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Thursday, September 17, 2009, 08:35 AM
Posted by Administrator
Though my French isn't good enough to know exactly why, it used to be a long-standing joke in my house that the meaning of our last name, "Baudier" was something akin to "one who rides donkies." However, due to my recent investigations on the internet, I have good reason to believe that the meaning of "Baudier" is something more like "brave warrior" ... which, pardon me for saying, is pretty hard-core (at least compared to "mule rider" or whatever it was). On the other hand, I can't help but laugh at the notion of such a strong name being attached to someone like me. I mean, when I was a child I used to be afraid of everything: elevators, escalators, planes, heights, even toxic mold. And let's face it, how many asthmatic, anemic (hence the bruises), underweight female karate-ka do you know? Sometimes it really makes me laugh how unsuited I must seem to the life of a karate-ka.
You know, having trained for several years now, I've seen quite a few people pass though dojos on a bad mission so to speak. In all of their actions and words and ways they present themselves to others it's clear that they are putting in effort for the sole purpose of getting something to which they feel entitled. Some people want a rank, some want to win a competition, but this type of mind is always expecting something in return. Often once such a person obtains his desired result he'll quit, and even more commonly, a karate-ka who thinks like this will fail at her mission and get very angry about injustices comitted. All I can figure is people like that must be very used to success. Perhaps one of the small advantages to being a born weakling is that I never have to worry about feeling entitled to anything.
To me karate is like a fall thunderstorm. Some days it waters my garden and brings in good weather, while other days I get pummeled with hail and flash floods that seem like they could shake the life out of my frail body. Yes, the more I think about it, the more I'm sure that I love both training and storms in the same way. I do my best to prepare for both, but regardless of how else I fair, nothing could make me more satisfied than simply surviving one day of it to experience another. When you really think about it, compared to the strength of a hurricane (or the wrath of a sensei who can count REALLY fast) we're all pretty weak.
Perhaps it's just the low iron levels in my blood, but there's nothing like reaching that hot-cold calm feeling somewhere between what I thought was my maximum and the final seiza of the evening. When training gets to that point I feel equal to anyone.
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Thursday, August 20, 2009, 10:34 AM
Posted by Administrator
The other day I was going though boxes at my parents house, mostly full of decrepid childhood toys that survived Katrina somehow, but which have no functional place in my adult life. One of these was a set of nesting dolls which I got when we visited the traveling Romanov family history tour some summers ago. Holding this little doll for a moment, I couldn't help but do what anyone would have done, so I opened it. Then I opened the next one, then another, and then another. But to my surprise, inside the smallest nesting doll was not a solid wood version, but rather a tarnished silver otter, no larger than a dime in size.
By now, it should come as no surprise to most of you that I have been odd my whole life. As a child I spent much of my summers either freely roaming my neighborhood with bare feet or indoors making macro or micro-sized art, often while listening to my sisters' broadway tapes and CDs without their knowing. Usually each summer was a different medium for me to mess around with. When I was five or so my dad showed me how to make paper, the next year I was consumed with water colors, then colored pencils, then pastels, even At age 12 I had resorted to a full scale acrylic mural across my bedroom walls. However, due to having lost almost all my art made prior to 2005 in the flood, there were several years that had neatly dissipated in my imperfect memory. Ironically, these were probably some of the longest held art obsessions of my seven to eleven year old life. As a testament to these years, amongst the children's books and rubber snakes that surfaced in that box, I recovered three of my most prized miniature sculptures, which I used to spend hours a day producing.
I had made many miniature metal sculptures like my otter, at my father's dental lab, first sculpting wax versions using a soldering gun and open flame, then casting them using the crucibles and left-over metal bits from past crowns and bridges. They had to be small because large ones wouldn't fit in the tooth-sized containers used to make the mold. The result was a virtually indestructible hand-made toy that could fit in my school blouse pocket, even in math class, without anyone being the wiser.
Though a much easier process utilized vast quantities of multicolored polymer clay and my mother's oven. Only two products of these endeavors seem to have survived in my parents' house till today partly due to their fragility, though mostly because I kept them in bins on the bottom shelf of the lowest lying room in the house in August 2005.
However inappropriate it may be to laugh at Jesus dying on the cross, I still find it really hard for me to keep a straight face when I even so much as glance at this. I think I may have intended it to be an Easter present for my devoutly Catholic grandmother. Honestly, I was probably too embarrassed to give it to her. I never really could grasp the proportons of the human body as a kid.
Now poison dart frogs on the other hand...
The left was my favorite rubber toy frog, though I had a total of 12 or so poison dart frogs total. Being an avid zoo and aquarium visitor as a child, I remember being bothered by my toy's fake-looking spot pattern. For that reason, around age 10 or so, I decided to take a stab at it myself. In case you were wondering, yes, I made each spot out of a tiny flattened piece of black clay and stuck it to the body of the frog. I was obsessed.
It was quite amusing seeing the oddity of my youth displayed in three dimensions, though I have quite a few more boxes left to go through. Bloated clay Jesus give me strength!
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Lazy summer days | 2010-07-25 16:47:26 |
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| This weekend was my first off in a while, so I took the opportunity to finish a bunch of art projects. First and foremost, of course, was this week's page of Shizentai. I also found enough time to plant a garden outside my apartment, go to the movies with my sister, eat out, and tonight I will be attending a barbecue! Man, summer rocks... even if my vacation is only three days long =_= Enjoy! See you next Monday! |
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