creative process depends on being able to suspend reality, or alter our perception of our current reality, in order to really work.

And perhaps that is why so many artists are crazy.

And that's my random thought of the evening :)