he might replace the earth with the moon

(if I had written it that's what it would be.)

Matt's had 154 in the car for the past few days, and up until now I didn't realize what a difference the CD makes. I've heard a lot of these songs before, but they were on tapes or mp3 or a few years ago, and they are different now. I drove a block: "Self, is this Wire?"

I've been meeting with T. and B. a lot to talk about a camp we're setting up for kuk sool - it was originally just a camping trip, but we have all these ideas, and it's turned into an all-day seminar. Exciting. They're talking about how we're going to try to change how ksw practices are run after I promote, and I'm happy about that too. Our old teacher rarely even had a lesson plan, and I don't understand how he could just wing it all the time. We're talking about meeting weekly, having goals for the class... refreshing! I wish we could expect people to at least work out a little on their own, though. I'd love to spend class time on making people better at kuk sool instead of just making them feel less guilty for eating.

Have I mentioned that before? I feel like a lot of people use practices as a time to make up for any pie they had over winter break. I have more than one problem with this:

1. Making up for pie in that fashion points to them having some weird attitudes about themselves, food, and fitness that I don't want to be part of.
   
2. If they were paying attention, martial arts would teach them not to eat too much pie in the first place.
3. They are in kuk sool to get badass, not to get skinny.
4. Workouts take away from practice time, and the curriculum moves way too fast as it is.

That last point is a result of a larger problem - at least, I view it as a problem: people want to have black belts before they graduate. Now, it is possible to get to that level in that amount of time. But people come in as white belts and they specifically want a particular color at a particular time. If they think they can't do that, a lot of them will quit because they "won't have gotten anywhere." So the class has to go at a particular speed because ksw introduced some artificial milestones. I want to make testing more optional - we should discuss students' progress with them and let them know before testing comes around whether they should bother with it or not. Then we can stop promoting people prematurely without so many hard feelings.

I'm going to visit my parents tomorrow. It's too bad they're not into roast leg of lamb, because that would make a great Easter dinner. I'm not so much into the eggs & chocolate event anymore, but I will take any excuse to make an impressive dinner.

np: Matt's mix that has "You Can Make Me Feel Bad" and "As You Do" on it