Adam Oster's Blog, page 9

Flash Fiction Noir

The not-so-young author sat alone in the dark motel room with a small glass of whiskey in his hand. He stared at the computer screen, wondering whether he had it in him to put to the page what he knew he needed to put there. If there was one thing this plucky novelist could do, it was to put things where they didn’t belong.

There was a knock at the door. He sat upright. No one should know he was here. He had made it absolutely clear at the front desk even that he should be left absolutely alone. He peered through the peephole, finding a young blonde standing outside, looking impatient.

Slowly, he opened the door, wearing nothing but a stained t-shirt and sweatpants, still holding his glass, breath reeking of alcohol, three days growth on his chin, knowing he looked as though he had gone through a rough one already, and it was only ten in the morning.

The woman was startled at the sudden appearance of this man, and looked around, presumably to remind herself of where the exits were.

“Yeah?” the writer grunted, eyes bleary as he tried to focus on the person who had broken his reverie.

“Um, hi, um, I think I might have the wrong room. Sorry.” She walked away, along the walkway to the second floor balcony of the motel.

The author thought for a moment to chase after her, to find someone to break the loneliness. He was stopped when she was greeted at the next door down by some tall dark and handsome fellow who opened the door and embraced her in a big hug.

He closed the door once again, sitting down in the salmon colored armchair to find some way to bring the muses back to him.

As he sat there, he thought about how he once had a life, how he had a wife and kids and all the perfect trappings of a perfect life. But now he was here, alone. In COVID-town.

Only 36 Hours Left

As I type this, I’m looking at only having approximately 36 hours until I’m allowed back into my home. And I honestly don’t know if I can make it. After talking with my wife this morning, I’m realizing more and more how terrible of a choice it was for me to choose performing in a show over being there for her, and it’s seriously taking all of my willpower to not just pack up my bag and move back in.

But only 36 hours left of this separation that nobody wanted. Of this unintentional experiment in whether or not we can live without each other (The answer is apparently that we can’t). Of sitting on the sidelines while my wife battles her own illness and our three kids who aren’t ill and she’s trying to quarantine herself from.

Of simply wanting to be home.

The past 36 hours have been a whirlwind of near nothingness. Outside of attending a funeral yesterday, I didn’t leave my hotel room until 6pm, when I went to rehearsal and tried to help get our new cast mates up to speed. Which, by the way, although I’d love to be finishing this show with all of the original cast (my wife definitely included), they were amazing. Completely off book and ready to get down to business. I can’t say as much for those of us who have already performed two shows. Luckily the newbies were patient with the shenanigans of the old guard and we got through our rehearsal with the newbies showing a confidence with the script I couldn’t have imagined possible after only a day (at most) with it in their hands.

But sitting here in this hotel, sending little messages to my wife to try to keep up to date on how she’s feeling, I just feel so…helpless. It’s not like there’s all that much I could do if I were at home, outside of try to keep the kids at bay, but I still feel like I should be there, doing whatever I can to make her life easier while she struggles through.

I don’t like feeling helpless. I like feeling like I can, at the very least, just be present, even if I’m not able to do anything. And in this case, I’m not. And I’m really not sure that I’m okay with it.

But 36 hours…then I’ll rush home, hold on to my wife, and won’t let go until she tells me I can’t follow her into the bathroom.

36 hours…

Another Day in Reverse Quarantine

As I sit here in my hotel room alone the morning after moving out of the house in order to try and keep healthy, I’m taken by both how loud it is outside of this room, while also how quiet it is without my kids screaming through the house as they get ready for school. Walking from the hotel lobby with only one coffee in my hands, as opposed to the two I normally grab when traveling with my family hit me hard.

There have been a couple of times during the past twelve hours that I’ve almost felt as though this is some sort of vacation. Sitting and surfing through channels on the television brought me back to every trip I’ve ever been on as we search for something to watch among all the crap in order to get the kids to chill out long enough to go to sleep. But, it all feels off. And knowing that I’m going to sit here in this room alone for another couple of days doesn’t help anything.

Add onto that the still-existing guilt that I’ve left my family alone to fight this plague and, well, the emotions are running high today already, and it’s not even 8am.

There’s another segment of this that feels almost Hunter Thompson-esque. No, I’m not talking about the extreme drug and alcohol usage. Heck, two fingers of Jameson hardly counts as anything close to what Thompson got up to during his heyday. But this feeling of being alone in a hotel room to work makes me think I should be writing some dark and dreary story about lonely men trying to find their way in this world.

Instead, I’m going to spend the majority of my time working my actual job and getting school work done. The school work one is definitely a good one to have extra time for, but not nearly as exciting as writing some noir fiction. Although, I suppose I’ve got a good idea for a bit of flash fiction to work on over the next few days.

The sounds of the city outside my door at least help to make me feel a little less in exile, knowing that a world does still exist out there. But…I don’t know, it’s all so weird. For the first time in two years of a global pandemic, I’m actually feeling as though there’s something not right with the world, that things have inexplicably changed.

But the only thing that’s really changed is that I don’t have the constant yelling of three kids filling my ears.

This might be the first time I’ve realized how terrible I’m going to be as an empty nester.

When COVID Got Real

After two years of waiting for it to happen, COVID finally hit my house. And I’m sitting here in a hotel reverse-quarantined from my family to avoid getting sick.

And I feel sick about it.

My wife, who is doing quite well considering her status as being COVID positive, is currently at home, with our three kids only one of which is showing any symptoms, while I hide out in a hotel room for the next three days hoping I somehow don’t wind up sick because in less than 48 hours I’m supposed to perform in this murder mystery I wrote.

My wife was supposed to be performing alongside me, and did last weekend, but had to bow out last minute because it turns out she’s yet another to fall victim to this crazy disease we’ve all been trying to get rid of for the past two years. And I spent all day trying to determine whether I should be in the same house as her and risk also having to not being able to perform.

It was not an easy choice.

Whenever anyone in my family is sick, I tend to want to be right beside them, snuggling them until they get better, disregarding my own health so they can feel some comfort in having someone taking care of them. And the very idea that I might move out for a few days and have her not only deal with her own illness but also the kids, while trying to keep them from getting sick (one of them is already sick, just not confirmed by testing) just doesn’t sit right with me, even while I am laying here in this comfy bed in a warm hotel room watching a movie by myself, where I know I won’t be woken up at the crack of dawn by a bunch of screaming and excited children.

Even as I type this, I’m still thinking I should just consider the money spent on this hotel as a loss and go back home, crawl into bed, and accept the inevitable sickness that I already can’t be sure I won’t have come morning.

But then I think of my cast mates. These people who have spent the last two months working hard to try to put this show together, who have helped develop the characters and story that I wrote into something truly hilarious, and want nothing more than to perform this show and have an audience fall in love.

And I’m torn.

I’m so incredibly grateful that the level of sickness in my house is minimal. Happy to note that my wife is still mobile and already has her voice back only one day into being officially diagnosed. That the one kid who is sick is feeling well enough to be disappointed that he spent all day hiding out in his room to avoid getting me sick. That all of them are, for all intents and purposes, well, even if they’re a little under the weather.

But to not be there for them is hard for me. To know that I’m spending money to be away from them so I can perform in some silly thing I wrote that I’m not even getting any money for. Sure, I could use things like the fact that this is helping to support a local non-profit who had struggled through the pandemic, that it will provide entertainment to people who have spent the past two years, like the rest of us, wishing for things to go back to normal. But I struggle with being able to make it more important than being at home with my family.

And if my wife hadn’t booked the hotel, I guarantee I wouldn’t be here.

Instead, I’m here, where I will have incredibly limited interaction with anyone for the next 72 hours, outside of performances and rehearsals, and thinking that the one bottle of Jameson I picked up on my way here might not be enough.

But I guess, at the very least, I can turn the heat up as much as I want to, so that’s something, right?

And if you talk to my wife, tell her that she’s a champion. Because she’s definitely going to have to deal with my sick ass come Sunday when I’m finally back home. It’s Wednesday as I write this, just for a point of reference for how much of a champion she is.

And I guess that’s my real issue, is that our reaction to my wife getting sick is too much about me, and not enough about her. She’s sick, but we’re working to protect me. And a show, that honestly isn’t even that important to me. And I don’t know if I can get over that.

To have the reaction to any sickness be about me is difficult enough for me to take, but if I’m not even the sick one, that takes things to a whole different level.

This isn’t about me. But, we’ve decided together to make it somewhat about me. And so, I’m alone in a hotel room, feeling all the regrets about that decision.

How Real is Reality, Really?

We live in a weird time. A time where nearly anything can be ‘true’. And, well, I’m a little conflicted over how I feel about it.

The big example in the current world is, obviously, what is lovingly referred to as fake news. Spin doctors aren’t anything new. For as long as we’ve had tales to tell about someone that aren’t exactly positive, we’ve had people trying to turn those bad stories into good stories, to make someone out to be better than they really are. But the past few years have seen a transition from this turd polishing process into simply denying the truth entirely. It’s not an artform of bullshit, it’s denying reality often enough that people actually start to believe it.

Like, for instance, the claim by a certain former President of the United States that the 2020 Presidential election was rigged against him. Although countless investigations have been performed to find no evidence of any form of misconduct (at least on the scale necessary to have an election stolen such as is suggested), he still proclaims it as a fact that he won the election. Even a year after he left office, he still tells his supported about how they won. He doesn’t provide any actual facts to support this claim, just says it over and over again. And there are a not inconsiderable amount of people who full believe him.

Does the fact that he has tons of people believing this story make it any more true?

Well, actually, I guess it kinda does, right? Because what is truth except what people believe to be true?

I know, every single one of you reading this is already mentally raising your hand to say, “Um, Adam, you’re talking crazy talk. Facts are facts.” And yeah, obviously there do appear to be some undeniable truths in life, right? Right now, my computer is on and I’m typing out this post. That’s a truth. But, well, I mean, is it though? I could give you all sorts of proof that I’m currently writing this article, such as the fact that you are reading the article that I’m currently writing, but, there could still be questions about the legitimacy of that truth. You’re not watching me type it. And also, technically, I’m actually editing it, just writing an entirely new section to my original draft which expands my thoughts on something. That’s a fact that, I guess changes things. Also, by the time you’re actually reading this, I’m not actually writing it. The fact, in this situation, actually changed, because at some point I’ll have finished writing this and you can’t actually read it until I have it written.

But some facts don’t really seem like they should change, right? Like the fact that the Earth revolves around the Sun. Well, I mean, I guess we hold that to be true today, but obviously Galileo had some struggles when he presented this new fact to the Catholic Church back when the fact was that the Sun revolved around the Earth. In that situation, the facts didn’t actually matter unless they were the facts that the people in power wanted everyone else to believe.

Let’s take it one step further and bring up a concept that I know everyone can relate to. Creationism vs. Evolution. The majority of the world today believes one truth over the other and are convinced that the people who believe the other truth have been duped.

The truth is, we’re all a little confused about the truth. Even in the situation of Creationism vs. Evolution, we’re all forced to take the truth on a little bit of faith. Most of us haven’t done the research to be able to verify either of those options. We follow what we consider to be the most likely scenario. The one that makes sense to us. The truth that feels right.

Even in situations where we might know the truth that is “true”, that might not actually cause us to change our personally held truth. The idea that airplanes are one of the safest ways to travel won’t get those who are afraid of heights to consider them safer than cars. And I don’t think there is a single thing on this planet that can convince Terrence Howard that 1×1 doesn’t equal 2. I honestly don’t think you have to look very hard to find your own illogical logic that causes you to completely ignore the facts and hold to your own truth.

There’s an interesting book that you may have heard of, called 1984, which explores the concept of doublespeak. This is the idea that something you held to be true yesterday might not be considered true by the people in charge today. So, for instance, if we were fighting a war against China yesterday, it’s possible that today the government would tell us that we have never been at war with China. And we would all be expected to not only consider that the fact, but to believe it to be the truth.

The truth in that story is that we should be concerned that there are people who are withholding the truth from us. That reality might not be what we are told it is and that we are all being duped into believing falsehoods one way or another. While I think it’s a fantastic book, it’s also one which fully supports the concepts of conspiracy theorists. It one hundred percent tells us that the truth is not true.

And eighty years after Orwell published his most famous book, here we are, debating truth. Convinced that the people in power are pushing a lie, no matter which side of the political spectrum you fall on. And, let’s be honest here, there are definitely lies that are being pushed. Truths that aren’t as true as we are being told they are.

Which leads to situations like that of the COVID vaccines. While they have been proven to be safe and effective against COVID-19 and its many variants, we still have countless people unwilling to take the jab because they simply can’t believe that truth. While masks have been proven to reduce the risk of infection of this disease which recently surpassed the one million infections a day in our country, we have those who choose to believe this is an attack on our personal freedoms.

And if you’re completely honest with yourself, can’t you entirely blame them? We live in a world of doublespeak. We have an ex-President who led the charge for getting people vaccinated who, when the time came, wouldn’t even acknowledge whether he was willing to get the vaccine or not. He was vaccinated in secrecy. Why would this man, who should be given a great deal of credit for getting these vaccines out quickly, not want people to cheer at him getting vaccinated?

While I’ve talked at great length about how I believe everyone should be vaccinated, if you ever needed a reason to question the truth, it’s when a man who is known for his love of putting on a show, takes a big moment like taking the vaccine that he is responsible for, and doesn’t put on a show about it. In a presidency that ended on a sour note (you might argue that it was all sour notes, but even for his supporters it has to be a truth that ending a presidency with a pandemic isn’t exactly a great thing), why wouldn’t he want to go out with a bang, or, in this case, a very visible jab?

The truth is relative. And this is both a scary and a freeing thing. While it can allow for people to be who they feel they are inside, regardless of what they look like or what equipment they were born with, it also allows people to say that they don’t feel like they need to protect themselves (and more importantly, others) from a virus that has had absolutely tragic consequences across the globe and will for years after we manage to get it under some semblance of control.

Even more of note is how few of us actually care about finding the true truth. We don’t like to hear opposing viewpoints, and we like to present ours angrily as though we’re already at war with those who disagree with us.

Which, I guess isn’t all that crazy of a metaphor. We’ve been at war with the truth for forever. That’s why we can get mad at people like Bush Jr. for starting a war in Iraq while ignoring Obama’s implementation of unmanned drone strikes which were notorious for killing civilians. That’s why we can get mad at Obama for bailing out the automotive industry while ignoring that Bush Jr. did the same for the banks just a year earlier. This is why we can absolutely freak out at the allegations of sexual misconduct against Trump and Kavanaugh while electing a man into office who also has sexual allegations against him, by simply saying, “Well, it wasn’t as many”, or “They backed off the allegations”, or whatever other excuse I’ve heard about the thing.

Because we hold our own truth. And in many of the above cases, the truth on display is that “the other guys are evil”.

So, what do we do with this information? How do we go forward knowing that the truth is what we make of it?

Honestly, I don’t have a good answer, because I think the truth will always be different for different people. But perhaps, knowing that even your own held truths require a bit of faith, you can take a step back when someone is proclaiming their own truths to you and at least listen. Maybe your truth won’t change, but you could at least get a better understanding of why that person’s truth is true to them.

Like the truth that I’m finishing this post now and will schedule it for being on the blog next week.

Or am I?

Performing WITH an Audience

As I write this, it’s the morning after our first rehearsal with an audience for the murder mystery I wrote and am starring in, Lei’d to Rest – A Hula-Dunit Murder Mystery. I know I’ve talked a few times on here before about how how nerve-wracking this whole experience has been thus far. While this isn’t the first time I’ve written a play, it’s the first time I’ve actually been in one I’ve written, which means I have spent the past five weeks wondering if what I’ve written is any good.

This isn’t exactly the type of thing I generally write. It’s supposed to be funny, it’s highly interactive, and it’s loose with plotting in order to keep things as easy as possible for the folks who are drinking and eating while half-paying attention to what’s happening on the stage. This means that it mostly consists of trying to come up with the most simple of segues from one joke to the next, while trying to progress the story to the end in ways that aren’t entirely jarring.

Not to mention how I wrote this while trying to finish up editing on Moonshine Monarchy and having some of the hardest semesters I’ve had yet in school and having the kids around way more than they should be, meaning they would constantly be interrupting the little bits of progress I would make.

With all of that baggage behind the script for me personally, as well as my own insecurities as a performer, I went into last nights rehearsal feeling a lot of concern over how the audience would react to this goofy little thing I’ve crafted together in the nooks and crannies of my days.

But I’m happy to say that even with the roughness around the edges of our performances while we work out some of the final kinks of adding an audience and props and set pieces to a show that revolves around so many of these things that we’ve been either miming or skipping over entirely, we had an amazing audience response, where lines that have long lost their humor for the cast were making us all smile simply from the huge laughter they elicited from our awesome audience.

Sure, the crowd was stacked in our favor with family and friends and other theatre folks, but these guys managed to stay engaged and would break out into real laughter and generally appeared to have a fun time, even without the drinks and food. So, add in those little bits and I can only expect that our first performance on Friday will have me leaving the stage at the end of the show with a giant grin on my face, feeling as though I actually succeeded in doing something I really didn’t think I could do: Perform in a show I’ve written and actually come out of it feeling proud of what we’ve done.

And this morning, I’m sitting here thinking through the experience of last night, and feeling, for the first time since we’ve started rehearsals, really ready to get this thing in front of a truly fresh audience and see how they react to it.

I mean, I’m still hella nervous about it as well, but, well, I’m not as concerned about the script itself being useless, so that’s something.

Flash Fiction: The Island in the Sun

Derrick slowly sipped his brightly colored drink, watching from above as the red color drained from the crushed ice while more and more of the beverage slid down his throat. He sighed gleefully at the light burn of the rum on the back of his tongue.

Sitting in his position at the pool-side bar, half covered in water, he watched the bartender make a couple of white slushy drinks, which he guessed to be pina coladas, and determined what his next order would entail. He could already taste the creamy coconut flavor, even while he finished his strawberry daquiri.

This was what it was all about: The frou-frou drinks that only felt confident enough to order in a place like this all-inclusive Mexican resort. It was really probably the main reason he came to this place. While he liked to think of himself as being secure in his sexuality, he also knew that back home in Wisconsin, being seen with anything so bright and which smells so sweetly, would cause him to instantly face a barrage of insults from his friends at the other end of the bar.

Besides it was currently well-below freezing temperature back home, hardly a time for frozen drinks, unless he were to try to sneak in a grasshopper when no one was looking.

But here, the sun was bright, the drinks were cold, and the women were wearing barely anything. Coming from the frigid Wisconsin weather, where the women all wore layers upon layers in order to keep themselves warm, turning the hourglass figures into something more akin to a penguin, seeing this much skin on a woman felt like seeing them naked.

He was in paradise.

It was so great that he was almost able to convince himself he wasn’t daydreaming.

But then his phone beeped at him, reminding him of his 10am meeting, leading him to close the browser window where he had been shopping for a vacation he knew he could never take. He adjusted the space heater by his feet, leaned back in his chair, and sighed once more.

It might not have been real, but it certainly felt that way, if only for a moment.

Coffee = Life

An interview with Jeff Goldblum recently revealed how the actor decided to cut coffee out of his life because he felt it was a mental crutch, something he needed in order for his brain to work. And I don’t think I’ve ever heard a more true statement.

I used to be a five+ cup a day kinda guy, needing to have a constant drip of caffeine into my bloodstream so that I could continue to function until the end of the day. I had a difficult time turning down a cup whenever it was offered to me, even when I would be at a restaurant and someone would suggest an after-dinner cuppa. This was at the same time when I was drinking multiple Dr. Peppers a day as well, which means that me and caffeine were inextricably linked.

Nowadays I’m down to just two cups a day in the morning (they’re pretty big cups though…). Sometimes I have some of those Crystal Light w/ caffeine drinks in the afternoon, but it’s probably been months since I’ve even had any of those in the house. Which means that the Adam of today has significantly less caffeine in his diet than the Adam of even a year ago.

However, I too have found myself in the same boat as Mr. Goldblum on many occasions, thinking that I should probably give up the good old black stuff. In fact, I’ve managed a few times in my life to cut out caffeine from my routine for brief periods, usually when I’ve determined that I need to do whatever I can to fix my insomnia. But those were always intentionally short-lived diets, never expected to be something I would stick to.

However, back at the start of the pandemic, in good old March of 2020, I was actually at a point where I was ready to give it all up entirely. At this point I had severely cut back on my drinking and had moved away from most chemical dependencies, leaving me only to the morning cups of coffee that I find myself needing so badly. And I was ready. I was ready to finally remove myself from my dependence.

But something about having the kids home 24/7 while you’re still trying to work and do school put all of that on the back burner. In fact, all of the forward momentum I had made on things like drinking also slid back. I found myself going back to my old ways of coping with stress and depression.

These are all things that I’m actively back to working on being where I was in March of 2020, but the one thing that I find myself struggling with more than any of it is, well, coffee.

Because I do find it as a mental crutch. I can barely open my eyes in the morning before I have my first sip, much less actually think through complete sentences. I grunt orders at my kids while they slowly get through their morning routines to get off to school, wondering if I’ll ever actually be able to wake up.

And I don’t want to pretend that I’ll suddenly be a morning person simply because I cut out coffee, but I would like to think that perhaps, considering how much of a different person I become after taking those first sips, that I might, at least, be able to be more like me if I could cut off the dependency.

So, in light of Mr. Goldblum’s interview, I’m starting to think that perhaps it is time to once again head into the unknown.

But it might not be until after I finish college…

What Comes Next?

Heck folks, today’s a day where I find myself questioning some of those existential pieces of life, specifically, what the heck am I going to do?

There have been a number of times, generally in job interviews, where I have been asked about my five year plan. Often when I’m asked these questions, I have a fairly generalized idea of what I want my five year plan to be, but not only is it not entirely fully formed, it’s also usually something I’m too embarrassed to talk about, or, more particularly, isn’t something that I’d want to talk about in a job interview. Things like: “Well, I’d like to be writing full-time” or “Retired” aren’t really the answers they are looking for in those situations. So, I generally come up with some BS answer that is somewhat true, like “Well, I don’t have a solid strategy, but I’d like to be doing something where I can really flex my skills and talents and improve the situation for whatever business I’m working for”.

It’s answers like that which are probably a big part of the reason I don’t do very well in interviews.

However, as I’m nearing the end of my program in school, looking down the barrel of another six months (although I’m actually flying through courses at top speed right now, so I’m hoping to be able to cut that short), I find that I really don’t have a plan for what to do with this new degree once I’ve gotten it. Since I’m studying in Information Science and Technology, it obviously doesn’t offer much in the way of a creative writing career, but I knew that going in. In fact, all it really does is allow me to possibly make a significantly larger amount of money for doing the exact same jobs I’m already doing.

And also, in theory, gives me a bit more breadth of options in selecting the types of places I’d like to work for.

But herein lies the issue. While I obviously decided to go to school to be able to make more money in order to be able to prepare for things like my kids going to college and my own retirement, it wasn’t exactly like I chose this career path because it’s something I consider particularly interesting, just that it is something I’m good at, have a ton of experience in, should be able to have a much easier time getting job opportunities if I have this piece of paper.

But with this time and financial investment I’ve put into my schooling these last two years, I’m realizing now is the time I should really probably develop one of those five-year plans everyone’s been talking to me about for forever. A pretty crazy thing to finally start thinking about at the ripe age of 40.

And the answer to the question is still pretty much the same. If I could make a plan based off of my own actual wants and desires, I’d be focusing on my writing. But since writing is notoriously bad at paying out, I actually need to develop a plan that focuses on an actual paying career, relegating my writing still to that hobbyist place in my heart, while still trying to do it as professionally as possible (my professionalism could come into question with the large portion of yesterday I spent trying to come up with double entendres for the show I’m working on).

For someone who spends a significant amount of time plotting out the lives and actions of fictional characters, you’d think I’d be able to develop some sort of plotline for my own life. And yet, here I am, looking at the haziness of my own future and not being able to pull the trigger on any one direction outside of just following where the wind takes me.

Which, I guess, has treated me fairly well thus far, so maybe my five year plan is really to just hope that things continue to go well?

I’ll see how that works as an answer for my next interview.

The Karate Kids

When we first moved back to the city, we were excited to see that there was a karate dojo just a couple blocks away from our new home. Our boys were excited at least. And during the time it took for me and the wife to get comfortable in the new digs, a pandemic shot up across the country, so we decided that although we were interested in getting the boys into something that would work out some of their extra energy, while also possibly helping them to learn some self-discipline, we also weren’t really sure that we should bring them into a building with a bunch of young kids exercising and breathing heavily and all around breaking the rules of the pandemic.

But by the time Christmas this year rolled around and we were seeing that things were getting better around the world, not to mention that both of them were now vaccinated, we decided to finally give in to their pleas for joining the martial arts club, and we reintroduced one of the most 1980s things possible to our house, karate. (And yes, I know, we’re back into the danger zone of the pandemic, and…well…they probably should be back to hiding in our house again)

Which, of course, brought me right back to my own childhood. When Ralph Macchio and Pat Morita first brought The Karate Kid to screens across the world, it was instantly a moment where all of us little kids knew that we needed to learn how to awesomely take down our bullies with sweet-ass crane kicks. We didn’t really notice all the nuanced character development, or the story of a drunken old man slowly learning how to care for a kid who wasn’t his own, or the story of a mother who was purely struggling to get by, thereby missing out on what her kid was doing while she was hustling to be able to pay for their rental. We didn’t see the power struggle of a man running his own karate dojo as he worked to convince the world that he was badder than Shaft himself.

No, we saw sweet karate kicks and an underdog actually managing to take home the trophy (and the girl, I guess, but let’s be honest, we didn’t notice that either. How could you when Mr. Miyagi managed to get John Kreese to absolutely destroy both his hands by ducking out of the way so he would punch out a couple of car windows?)

I’ve watched the original Karate Kid countless times, even as an adult, and am always amazed by not only how much that film holds up over time, but how much more there was to that movie than just something which popularized the martial arts in a way that had never been seen in this country before. And now that we’ve got Cobra Kai bringing it all back, mostly for the same people who fell in love with these characters ages ago, it seems only fitting that my kids are being introduced to the world of martial arts, even if my own career as a student of karate only lasted about six months.

However, I’ve watched the couple of lessons they’ve sat in on so far, and…it’s really painful to watch. I’m not a fighter, and definitely not someone who is skilled in any way in how to punch or kick appropriately, which should really highlight exactly how bad my kids are at the same things. I watch these two try to kick and punch and cringe as they almost fall over while trying to simply move their bodies.

I guess that’s a good indicator of how much I’ve taught them to be peaceful, but still, I might have to keep paying for them to stay there just so they can learn some freaking balance.