clinched with some aussie dude today, focused not on how to fix his mistakes but how i should capitalize on them. i tried not to just overwhelm him because i clearly had the advantage, but instead experimented with a lot of the techniques i've been shown for clinching. some worked well for me but others that have been working did not work so well.

first thing he said to me was "so yowah tha BJJ goy."

"i roll once in a while," i replied, sort of confused. i've grappled with a couple of guys here, but only briefly. how come they aren't tha BJJ goy ?

anyway, we went sort of hard but not viciously hard. his girlfriend was watching the whole time which was sort of strange-- made me wonder how stressful that is for both of them, particularly when he's getting molested.

pot was refereeing and every time i got an advantageous grip he would break us and then give me a devilish "yeah that's right" grin. these motherfuckers are all so playful and fun to train with that you really can't get mad at them, even though they're constantly being dicks.

i'm so frequently impressed and inspired by the people around me, both the trainers and those training. there are so many people training, and training hard through fatigue, injury, heat, frustration and a multitude of other blocks that it just forces me to elevate myself out of some mix of desire and pride (and a dash of inertia).

i've decided i'm not going to gas out anymore training and today was the first day in the experiment-- it actually seemed to go really well. just remembering to breathe, not throwing every fucking single strike as a KO punch, and trying to stay relaxed. sparring went so smoothly, counters came easier, the guy i was sparring with gassed after one round while i was staring at ann waiting for him to start the shit back up.

just had my first fanta. i wondered why fanta is so popular here, with fanta being much easier to find than any other soft drink. a brief perusal of the ol wikipedia shed some light on things:
"As common in the south east part of Asia, the sugar content of these flavours are exceptionally much higher than in the rest of the world, giving the drinks a quite different taste compared to similar flavours around the rest of the world. Red Fanta has been officially endorsed by the King of Thailand as one of his preferred drinks. Consequently, glasses and open bottles of red Fanta are often seen as offerings on the small Buddhist altars displayed by every Thai home and shop."

it was very green, and it's called nam quiew which further according to wiki translates as "green water" and is cream soda flavoured (although according to my face no it isn't). the first gulp left a miserable aftertaste, but subsequent gulps convinced me that the stuff was actually pretty tasty (ie. sugary as fuck).

i drink so much liquid here it's sort of shocking. i didn't train today (sunday) and i put back at least 4L of water, as well as the aforementioned fanta, a mango smoothie, probably about a litre of milk, and a gatorade.

oh ! gatorade here comes in only 500mL bottles and only in two flavours: lemon lime, and grape. no orange, no fruit punch, no mosh, no core, no joke. i offered oron a drink of my gatorade when he was looking at it particularly longingly one day, and he took that to mean that all future gatorade concerns belong to him and he slaps me on the shoulder and shouts "NO !" when i drink more than him. also if i don't produce the gatorade in a timely fashion, he will happily and shamelessly root through my bag insisting "yellow !" the entire time (responding to me saying, "it's in there." with both demands of "yellow !" and follow-up queries of "...yellow ?") until he finds it. one day i made the mistake of bringing a grape gatorade and he was positively inconsolable. i think i deeply tested the thai patience that day.

"yellow ?" he was asking into my bag as i wrapped my hands.

"there's one in there. might be a grape actually."

his eyes went wide and his digging took on an edge of concern (it was actually panic but he would deny that it was panic so we'll call it concern). upon finding the bottle, disappointment, frustration and disgust mingled across his face. "no yellow." he asked rhetorically.

"nah, they just had grape at the 7-11."

oron shut his eyes to gather himself, tapped his foot, the fist not holding the detested bottle firmly planted into his hip. he looked skyward, then left, then at my feet. everywhere but my eyes until i snickered at his not-so-carefully concealed anger. the disbelief in his eyes was sharp, like superman using heat vision to burn a hole in a lake because it had the wrong flavour of fish in it.

"ok," said oron, shaking the bottle at me, "i no like. grape, i no like."

"hahahaha tough it out princess," i say to him. he doesn't understand my words, but i think he gets the scorn in my tone because he kicks me in the ass hard enough that i yelp "hey !!" at him.

"GRAPE I NO LIKE !" he yells back, and kicks me again as i laugh and try (but fail) to dodge. "ONLY YELLOW ONLY !" he dropped the bottle on my bag and went into the field in search of a stick.

he found one.

pulled out the question mark kick sparring with senchai today. he smiled and his eyes registered something a few steps below surprise and then he punished my legs. his catch and sweeps are magnificent, somehow leaving me sailing down from about six feet high. he goes to touch gloves as i get up, pulls back at the last second and drives home another leg kick. i try to check them but the guy is like lightning if lightning were five or six times faster and targeted your leg and instead of thunder the skies echoed with calls of "OH AYYY !"

i'm facing a strange mental situation where i'm so used to going slow and training for the benefit of others as training partners that getting used to being selfish and being okay with others being selfish in their training has been hard mental work. sparring here with a few of the other falang means a fight a lot of the time. it's not just a matter of being okay with getting hit, it's a matter of getting your game ready and going to war. it's not a place for experimentation with technique. i'm not used to that.

on the other hand, sparring with the trainers is a lot of fun. they hit you hard but they never go in to take your head off, and they have a keen awareness of your abilities. i've been hit by hard kicks, hard knees and hard punches from a number of trainers, but they were almost all because of my mistakes.

i apologized to the guy who kicked my balls that i treated badly. he took it well, then tried to take my head off sparring again. it's fine-- i shouldn't expect other people paying to train to have the best interests of some dude in mind; they're just trying to get as good as they can and that's the way they feel is best. if i don't like it i don't have to spar with them. and i want to spar with them.

was sparring with some dude today. he kept going full speed and the trainers kept telling him to slow down. "ok right ok" he'd say, and i'd throw light and slow, and then OH SHIT he's throwing haymakers at me, driving full power leg kicks and is jumpy like cracked out motherfuckers. "slow down, relax..." bam, leg kick to the balls. in spite of the cup it definitely registers. i take a minute to make some adjustments to my testicles and go back to sparring. this guy's seriously trying to take my fucking head off. "alright, all in." i figure, and launch a hard straight to his body and come up with a hook to his head. he tries to clinch after i land but i circle right and throw a rear cross with my right that lands behind his ear. i take a boxing stance and walk through his leg kicks to land better power with my hands, then BAM kick right up the middle into my balls. i fucking crumple and try not to throw up. the trainers all try to be polite about it to the guy when he's apologetic, but when he comes and pats me on the head i push it off and tell (whimper at) him to get fucked.

goddamn it, temper again. i forget that the thai culture has no respect for anger; they only respect being polite. it's just weird and embarrassing to them when someone gets angry.

it takes me a while to get to the point where i can stand. douchebag is sparring with one of the trainers who tells him after every combination "ah, slow, slow..."

eventually i spar with oron for a bit, working against waves of nausea and his superior technique. we go a few rounds (he manages to not kick me in the nuts and i return the favour), and then senchai asks if i want to spar a bit.

fuck yes. light me up dude.

he obliges. he's so fucking fast and sees almost everything i do. his counters are perfect; my boxing defense is usually pretty okay but he makes me feel like i don't even have arms. his movement is impeccable. i land a few jabs and feel like the fucking champ of the world but he's just cataloguing, analyzing, waiting. he starts countering off my jab, making me tentative to throw it even though my hands are really my only weapon. what the fuck am i supposed to do, kick this guy ? haha.

fuck it, i kick him. it lands. "oh, heyyy," he announces, and his eyes light up at how unexpected it is. i land a grand total of zero more while he continues landing on me. any time i throw to his body he catches it and immediately hammerfists the quad. it doesn't hurt but we both know those are actually elbows in the real world and that they in fact hurt quite a lot.

we spar a couple of rounds, he dominates me everywhere, but afterward he tells me i have great technique. i'm sure it's what he says to all the boys but i still feel like a fucking champ again. thanks senchai.

douchebag comes over to apologize again and i tell him he's an asshole in spite of trying my absolute hardest not to. that doesn't go so well. thanks a lot, temper.

this trip has been great for understanding where i am, what i'm good at, what i need to work on and most of all who i am when it comes to fighting and who i want to be. how i move, how i want to move, what i see, what i do, what i feel. all of this is malleable and must be put through the fire of judgment and go under the hammer of refinement. i have so much time to focus on fighting; thinking about fighting in addition to spending my day actually fighting.

i sparred twice today, which is what i desperately need. working the pads with oron in between, one of the old dudes came over to me and told me in the month he's been here he hasn't seen anyone as good as me at working the pads on boxing. that's great, but connecting with this shit on a moving, blocking opponent who doesn't want to be hit is something else entirely. particularly when they're also kicking you when you're punching them. i land some punches here and there but the importance of setting this shit up, of moving, of feinting, of changing things up has really been impressed upon me. i've been trying to work my movement more than anything but the footwork is so much different for muay thai than it is for boxing (and has to be depending on if you're basing your weight more on your lead or rear leg). i frequently use a much more dutch style of kickboxing and it just infuriates the trainers here, which is understandable. i have to remind myself i'm here to learn muay thai, not out-box people.

my clinching and boxing are both excellent relative to the other people here and based on trainer's feedback. none of them have tried to change anything about how i punch, and the clinching is all little details for better execution.

my kicking largely sucks. i feel like i'm on page one of my kicking 060 textbook going "uhhhhhhhhhh".

that's probably an exaggeration for effect but every trainer i work with wants to change something about how i kick. it's good, kicking is probably the single greatest element of muay thai in my eyes and the thing they do better than anybody so i want that correction, but i feel like i'm actually losing power in my kicks trying to do it the right way, which is incredibly frustrating. although not unexpected: it makes sense that i've gotten comfortable with how i kick and can kick with a relative amount of power even if my technique is ugly. learning a new style, of course i'm going to be awkward and uncomfortable with it until it's natural and i can swing it without muscling it.

however, currently my kicks suck and oron is still hitting me regularly with a stick. he found a bigger one recently.

i think i finally get question mark kicks ?! god, i hope so. they're definitely not perfect but they follow the mysterious path of the enigmatic question mark and land on faces, so,

oron wasn't around this morning so i worked with wang. he had me doing those repetitive kicks in brutal sets that left me gasping for breath, but he was complimentary of my technique so no beef.

yesterday working with oron, he was totally dissatisfied with my bag kneeing technique and ran out of the gym into the adjacent field and got a stick and brought it back and hit me with it when i fucked up (which was regularly). he giggled every time he did it too. i'm fairly certain that oron is at least part demon trickster; likely his granddad is half demon trickster and his granddad's dad was a full-blooded demon trickster that used one of the oldest tricks in the demon book to bang his great grandma when she was a gorgeous young thai princess. no one believed her that the demon came to her in a dream and impregnated her and she was therefore outcast, raising oron's grandfather in poverty while she worked three jobs etc etc and now oron hits students with sticks and laughs because it's simply in his blood. that's really the only conclusion i can come to using occam's razor.