#50 - five-o with taiko

happy 50th post birthday to me! i thought i'd cap off 50 posts to this blog by reminding myself why i started it in the first place. looking back at my first post, i started this blog to faciliate the expansion of my life. a way to make a symbolic turn away from everyday monotony and encourage myself to discover what life has to offer and to decide which elements of that i want in my life. so far i think i'm on the right track... ready to move out of the parents' house, feeling comfortable and confident in my career, got my ambitions pointed in the right directions (even if i'm not quite there yet). so this post is about something that i've wanted to do for a long time and finally worked up the courage to do so.

as a kid my parents wanted me in sports (actually, i think they were really worried that since i was such a small kid that i wouldn't be able to "fend for myself" if they didn't breed me into competition or martial arts or something like that, bs), and even though i loved playing sports, i didn't like competition or coaches or a lot of the other kids (they were all mililani brats, haha). so even though i had fun in each sport, i grew tired of them very quickly because of all that other stuff that came along with playing (i.e. potlucks, getting yelled at, mosquito bites). therefore i was shuttled through all the major sports between kindergarten and 7th grade, soccer, baseball, basketball, aikido, korean karate, and finally tennis (which i regret was the last sport i learned and not the first).

but i had this lingering interest in taiko, well, i didn't see it very often, just once in awhile and then right after seeing it i'd tell my parents i wanted to do it, but they'd tell me that i couldn't because of soccer practice or aikido (which backfired on them because then i grew to hate those sports even more, up to the point where it was an all-out screaming match every tuesday/thursday when it was time for practice... grr.. i'm getting mad even thinking about it, this was a serious parenting error on their part as far as i'm concerned because i've developed a great deal of animosity toward them and their authority because of this conflict... in fact, i probably joined marching band just because practices were on the same nights as korean karate class and by that time i HATED anything that my parents wanted me to do and they forced me to go to that class). hmm... okay, so now i'm kinda p.o.ed and off-topic... but anyway, my advice to future parents: follow your kid's interests. it's no use fighting them on what they want to do with their life, you can only force your will on them so much. and kids won't understand that you're just trying to look out for them by making them take marital arts because they need to protect themselves, they'll just see that you're making them do something against their will when you should be fostering their variety of interests. i'm glad that i learned a bunch of different sports and i sure feel more well-rounded having at least a basic knowledge and skill level in each, but i wish that i had been allowed to explore a lot more different interests and was not forced (tooth and nail, for years) to do those that i had lost interest in.

GRR! okay, now that i'm trying to get back to the topic of this post, so now i'm taking taiko (finally) and it's completely awkward to me right now. granted, it's only my first couple of classes, but i feel like i've suddenly grown two new arms and i have no idea what to do with them. but, at least the class is pretty non-intimidating so i don't mind looking like an idiot, ha, and hopefully i'll get the hang of it soon. well, let's stop writing now before i get angry again... it's a good thing to learn something new. new hobbies, new people to interact with, this is the direction that i'd like my life to go.

next up: nicole & neil's wedding