Amanda Takes Off...

I realized my new jeans were biasing and tried to return them to the Giordano store near me yesterday. They wouldn't take them. When Master found out, he was so upset he wanted to return them for me. ("They are lying! They wouldn't do this if you were Korean!") I didn't have them with me, so he got the new woman, English name Heidi, to help me out today. And lo and behold, they exchanged them after a lot of face saving.

It is SO nice to have a Korean friend in the area. I thanked her, she told me not to worry about it.

A related cool thing that happened: I didn't have Heidi's phone number, so I texted Master in bad Korean. At least he understood me, because he texted back in...Korean. I recognized four of his seven Korean words and could figure out two by context.

Master's away at some training for the next few days, so his brother's studio joined our studio and we all practiced together. It was going fine until we started working on poomse. Brother Master was criticizing every single thing I was doing. This included telling me I was doing things wrong before he'd even seen me do them.

I was frustrated because I trained with two other Masters—Grandmasters, in fact—before I started training with his brother. And sometimes a senior black belt would lead the class. One guy, James, was super strict in a way that my last Master, who was quite strict, never was. Thus, I know that each person has a different style. I understand the importance of being flexible and adjusting to different styles, but he wasn't picking on anyone else and I just wanted to yell, "Go talk to X about his bouncing habit, you're only here for three days, dude!"

I had to remind myself that when I met him before, when I was first looking at studios, he was very nice, and he's been very kind every time I've seen him since. I'm sure he was trying to help me improve, but I was having a hard time keeping my spirits up. Even when he finally told me I was doing good, I just sort of stared at him. That, I know, was the wrong reaction on my part. I'll try harder tomorrow. And Thursday.

Then, to top it off, Studious threw open the lock-rarely-works door on me when I was changing. This has happened with just about every single person in the studio at least once, and I've done it myself by accident, so it wasn't really a big deal and I didn't really care, but it was sort of the icing on a not-as-great-as-I'd-hoped-it'd-be class. Poor guy, he was hiding in a big group, trying really hard not to look at me when I came out. I wanted to tell him it was fine, but I knew that would've made things worse.

(One small kid who'd never seen me before once opened up the door on me. I was entirely in my dobok and getting out my belt. He apologized and then stayed there and just stared at me. I nodded and pulled the door closed. The boys teased him for the rest of class.)