The Gift
2017 was very troubled in the political realm, but for me, it was a period of a big change as I dived headfirst into the world of sword sports. Now, with a year of training in kendo, iaido, and a dabbling in a few others, I can say with certainty my life has charted a whole new course.
It started Christmas 2016. Trump's election was over a month behind us and everyone was pretty much past the shock. That said, I was miserable for an entirely different reason. I was struck down by food poisoning; the really bad kind that laid me up for 3 days and ended with a trip to the ER. I managed to regain enough strength by Christmas Day, but it was a rough road getting there. The one upside was I ate very little during that period, so I didn't put on any holiday weight. In fact I lost some to dehydration.
While opening gifts, I recieved a rather unexpected one from my little sister; an umbrella with a katana handle. I was surprised but still excited at the coolness. Up until then, I had expressed very little interest in Japanese swordsmanship. I had offhandedly mentioned 'samurai' in a game of Mad Libs earlier, and played the Onimusha games in high school, but that was it. The umbrella was one of those gifts that I didn't know I really wanted. You might be thinking, "ah ha that's when you decided to take kendo" but no, not quite. That happened about a week later when New Year's rolled around.
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| The katana umbrella |
I always make New Years resolutions and they're often very personal and specific. Things like reading particular books, finishing projects, etc. I'd say, optimistically, I have about a 30-40% success rate on fulfilling them. Since weight loss was no longer an immediate issue, for January 2017 I resolved simply to "try more things." I felt I'd fallen into a bit of a rut of spending most of my free time on Netflix binges and video games, so I wanted to branch out a bit. As I considered what things to try, my thoughts returned to the katana umbrella.
