Amanda Takes Off...

Look! We're up to five! My beautiful plant has one new leaf starting to uncurl (seen between two leaves) and another one getting ready to shoot out (pointing up in the back). It's the only living thing in my apartment. I've had pets ever since I was 7 years old. This living without a pet thing is new. I should name the plant. Any ideas?

Class was so sparsely populated tonight* that I actually made it to the front line, primarily to get paired with a guy of my own size for some stretching exercises. I was with Blue until we did the standing stretches. His knee's messed up, so I got paired with a guy I now call Powerful. I love doing the stretches with other people because they push me in a way I can't.

Most stretches started with putting one foot on our partner's shoulder. Then, for the hardest stretch, he went into a long, long front stance and I had to lean forward. It really stretches the adductor magnus muscles.

But I simply don't have the balance for it.

I was leaning forward, clinging to Powerful's dobok front (not what I wanted to be doing, it's odd enough that I'm the only woman in class) while Master was trying to straighten me up and get me to tuck my hips under without actually swatting my butt (which he had done 2 minutes earlier to Powerful when he was doing the same stretch with me).

So I was sandwiched by these two black belts, with Master calling out, "balance, Amanda, jungshim!" while Powerful was trying to hold me up (it hurts your shoulder when you're the support) and I was asking how 중심 (jungshim) is spelt and he's rattling off the letters and Master's demanding I straighten up and finally I just leaned into it as much as I could and started muttering, "Balance, jungshim, jungshim, Amanda."

Later we did target practice and Powerful has some fantastic kicks, hence his name. I want to kick like that. The tops of my feet have hurt a bit since Saturday's hike (I think my shoes were too tight) but I ignored it because I adore the thwack of hitting the targets.

At the end of class I got Powerful and Studious to help me spell out some more Korean words. 구만, 반대로, and 시간 여행 (stop/cease, switch/reverse, and time travel). Whenever we do this, I say the word, they try and say it's English word, I attempt to spell it in Korean, and then one of them tries to write it in Roman script. Luckily nobody seems to have egos that are affected by the fact that somewhere in that mess, something is almost always wrong. They're always helpful and never act annoyed over spelling silly words.

* Master asked where Cocky Guy was. I had talked to his father this morning. The words for "dad" and "pain" are very very similar. So I stuttered, "Cocky Guy's dad says Cocky Guy pain" and pointed to my back. I probably said all of the words out of order, and I pronounced "dad" and "pain" too similarly, but he understood it on the first try. Only after the fact did I realize that I blurted it out without worrying about how wrong I would probably be.