The Green Monster

F the Green Monster. I'm not talking about Fenway Park's Green Monster, as shown above, but the one that rears its ugly head whenever we have a class and there's an itty bitty number of attendees. As Hannah already mentioned, only twenty people trained on Sunday, and hardly any senior students, which made the carpet oh-so-inviting. Yes, I'm talking about that Green Monster, the carpet which seems endless and forever sometimes, especially when you're tired, especially when it's a warm summer day, especially...oh, whatever!

It is clearly a mental game -- the size of the carpet in actuality remains constant, but when our numbers are reduced, the challenge of filling the carpet with our chi-osity seems rather daunting. We are physically capable, but mentally, it can be a struggle, so we must push ourselves, as Quantou once wrote.

Today, Shifu was peeved with our chi in class during basics because people were stopping about midway, so he made us stop and walk around the columns so we could rev up our chi and attack the carpet better. Unfortunately, some people didn't quite get it and continued to stop midway when we resumed, so we had to walk the walk again. Oy.

During forms, I tried to approach the intimidating vastness of the Green Monster by seeing it in a different light. Usually, I do chuji quantao followed by yiluquan followed by what I know of erluquan over and over again -- lather, rinse, repeat -- and oftentimes, squeezing in erluquan can be tough whenever the carpet is full since it takes up a lot of space in both directions.

Today, however, since so few people were practicing forms -- I think as low as ten at one point -- I saw it as an opportunity to go nuts and do erluquan as many times as possible, which was great because I've been dying to get the sweep kick going smoothly. I think I did erluquan as many as five times in a row before I busted out the chuji quantao again. I need to break in my new feiyues! Each time I erluquan-ed it, and practiced the sweep kick three times in a row, I felt happier and happier knocking it out of the ballpark. And I think I did all right....

So, yeah, F the Green Monster (and F the Sox, while we're at it)!