Maybe he spoke to me because I did a couple of katas to warm up before class at my gym today. A potbellied man my age (or possibly quite a bit younger) told me, without preamble, that he used to run hurdles in high school & that he's only taking this class because he has a muscle strain. He seems to have had the same idea I did before I actually took an Aurora "old folks" class, that I would show those doddering decrepits a thing or 2. Ha! First class I could barely keep up. OK, hurdles. Then that he had just been elected to his home state's hall of fame. Men & their egos. Any competence, even an unrelated one, in a woman can quickly bring out the urge to one-up us. As Frank O'Hara writes in the great essay or rather manifesto "Personism": If someone's chasing you down the street with a knife you just run, you don't turn around and shout, "Give it up! I was a track star for Mineola Prep." He was talking about that in the context of writing poetry ("you just go on your nerve" but apparently my (very nice) kata was mugging him.
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