Saturday is alright (for fighting)

Okay, so did everyone have a good weekend? Because I spent 8 hours on Saturday working with Escrima sticks and training knives and I can barely type, my fingers and knuckles and hands and forearms are so sore.

So this post is gonna be short (by my standards) because I'm a whiner. And a wimp.

I've been studying Escrima for about three years now with my friend Isaac as my instructor, and one of the things I love most about Escrima is that I don't have to be incredibly strong or huge to be able to take someone down. I have to be fast, and I have to be efficient. I also have to not flail my arms as much, but I'm working on that last one.

Escrima (sometimes referred to as Kali) originated in the Philippines because, um, lots and lots of countries were lining up to try and slaughter their people and take over the country, and the Filipino people were all, um, no thanks? So they borrowed from a ton of different martial arts and whenever they'd be taken over for short period, the Filipinos would practice their sword work in the fields along with practicing it through, ahem, "dancing." If you guys know anything about Capoeira, you'll notice some similarities - mainly, a subjugated group of people pass along their martial arts training through the art of dance so that their stupid masters don't notice anything, then one day they rise up and kick ass and everyone's like, Wow, didn't see THAT one coming. I just thought they were being moved by the holy spirit.

Anyways, my point is, Escrima is bad-ass and it teaches you not only sword fighting, but because it's based off fighting concepts and not fighting techniques (something our guest instructor, Guro Lewis, kept drilling into us on Saturday), you can use it at any time with any object. Our Guro demonstrated this by taking down one of our students using a pen - and if you've seen The Bourne Identity, you get to see Jason Bourne use Escrima to kill someone with a rolled up newspaper. Finally, a use for all those old Wall Street Journals you've got lying around.

So Saturday was a good day of working sword and then knife fighting techniques, because, again with the idea that any weapon can be utilized with Escrima concepts, Escrimadors make really, REALLY good knife fighters. I learned how to stab, poke, hack and slash my way through the human body, and I had an absolutely fantastic time doing it.

And this is my blog post about how I spent my weekend learning how to kill people more effectively. Why can't I just scrapbook like everyone else?