Karate Tests

I really don't like Karate tests. They make me anxious beforehand and weak and feeble during, and sore and practically dead afterwards. I would have been perfectly happy to stay at, say, a green belt for ten years. Unfortunately for me, my instructor had other plans.

I had been a second degree brown belt for about a year - I took my last test in January 2011 when I was about two weeks pregnant with The Cookie. My instructor told me, "We're not going to tell you when the next one is, because you get too nervous. I'll have Dave take you on a 'date' and then drive you to the dojo and say, 'surprise!!!!'"

For the last month or so, my instructor teased me about having a "special dinner" sometime in March. Last Saturday he asked me, "So do you still want your test kept a secret from you?"

Thinking that it was going to be in March, I said, "Well, at this point I guess I wouldn't mind knowing."

"Great. You're testing today."

"Haha, very funny Sensei."

"Are you nervous?"

"I still think you're joking."

"I'm  not lying. Your Husband paid the testing fee last Thursday. Your test starts at three today at the West Jordan dojo."

So right after my Karate class, The Husband picked me up and drove me to West Jordan and I had my test! He took the boys to a nearby park, where The Squeaker has a magnificent time playing on the slides.

I really don't like Karate tests. I kind of had something that may or may not have been an asthma attack, and I had extreme difficulty breathing. The last time I experienced this sensation was, oddly enough, my previous karate test a year before. And I left my inhaler at home. Also I forgot a technique that I supposedly learned at green belt but I had no memory of it at all. I was glad they passed me anyway, although at the time I wasn't sure I had really earned it. And yet, the supervising instructor, a 6th degree black belt, spoke with me a bit just before the end of the test and told me that he could tell I had internalized the Martial Arts by the way I moved. That's good, right?

These guys aren't in the habit of pity passing their students, but I can still think of about a hundred things I did wrong, things I wish I had done better.

So I'm a first degree brown belt now. My next test will be to get my black belt. Yikes. I never thought I would get to that point!

They really should teach the martial arts in P.E. instead of volleyball. Volleyball is stupid. Martial Arts has a purpose. As much karate stuff as I have done over the years, I am not sure I would ever be able to completely throw off an attacker, but I know I would be able to do something other than stand there and let some guy bludgeon me to death. Sometimes my imagination runs away with me and I think of all the bits of my house that are vulnerable to attack, and I start wondering if I should start sleeping with my kubotan and a pair of nunchucks under my pillow.

Karate has gotten under my skin. I have taken to doing a defensive maneuver here, a kempo there, while I go about my daily routine. Empty the dishwasher and leopard's paw to the lymph nodes, break the elbow, kick out the knee and spinning hook kick. Carry the laundry downstairs and monkey block, willow palm and chicken wrist to the jaw and throw the guy to the ground with a tiger's mouth to the neck. So much cooler than volleyball.