So Angry!

I went to class thinking it was going to be Cherub and me again, but shortly into our warm-ups Dave showed up on his bicycle.  

Dave is going through a rather painful divorce and he's only in the preliminaries.  He still hasn't lost his sense of humor, but it often takes on shades of frustration - still hilarious though.  For instance at the end of class he gleefully clapped his hands and said in a high pitched voice, "oh boy, I get  to go home now!"

I gather we are one of his few respites.  

Class was mostly just basics for the first hour, but Teacher grabbed an elbow block out of Pinyon Sam Dan.  It's as if you have your hands on your hips in exasperation, but you twist your body to knock away punches and such.  This is great because in reality hands in pockets make this the perfect tool for a cheap punch from someone.  

For us, we knocked the punch to the inside and swept the arm up and over, then rotated our body and take the puncher down.  Easy and elegant, but Dave and spent a good 30 minutes making a mountain out of a mole hill.  That took a lot of refinement.  About one and ten was close to correct.  I'm starting to think that's my statistic.  

We finished up class with a sticky-hands exercise that supposed to be easy, but the tension in Dave was palpable. Instead of a relaxed, sophisticated feeling of touch Dave just used 100% of muscle to keep my hand out of the way.  After doing this for a few minutes I realized what was happening and described what we were supposed to be doing.  It was still hard for him to relax; he needs an outlet to burn off the tension.  

I finished up with Teacher and it was super fun in that it was relaxing challenging and still a bit of a work out.