Testing Your Boundaries

I lay on my stomach on wrestling mats while a strong man pressed what felt like his fist or elbow, or maybe some other kind of blunt weapon, into my lower back, putting the full weight of his body behind it. I tried to focus on breathing, drawing in breaths as deep and regular as I could make them, because this hurt a lot. The spot he was pressing into felt like the precise origin of the nerve that had been cramping up my lower back, tightening my right hip, sending flashes of pain down my calf and into my ankle.

Despite the fact that I had been in almost constant pain for several months, this fist or elbow accessed extra-deep pain that I didn’t realize was hiding there, like the pea under the mattresses, a crippling vulnerability that I did not know I had.

“Hmph,” said the thai massage practitioner, releasing the elbow. “You’ve been testing your boundaries.”

Testing my boundaries? What do you mean?

“Have you been throwing roundhouse kicks?” he asked me.

Of course, I wanted to say, scandalized. I could feel my face conveying my horror. Please, please don’t tell me I can’t throw roundhouse kicks again.

When I had my first encounter with the sciatica, I couldn’t stand upright for a day, could barely walk for a week, couldn’t touch my toes or lift my leg more than two feet off the ground for two months. It was now a month and a half since I had started throwing roundhouse kicks again, and I didn’t know what I would do with myself if he told me I had to stop.

“Yes, but…” I said, about to explain how I was throwing them so carefully, light, not full-power.

“For someone coming off sciatica, it’s pretty risky to be throwing them at all,” he said. “That’s testing your boundaries. Seeing how much you can do before you get injured again.”

I started to protest, to justify my actions: No, no, I was being careful.

“It’s okay, everyone does it,” he said. “Everybody wants to test their boundaries. That’s why we do so much stuff that hurts us.”

I know lots of people who seem perfectly content within their boundaries, who don’t feel the compulsive drive towards self-destructive activities, whether they are "healthy" or "unhealthy." Still, I had to agree that for most people I know who are heavily involved in any athletic activity, there is an element of self-destructiveness driving them. This isn’t just true of martial artists, though the self-destructiveness is a bit more self-evident in their sport. But I’ve seen people pursue hobbies like spinning or Pilates with equal reckless abandon, working out through colds, flus, bad backs, sprained shoulders.

My friend Julian plays soccer with a compulsiveness that could easily be called an addiction. He continues to play through all sorts of injuries that should rightfully preclude him from athletic activity, not just a game here and there, but all-day marathons. His Facebook updates regularly look something like: Supposed to be resting my hurt knee. Playing three games today, two scheduled and one sub.

It’s an addiction, certainly. But at least it’s a healthy addiction, people tell me, usually after pointing out that running sprints in between two kickboxing classes might be seen as a bit compulsive.

One common definition of addiction is behavior that we cannot or will not stop, despite its negative consequences. Are our twisted knees and sprained ankles and wrenched backs and broken toes and fingers negative enough consequences to counteract all the positive outcomes of our training? Are our healthy addictions really so different than all of our other types of compulsive boundary testing?

My adorable punker student Miranda was complaining about one of her friends:

“I hate going out with Sammy because she just wants to get drunk. I keep trying to explain that I don’t do that,” Miranda says.

“You don’t drink at all?” I ask her.

“No, I don’t see the point,” she said. “Sammy is like, ‘Let’s get a bottle of chartreuse and drink the whole thing.’ And I say, ‘That’s going to make you throw up.’ And Sammy smiles and says, ‘That’s okay.’ And I’m like, ‘Really? That’s what you want? Really?’ I don’t get it.”

It’s good that she doesn’t get it, but I do, and there’s a good chance that you do, too. All too clearly, I remember that drive to drink myself half-unconscious, the weird unlikely pleasure of stumbling around like a half-witted idiot, of feeling poison in my body that was not quite enough to make me sick, but almost.

When I began doing martial arts, I suddenly lost all interest in drinking. The reason was not, as my friends presumed, because I needed to be rested and healthy for my workouts, although that was certainly a concern. Instead, the part of my psyche that had decided that semi-oblivious intoxication was a great idea was now sated. Throwing roundhouse kicks by the hundreds, continuous punches for minutes on end, running on a treadmill after class when I was so tired that even walking was difficult, getting punched in the face and kicked in the leg and slammed to the ground—these activities seemed to satisfy the same need for self-punishment and sickness that drinking previously had.

Miranda has approximately eight piercings in her face and ears, several tattoos, and is considering getting designs branded into her skin.

“Do you think your friend enjoys drinking the way you enjoy getting piercings?” I ask her.

She wrinkles her nose skeptically. “Maybe,” she says, indulging me.

She might disagree, but it seems to me that the negative consequences are part of the appeal of so much that we do. Why else do we work out until we’re sick and broken? Why do we poke holes through our bodies and inject ink under our skin? Why do we purposely cultivate unnaturally large muscles, drink poison for fun, eat chemicals that make us hallucinate, follow strangers home from the bar, work until 5 a.m., drive down country roads at 120 miles per hour, pick fights with people we care about, breathe in burning smoke to help us “relax,” fall in love with people who make us miserable? Why would we hurt ourselves if it didn’t make us feel good?

This illustration is a drawing I did during my first year of martial arts training, depicting my love-hate relationship with bruises.

Being Aggressive

A girl comes flying in at me, her arms whirling like a pinwheel, throwing punches and kicks all at the same time, a writhing ball of fury and rage.

What did I do to this girl again? I search my mind for some past offense. Did I make fun of her poor arithmetic skills back in fifth grade? Or did I unwittingly erect a shopping mall on top of her ancestral homeland? Did she think I was flirting with her boyfriend? Because I definitely wasn’t, but you know how some girls get. Or maybe she overheard me making a dismissive comment about her pink boxing gloves…

Oh right—this girl wants to beat me up because we are in a kickboxing tournament. So I suppose that’s her job. Come to think of it, wanting to beat her up is my job, too.

Why did I want this job again?

In the moments before this fight, I thought: I am going to lose, and I don’t care at all. Actually, that sentiment might be backwards. What I was really thinking was, I don’t care at all, and so I am going to lose.

I knew that’s a bad way to think, so I began saying a mantra to myself: Want to win, want to win. It wasn’t a statement but a command. You need to want to win.

I felt like I was faking wanting to win through the entire fight. I knew that body kicks were supposed to score the most points, so I thought, You want to win, so throw more body kicks. I made sure that every time my opponent threw any punch or kick, I would throw one or two body kicks in return.

That should be enough to win this thing, I thought, counting up the kicks. Because I want to win.

But this girl wasn’t counting her kicks. I’m not sure what she was thinking, actually. She was flying around so quickly that she never planted enough to hit me with anything that hurt at all. So I don’t know if she was really trying to hurt me—if that were her goal, she probably could have done it. (And I don't say that to dismiss her abilities, because I wasn't trying to hurt her, either). But she definitely wanted to win, wanted it with all her being; every movement manifested desire to dominate, to aggress, to be the best, to be on top.

This desire for dominance is perhaps something I just don’t have in me. I love “friendly” sparring, with my friends or with strangers. I love seeing if I can keep up with an opponent, seeing if I can withstand whatever that opponent throws at me, figuring out ways to trick that opponent into opening himself--or occasionally herself--up for a kick or punch.

I don’t know if those feelings will ever translate into me being a good competitor. I do get angry and competitive when I spar sometimes, usually when I feel like someone is hurting me. That never happened during my fight. I never felt scared, hurt, attacked, all the things I am used to feeling during my regular sparring with people who are bigger and stronger than me. I felt more annoyed, irritated, like being poked over and over by an annoying twelve-year-old playmate.

I had anticipated that once something hurt, my desire to hurt my opponent back would kick in. That’s what fighters always tell you: You think you don’t want to throw hard punches at this person, until he starts throwing hard punches at you.

I have experienced this enough times in my training, times when I was terrified, when I felt, with good reason, that someone was trying to hurt me. The thought that always comes into my head at these moments is: I am going to fucking kill you.

I've always thought I would be scared of my competitor in a tournament, and always expected that this desire to kill would be a central feature of any competition I did, for better or for worse. But that self-defensive rage never kicked in during my fight against this 106 pound ball of antagonism. I mean really, can’t we settle this in some more civilized manner? Why am I fighting you again? I felt completely calm, logical, aloof. That’s actually how I had wanted to feel, and I had worked very hard on being calm and collected as I approached the tournament. Unfortunately, being calm and collected may not actually be the best way to goad oneself into an irrational fury.

The worst part about my want to win mantra is that I then did feel angry and upset when I lost. But I was counting, I thought, indignantly. I threw like a million body kicks! If I just needed to look more aggressive to win, I wouldn’t have bothered throwing all those kicks.

Being disappointed that you lost is the most horrible part of not wanting to win enough, because then your not wanting to win seems like the most pitiful sort of sour grapes: well, I didn’t want to win anyway. So really, I am not sure if I did or didn’t. But I do know what I thought as I watched my opponent jumping up and down before each round began, barely able to contain herself, as I stood waiting quietly: Whatever she’s feeling over there that’s making her act that way, I can’t imagine feeling like that.

One of my teachers told me that I needed to do at least one more competition. “You need to do one more so that you can win,” he said.

“I won’t win,” I said. “If I’m doing it just to win, I’ll lose, and then I’ll have to keep doing them and it will just make me lose more and more.”

“Don’t think like that!” he chastised me.

But it’s true, or at least I can’t see any other truth at the moment. I know this is not a particularly objective or logical moment, a week after this fight, when I am trying to process what it meant and how to think about it. And I know that these conflicting feelings are part of the point of competing, that it is supposed to teach us deep lessons about who we are and what our place in the world is. Right now, I feel my place in the world is not in a competition or a performance, not testing myself in some formalized public way, or that if I do so, it’s only for what I got from this, which was some really helpful video footage that I can study to improve my sparring. Right now, I feel that I will always lose, because I just can’t imagine wanting to win enough to make it happen.

One of my favorite things I got from this fight are the photographs my friend Amy took of me, with perfect lighting for drawing. And yes, I did this one myself, with heavy coaching from Adam. I have been working on my coachability.

Being Skinny

For the last few months, I have been having an experience that I gather would be envied by most adult Americans; I have been losing weight without trying to. A few small changes to my diet and exercise regimen have had the inordinate effect of causing me to drop about ten pounds, which is almost eight percent of my former body weight.

This weight loss has exposed me to something else that I wasn’t pursuing: unsolicited approval from casual acquaintances. This is especially true at one of my kickboxing schools, where I have been receiving a number of compliments.

A sweet but slightly unhinged middle-aged woman who takes every chance she gets to try to knock my head off with wide, looping haymaker punches appears behind me as I am warming up and pats me on the shoulder.

“You’ve lost a lot of weight,” she says, smiling, as I turn to face her.

“I suppose,” I mumble back, embarrassed at being complimented for this.

She smiles encouragingly at me. “You look good,” she adds, before heading off to grab a jump rope.

A friendly young kickboxer stops me on my way out of the gym. “You’ve really slimmed down,” he says.

I nod and shrug, not sure how else to respond.

“You’re not psyched about it?” he asks me.

“I wasn’t really trying to lose weight,” I reply.

Now he looks unsure of how to respond. We are clearly speaking different languages.

“Well, you look really fit,” he says finally.

This is a compliment that I can comfortably, even happily accept. “Thanks,” I say.

Of course, I have to appreciate their desire to say nice things about my physique; still, a part of me is tempted to respond with snotty answers:

I just got over pneumonia.
I have cancer.
I have an eating disorder.

After all, it seems to me a bold assumption that a person who has lost weight a) did so intentionally, b) did so in a healthy fashion, and c) is happy about it.

I’ve never felt good about being complimented on my weight, and I don’t compliment other people on theirs. Weight is bound to fluctuate, so the backhanded compliment is always implied: you look good now, but when you gain that weight back you won’t look as good.

The praise that I have been getting communicates to me that I needed to lose weight, which I don’t believe I did. Ten pounds ago, I was far from overweight; I was what most people would call thin, curvy, and athletic in build. I ate an extremely healthy and light diet, my weight was smack-dab in the middle of the “normal” BMI range, and I trained vigorously about fifteen hours per week.

I wasn’t trying to lose weight, nor have I ever tried to lose a significant amount of weight as an adult. The changes in diet and exercise were just to increase my fitness level, adding daily pull-ups, increasing my running speed, cutting some starch out of my diet. These were all things that I have done in the past, for limited periods of time; but for reasons I am not totally sure about, right now seems to have been the perfect time for these changes to stick. I can understand that I look fitter at this weight, but I resent the implicit suggestion that I was significantly less fit, or really less acceptable in any way, at my previous weight.

Perhaps the greatest reason I am not “psyched” is because I don’t feel that I necessarily look better at a lower weight. I have been enjoying looking more muscular and less soft, but I’m not sure this look is what I’d call attractive, at least not in any feminine sort of way. I associate my own skinniness with hard work, self-discipline, and a certain level of deprivation. Ever since I was a teenager, I have noticed that I am sexually validated for being skinny, yet I feel more ascetic and disembodied at my lowest weight. My figure is too spare to be sexy--my chest and hips are smaller, and my clothing floats around me like it's on a clothes hanger.

When I think of the woman and men I find attractive, they generally have a decent portion of body fat covering their nice, limber, hard-earned muscles. Sexuality seems like it should be associated with appetite, with indulgence, not with plain beans and steamed kale.

A friend of mine wrote an article once discussing women’s feelings of inadequacy when they compare themselves to models in fashion magazines. She urged women to think of these “perfect” models as objects of attraction, and to ask themselves: Am I attracted to this skinny, fashionable, painted woman? If not, what kind of women am I attracted to?

My own answer was easy: strong women, physically and mentally, smart women, creative women, women with wicked, clever facial expressions, brave women, women who are as wonderful with a BMI of 27 as they are with a BMI of 18.5.
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Thanks to Sondra Gates for letting me use the drawing of She-Hulk, which she purchased at an auction benefitting breast cancer research. I was especially excited to learn where she got the drawing, since one of my favorite strong, brave, and creative women is currently undergoing treatment for breast cancer, and yet somehow manages to throw crazy scary hooks and roundhouse kicks every week.

Messing Up

As I walked through the Las Pecinas College library last week, I saw a student sitting with a drawing pad in his lap, holding his left hand suspended in a fixed pose over the paper.

His bodily position looked a bit odd to me, but also uncannily familiar. I realized that he was drawing his own hand, which is something that I’ve also been doing a lot lately. My friend Adam has been teaching me to draw, and a person’s own hand is one of the best things to draw, because it allows the student to work on showing planes and angles and foreshortening and, more importantly, it’s always available.

I looked down at the student’s pad, and was disheartened to see that the hand on his paper was way better than those I’ve been drawing. The lines were crisp, assertive, conveying a confident sense of the shape and bulk and gesture of the hand.

In contrast, my lines have a quality that I have seen described as labored. That’s a good term for them. It’s obvious, looking at the heavy, jagged borders of my drawings that I dragged my pencil over them slowly, painstakingly, agonizing over each minute change of direction.

I like to carve my lines in little tiny increments, like frosting a cake, manipulating and smoothing them as I go. This technique feels comfortable, but it’s all wrong. It produces lines that are cramped and fussy. “Don’t hen-peck your lines,” Adam says, standing over me as I draw. “Stop scratching at them.”

If I were writing, the lines I am drawing would be an overuse of adjectives, or flowery description, or excessively quippy narration: they draw attention to the creator of the drawing rather than to the drawing itself. A viewer shouldn’t be noticing the lines of my drawing any more than he should be thinking, “Check out that descriptive language!” when he reads a novel. Instead he should be thinking: there’s a hand.

I know that I need to learn to make the beautiful, confident lines that Adam urges me to create. But when I try, my drawings become distorted and misshapen, because my lines, while assertive, are in the wrong place. That’s the difficulty with being assertive about something that you are just learning; you may be asserting the wrong thing.

“It doesn’t matter,” Adam says. “No amount of drawing hen-pecky lines will teach you to draw a good line. You have to draw the good lines even if they’re wrong.”

That’s the problem with learning confidence: before you earn it, you have to fake it. It’s like wrestling. To execute a take-down, you have to shoot in with confidence, even if that confidence is completely unwarranted. For somebody who has great respect for wisdom and experience, it feels counterintuitive to assume a position of confidence when I know there is perhaps an eighty percent likelihood that I am going to screw the move up.

Luckily, I have now studied enough art forms to know that it’s often necessary to mess things up in order to make them better.

It’s like in kickboxing. You can tell a kickboxer again and again to fix her roundhouse kick, but she won’t want to. Step out, you’ll say. No, in that direction. She steps out properly once, twice. The third time, she reverts back to her old footwork. That’s because the new footwork, while technically superior, doesn’t let her throw the kick as hard, doesn’t feel as balanced and comfortable, can’t be done as quickly. Some day, the new footwork will make her kick twice as hard, but not without a period of frustrating awkwardness.

I’ve been that kickboxer a dozen times, not wanting to mess up my roundhouse kick in order to fix it. I remember throwing kicks at a pad, and I was throwing them hard, I thought, based on the gratifying banging noise my leg was making against the pad. But the holder of the pad pointed at my front arm and said, “You’re dropping that arm every time you throw the kick,” which meant that my face was unprotected for a moment.

Fixing my mistake prevented me from getting the same momentum into my hips. As I practiced with my hands properly blocking my face, my kicks became lighter, quieter, less gratifying. It took me months to regain the same force, although I finally did, and now my hands were in the correct position.

One of the other things I have learned about mistakes is that they are never new. I now know that my small hand drop is a common mistake, one that I see many experienced kickboxers make when they are trying to get extra power into their kicks. We flatter ourselves to think that our mistakes are novel and that we are disappointing our teachers through our unprecedented errors. But errors are predictable, as is our perception that they are unique.

When I started to do yoga, I would always cross my legs the wrong way in one particular pose. “Why do I always do that?” I asked, when my teacher had corrected me for the third week in a row.

Now, throughout the several years I have studied yoga, I have heard my teacher make the same correction countless times, to countless new students. And about fifty percent of the time, the corrected student reacts just as I did, down to the word: “Why do I always do that?” the student asks aloud.

These students are like me, wondering why they would reverse their leg position, lacking the perspective to recognize the answer: because everybody does that.

My students do the same thing, berating themselves for the same difficulties and mistakes that I have seen in a thousand student essays, including my own.

“I can never figure out how much to summarize the plot,” says a student writing about a novel. “I always put in way too much summary.”

Everybody does that, I tell the student. It’s not just you. You’re not the only one who writes vague or confusing thesis statements, who cannot find any way express an abstract, complex idea except through a grotesquely gnarled and winding sentence, who struggles with the transition from one paragraph to the next, who gets to the end of the essay only to realize that you now believe the opposite of what you originally set out to argue. These are the same difficulties writers have faced throughout history, since the dawn of time—the same clichés that will negatively affect their writing in the following areas: clarity, originality, and the ability to make critical arguments—the same opportunities that have been handed down to us as a gift from those who came before us and have made all of our mistakes a thousand times over.

Now the student will need to go back through his essay, clearing out the extraneous plot summary in each paragraph and replacing it with fresh, healthy argumentation. It will take a lot of work, and he’ll lose over a page of hard-earned writing that he was counting on to meet his four-page minimum. But when he turns in those final four pages, they will be stronger for the loss, free of sloppy lines, assertive and accurate and confident.

Woman as Sexual Dictator

So few women recognize the power that they hold over men. If women only realized how badly men wanted them, they would use their sexuality to get whatever they want.

A particular country-inflected pop star has been in the news as often for the fluctuations in her weight as for her musical successes. She was the darling of the entertainment magazines when she lost about ten pounds off of her already slim figure in order to have the tightest possible buttocks for a role in a movie that required her to wear tiny shorts. She was then chastised heartily by the same magazines when, several years later, she gained over ten pounds, bringing her five-foot three-inch frame from a svelte 110 pounds to a “chubby” 124 pounds.

She eventually lost that weight, but then recently made the cover of virtually every major entertainment magazine because, at a recent performance, she looked to have gained about twenty pounds. All of the photographs on the magazines were from the same single performance, as though she had only gained the weight for that one day. Now she has lost much of that weight, although one magazine recently noted that she was so distraught of the unexpected death of her dog that she had “stopped losing weight.”

Of course, by regular-people standards, this woman has never been close to overweight. Her low weight of 110 pounds, according to the body mass index (which is just a fancy name for a height/weight ratio), was at the low end of the “normal” range, while her gained-twenty-pounds weight of 135 puts her at 23, near the top of that normal range.

And BMI aside (it’s a poor judge of healthy weight at any rate), in the normal world, a 135-pound, five-foot-three-inch woman is what we would consider average.

I think of this woman, of her rise to hotness glory and her fall from hotness grace, whenever I hear people say that women have a deep, untapped source of power stemming from the fact that men want to have sex with them.

I’ve heard tell of this mystical power for as long as I can remember. I raged over it in my teenaged journals: this power that isn’t power at all, the power not to do something but of somebody wanting to do something to you, power that can turn on you at any moment and leave you ugly, undesirable and humiliated.

Now with more perspective, I’m still skeptical about my potential ability to lord despotically over men based on my chromosomes and anatomy.

As power goes, it’s a backwards sort of power, in the sense that it is conferred by the person who is supposed to be the subject of that power. When a dictator takes power over a nation, he does not need the approval of the people that he will lord over. If a Mafioso has the power to kill you and your family if you don’t seat him at the table he wants at your restaurant, your decision that this power is not real or valid will not change the reality of the situation.

So I suppose that sexual power is more like a democracy, where power is given willingly and can be taken away at will also. In a democracy, a leader must cater to the wishes and whims of his constituents, and that changes the kind of power that he has, which is why we more often call it service than power.

Likewise, the woman who wants to use her sexuality as power must cater to the whims of the men she seeks to dominate, in this case, maintaining her sexual desirability, which often lies in inverse proportion to her domineering nature. So for example, if a girlfriend wants to use her sexual power to make her boyfriend clean the apartment once in a while, he may just decide to cast his vote for a new challenger in place of the incumbent.

If a woman wants to wield her sexuality as power, and you decide that you don’t want to have sex with her to start with, her power is gone, instantly, and she is disgraced. Take the example of the famous pop star. As long as she weighs 110 pounds and wears tiny shorts, she is at the pinnacle of feminine power. But when she weighs 135 pounds and wears an unfortunate pair of unflattering jeans, she is humiliated, a laughing stock, she has let herself go, despite the fact that she is considerably slimmer than the average American woman.

When people talk about women’s sexual power, they are fantasizing that women could have dictator-like power over men, when in fact, at the very best, she is more like a civil servant.

This myth of woman as sexual dictator comes from the fantasy that male desire could be bottled and put to some use. I imagine the thought process, at least for men, goes something like this:

I am soooo attracted to Woman X and Woman Y and Woman Z. I don’t think those women could have any idea how much I desire them. But if they knew, they could use it against me in some way. And I wouldn’t even mind, because it would be erotically thrilling to have my desire used against me.

But of course, the power of Woman X, Woman Y, and Woman Z only comes from the fact that this fellow, Man XY, cannot be with them. The moment Woman X became the lover of Man XY, Woman Y and Woman Z’s power would skyrocket.

Not to mention Woman Q, who has been admiring man XY for years, but is not his type. She has no power over Man XY at all. Which is too bad, because she’s the only one who really wants it.

It reminds me of a scene in Toni Morrison’s Beloved. Before Paul D. has sex with Sethe, he finds the web of scars on her back to be irresistibly compelling—a living, breathing tree growing on her back, calling to him with its powerful life force. But as soon as he has sex with her, it devolves into a grotesque, seething injury.

So as compelled as we are by the myth of the all-powerful pussy, this power is as ephemeral and undefined as the power of the British royalty, as unwieldy a weapon as those F-22 stealth jets whose production was halted because they couldn’t fly well in the rain. It is cotton-candy power, sweet and tempting until you put it in your mouth, at which point it disappears.

The Heavens

My friend Adam is a skeptic. He doesn’t believe in unseen, unprovable phenomina like conspiracy theories, ghosts, or gods. If he’s going to believe in something, he wants empirical proof.

One day when we were talking, I mentioned something about horoscopes. “You don’t actually believe in that, do you?” he asked.

I wasn’t sure how to answer. If he was asking whether I believe that people’s personalities are shaped by celestial patterns, that all people born on a particular day, or even during the same month, would share a set of identifiable traits based on the position of the planets—then no. If he was asking whether I believe that knowing somebody’s astrological sign affords some worthwhile insight into his or her personality—then, I suppose, yes.

I’ve always been interested in astrology and horoscopes, and it seemed dense of me that I had never thought about whether I actually believed in them. They’ve always just been there, like Democrats and Republicans, black, white, Asian and Latino people, like terriers and schnauzers, and every other useful but probably fictitious categories we classify things and people by.

Horoscopes had always been one of my ways of understanding all sorts of personal relationships, starting with my family. My mother and sister are a Cancer and Pisces, respectively, both signs known for their emotionalism and sensitivity. My father, on the other hand, is a Virgo, a logical, Mr. Spock kind of sign. My own sign, Gemini, represents duality, which seemed to explain my status as the peacemaker between the two factions.

Our professions also reflect these traits. My emotional mother is an artist, while my logical father is a computer engineer. My sensitive sister is a psychologist. And I, the mediator, am an English teacher, which means that my job is largely to help people with different viewpoints and perspectives to communicate with one another.

My first serious boyfriend was a Virgo, born on the same date as my father. After we broke up, I looked up our compatability in a book my roommate owned called Love by the Stars. The book said the following about Gemini-Virgo couples:

You are joined by your mutual interest in intellectual pursuits. However, aside from that fundamental similarity, you are not naturally compatible. The Gemini will perceive the Virgo as uptight, rigid, and overly serious, while the Virgo will find the Gemini to be flighty, disorganized, and prone to silly distractions.

I couldn’t believe it; the description seemed to have been written by someone who knew me and my ex-boyfriend personally. It turned out that my next relationship, with yet another logical, serious Virgo, followed this pattern as well.

How could I not believe in astrology, after all of this evidence of its predictive and explanatory powers? And yet how could I believe in something so patently untrue, from a strictly empirical point of view?

Reflecting on these patterns, I realized that they are less a belief than a mythology, a pattern more literary or symbolic than scientific. Certainly not every Virgo in the world behaves like my father or first two boyfriends, and not every Gemini acts like me. Still, these categories have always been a part of my consciousness. They have shaped the way I understand the world for so long that if I decided to excise them as illogical, I would lose a shade of meaning as rich as art or music.

It’s a lot like religion, really, because I use that to explain my life, too, even though I don’t strictly believe in it.

Monday was Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement. Proper Jews stayed home from work and attended services, praying and fasting until sunset.


I didn’t do doing anything at all to observe the holiday this year, and I haven’t for many years. I used to observe this holiday every year, you might say religiously. It took on a special significance to my family when I was seventeen, just after my mother’s father died. Yom Kippur was on his birthday that year, and my mother, sister and I fasted and attended services on Stanford campus near our house (my father was never much for synagogue; he went to work). My mother brought printed copies of my grandfather’s eulogy, since my sister and I had not been able to go to the east coast for his funeral. After the service, we sat on the grass and read the eulogy, and then we shared memories of my grandfather. It was a very sweet and sad afternoon, its significance heightened by the dreaminess of hunger.

By the time we were ready to go home, my mother felt too lightheaded to drive, so I drove, being extra attentive to traffic since I was also fairly woozy. When we got home we could not find the copies of the eulogy, which had been in a folder along with some pictures and documents. It turns out I had left them on the roof of the car, back on Stanford campus. I drove back to Stanford, now in a really surreal haze, and found the folder, scarred by a dusty tire-print, in the parking lot. I expected my mother to be angry with me, but she said, “It’s okay. We’re all just really out of it.”

This was a special day for my family, and for a while, Yom Kippur became a meaningful family tradition in a way that other Jewish holidays were not. My mother still observes Yom Kippur fastidiously each year, but I stopped long ago. It seemed that the significance of the day was more about family history and the headiness of hunger than about religion. Even if there is a God, I don’t think It would be interested in micromanaging us to this level. With all the activity and matter in the universe, what kind of Supreme Being would busy Itself worrying about what I eat?


Cartoon--"Compare and Contrast: God Versus Superman" written by Karin Spirn and illustrated by Adam Caldwell.

Hard Work

If you ask Chris Evert who was the better athlete, herself or Martina Navratilova, she’ll tell you it was Martina. The former rivals (who are also close friends) went on Oprah together last year. "Martina's a natural athlete," Evert said. "She could have been a champion at any sport she chose. I wasn't like that. I was a champion in tennis because I loved the sport so much, and I focused so hard on my game” (or something along those lines; I’m paraphrasing).

Evert’s statement suggests that there are two ways to achieve greatness: through talent or through hard work. Of course, in practice a successful person would need some combination of both of those things; no one would argue that Evert wasn’t athletic or that Navratilova didn’t work hard.

But we often expect that talent trumps hard work, that a person cannot excel at a sport or hobby or profession or field of study without some observable, natural proclivity for it.

As teachers, we can’t help but judge our students this way. Some students are just never going to get it, we say, often about students who have been given very few chances to get it before now.

Students judge themselves this way, too. I’m just not good at English, they’ll say, often in an introductory English course, like someone walking into a new yoga class and declaring, Don’t bother teaching me; I am horrible at yoga.

Whenever I parallel my own teaching to the subjects that I currently get taught at, mainly martial arts, I think, This whole school thing should be less about assessing and judging and more about learning. A student who can’t write a grammatical sentence shouldn’t be chastised and humiliated any more than a student who can’t throw a straight right cross; both students just need instruction and practice.

Although I am reminded of my role as a teacher each time I attend a kickboxing or yoga class as a student, sports taught me how to be a good teacher before I ever knew I would become a teacher myself.

When I was in high school, I was pretty good at all the subjects I studied in school—except physical education. I wasn’t horrible at it. But if there was a C on my report card, it was probably next to the letters P.E. Most of my gym teachers ignored the kids like me who weren't great at catching a fly ball or running a mile. And while I always enjoyed running around and getting exercise, P.E. was always my least favorite subject because it was frustrating and humiliating to have my teacher rolling his eyes and insulting me if I couldn’t master the art of the layup during our two weeks of allotted basketball instruction.

I had one great P.E. teacher in high school: Mr. Hart. He was also the photography teacher. He seemed like a pretty interesting guy. He was the only P.E. teacher I ever had who actually ran and did sports with us instead of just watching. He was into windsurfing and scuba-diving, and he brought his own equipment so we could try it in the swimming pool.

But my favorite thing that Mr. Hart did was create obstacle courses. It was a requirement of P.E. classes that we run three times a week. Sometimes, instead of just running the track, Mr. Hart would have us run all around the P.E. area, up and down the bleachers, through the trails in the bushes, jumping over hurdles, stopping at the pull-up bar to each do a pull-up. I could never do pull-ups, and my other P.E. teachers would have just yelled at me to try harder. But Mr. Hart came and lifted up all the students who couldn't do pull-ups, and encouraged us to pull as hard as we could to train our muscles so we could learn to do them on our own.

In Mr. Hart's class, I discovered that I could be good at sports and working out. It's not my natural area of strength, but I like to work hard, and I can learn a lot if someone will teach me.

Now that a large portion of my adult life revolves around a sport, I regret that I so often sat on the sidelines as a teenager because I didn't think I could do a good job.

Back during Mr. Hart's class, I had a revelation that has stayed with me throughout my years of being a student and a teacher. I thought: You know, those other teachers never bothered teaching me to do sports because I wasn't good at them naturally. But if someone would just teach me, I could learn. I became angry at the years of teachers who hadn’t taught me anything, who had ignored me or insulted me because I wasn’t naturally gifted in a subject that it was their job to teach me.

And then, for the first time I can remember, I thought in horror of all the students who weren't naturally good at math and English and other academic subjects (which I was naturally good at) and how their teachers might be treating them the same way, as hopeless cases not worth teaching.

When I tell my friend Marie this story, she says, “Like all my math teachers. They just ignored me and hoped I’d go away.”

When I became a teacher, I vowed to be there, like Mr. Hart, for students like Marie in math and me in P.E., students who are ready to learn, if only someone would be patient and teach them. In the time that I have worked in a community college, where we accept all students at any skill level, I have met some English Martina Navratilovas, superstars who are just waiting to unleash their innate skills upon the world.

But I’ve also met dozens of English Chris Everts, and I have seen them rise to great success and achieve things that their teachers would never have thought possible—that I wouldn’t have thought possible—because they are tough and scrappy and ready to fight for the knowledge and skills that are their birthright as humans.