In which I rant about fighting.

I don’t know what it is exactly that draws me to fighting. Even Taekwondo doesn’t fill that category, it’s got to be Krav or mma…there’s something about that release that is different from any other workout. i don’t know if it’s released frustrations, I think that’s a lot of it. There’s definitely something therapeutic about hitting something. It’s almost ironic, because I love fighting, and I absolutely hate hurting people. It’s the main reason I don’t know if I could ever do an actual mma match, because I don’t know if I want to end up injuring another person…But I want to fight. I want to win, I want to be good at this. Fighting, to me, is a lot like dancing – fun to watch, but more fun to do. There’s a beauty in the dance of a good match. Duck this, block that, react and hit… It’s a chess match at high speed. My instructor is fond of reminding us that the best fighters might only use three moves, you might know exactly how they fight, and they’ll still beat you. Because they’re better at the game, the reaction, the dance.

I wish that I could explain that to a lot of mma fans. There are so many people who only look for blood, the knockout or the submission. I love all that as much as the next fan, but so much more if they come in a good fight. I hate mismached fights, I hate brawls. I really hate Brock Lesner, while we’re at it, for exactly that reason. He doesn’t play the game. He’s just in to get the win, not to fight. I couldn’t enjoy a win against a mismached opponent. There’s no joy to me in winning an easy fight. But Lesner is apparently happy to just lay on the mat and ‘win’ because he has a massive weight advantage. And add on to that his gloating, as though he had done anything worth celebrating….it just makes me sick. It’s a disgrace to everything that I love about fighting, and drags the sport backwards, if you ask me. Put Lesner and Kimbo in a ring, and let them duke it out – they’re in the same class of dressed-up frauds, if you ask me.

Unexpected side effects.

The reason why I started martial arts was the complete usual – it sounded cool and I wanted to get in shape. The reason why I stayed in martial arts, was that I found a level of sanity there that I never thought possible. There’s a lot of painfully cheesy talk about how martial arts ‘centers your mind’ and that kind of thing, but that’s not where I’m going with this. To me, it was an escape. My mind, especially then, replays everything, stresses everything, and was running a constant paranoid dialogue about what everyone else was thinking about me at all times. And I don’t mean the everyday level, because everyone worries about what everyone else is thinking. This was a crippling, bordering on complete paranioa, problem for me. What I found in Taekwondo that I didn’t expect was an escape from that. It required so much of my mind to focus on what I was doing, and to do it well, that I would get relief from the insanity in my head for a while. And as time went on, I found ways to hold on to that relief in the rest of my life. The degree to which martial arts fundamentally changed my life and my personality is incredible. I love it for a lot of reasons, but the pure mental relief was one that I never expected, and probably saved my life.

I think my brain just exploded.

**NOTE** I wrote this quite a while back, but didn’t publish it because I was pretty mad at the time and was not sure I could judge whether or not it was coherent and not just a rant. Since then, the ruling that sparked this post has been overturned, but (although it’s still a bit of a rant) I think the basic principle of my post still holds, and I feel like I need to get it off my chest. I mean no offense by this, I just have a lot of old frustrations and feel like people will gladly remain closed-minded about this subject, and I’m tired of fighting old, outdated stereotypes. **END NOTE**

This is bullshit. I would really love to know how on earth they twisted the constitution to justify requiring state teaching credentials that didn’t exist when it was written.

Listen, kids. I know, I know, I know, I KNOW. You all knew those crazy homeschool kids who weren’t that bright, or the fundamentalist religious crazies who couldn’t so much as consider the possiblity of debate and take every hard-core biblical view they can as their own personal vendetta. Well I’m sorry. I know those kids too. But I know a lot of non-homeschooled kids who are exactly the same. And believe me, it’s always the crazy ones who stand out, but that doesn’t mean they’re the norm. The normal, incredibly bright, articulate, open-minded kids who got world-class educations don’t go around screaming that they’re homeschooled.

You know why I don’t? Because I know, if I tell you that I’m homeschooled, that all of a sudden I have gone from just some person you know to having to overcome a thousand stereotypes of the batshit-crazy fundamentalist six-day creationist seventeen siblings never been out in public standing on the front porch with a shotgun unsocialized weirdo. And you know what? I don’t love that. I don’t love having to spend my time trying to change prejudices that strong. I don’t love people who treat me like a sheltered, naive, ignorant religious freak. It doesn’t matter if I do or don’t have anything in common with the stereotype, I shouldn’t have to spend my life justifying my education and rebuilding my reputation as who I actually AM instead of who you assume I am. People find out I’m homeschooled and somehow all of a sudden everything they know about me doesn’t matter anymore. This isn’t hypothetical–I’ve seen it happen. I’ve had to deal with this crap from strangers, from casual aquaintances, and from some of my best friends after they’ve known me for YEARS, and it sucks.

Let the girls fight.

So EliteXC is officially going under, can’t say that I’m sad…They were a disgrace to the sport that made all of MMA look bad. I hated that they got to be the “face” of mma, on network tv, and they put on an incredibly sub-par show that just cemented what many people already felt about mma. It was a show, not a sport, and not a skilled show at that. Kimbo Slice is a bad joke, and everyone who follows mma knows it, but the general public doesn’t. What we need is for UFC to go a little more mainstream, and for people to realize that these guys are athletes, and these aren’t just unregulated brawls…this isn’t the UFC of ten years ago.

The one thing that does make me sad about EliteXC going under is that now Gina Carano is out of a job, and Dana White doesn’t want to let girls into the UFC. To some degree that’s fair-there aren’t many high-quality female mma fighters, and if he let them in at a sub-par level it denegrates the sport and comes off looking like a publicity stunt. But for the few females who can fight mma, or who want to fight mma, it’s quite a blow. The sport can’t progress, there will never be a large number of good quality female fighters, if there’s no arena for them. Look at UFC a few years ago-bar brawlers, alley fighters, if you knew anything at all about fighting you could dominate the cage. But as the sport gained popularity, more people joined, smarter and more talented people were fighting, and you actually have to train in multiple disciplines and be a smart fighter to do well. The same thing can happen for female fighters if they are given an arena to fight in, something that’s high profile enough to give the sport some traction. It won’t be a huge sport, not for a long time, but it can be a successful sport, if given a chance. I don’t think Elite was the best place for that, but at least it was somewhere visible.