Tag: martial arts

The First Full Week of the New Year

John Winkelman

About this time last year, when it became apparent that the COVID-19 pandemic would continue for the foreseeable future, I set about putting together a daily routine for the weekday mornings. This routine included working out, reading, writing, playing with the cats, and generally relaxing and preparing for the workday. I managed to stick with this routine until I received my first COVID vaccination shot at the beginning of April, at which point the stress and anxiety which had been powering my life to that point evaporated, and so did my routine. After my second shot at the end of April I tried to pick it up again, but other life stressors appeared and, while I managed to do some minimal workouts and writing, all of this went away at the beginning of September when my mother passed away. The writing picked up again in the beginning of November with NaNoWriMo, but I haven’t had a good steady week of morning workouts in almost a year.

So here I am at the start of 2022, with a renewed sense of purpose, if not exactly renewed energy. I am 52 (and a half!), and don’t have the deep well of mojo I had in my twenties, or even in my forties.

But a routine is a good framework around which to build a day, and mine looks something like this:

5:00: wake up, feed cats
5:10 – 6:30: calisthenics, chi kung, kung fu and tai chi forms practice
6:30 – 8:00: write
8:00 – 8:30: read or more writing
8:30 – 17:00: work prep, work
17:30 – 18:00: stationary bicycle, hand/arm/grip conditioning

For the rest of the day I relax with my girlfriend, read a little more, play with the cats, work on projects around the house, and maybe watch some TV. Repeat each day of the work week. Weekends are open time when Zyra and I do whatever suits our mood.

For writing I also planned a monthly routine, which involves setting aside the first full week of the month for editing and submitting, and using the rest of the month for writing. As this is the first full week of January, I am using my time in the mornings to catalog and sort all the poems I wrote in 2021, as well as reviewing the large pile of short stories, completed or otherwise, which await my attention.

 

2021 In Review

John Winkelman

Poe and Pepper, asleep on my lap

Oh, 2021 was a hell of a year. I don’t think there’s any argument there. It was certainly one of the most stressful and uncertain years in my life. The successive waves of COVID variants spreading through the world, accompanied by hundreds of thousands of deaths in the USA, and millions more in the rest of the world, made it difficult to concentrate on anything beyond getting from one day to the next. It wasn’t just that the news (as well as the “news”) was distracting; it was that in the context of a global pandemic, everything else seemed a little (or a lot) less important.

Relationship

The high point of 2021, no doubt about it, was my relationship with my partner Zyra, who I have been with for a little over four years, and with whom I have been cohabiting for a little over two. We continue to find comfort and joy in each others’ presence, and are good at working through moments of stress and friction and coming out the other side, closer and stronger.

In April, Zyra officially started her business Gallafe (pronounced “GALA-fey”), making Filipino food and selling it at the Fulton Street and Holland Farmer’s Markets. She also began holding popup dinner specials on alternating Fridays, as well as the occasional Sunday brunch offering and a regular delivery to the South East Market. She has made amazing progress in a short amount of time, and this in the second year of an ongoing pandemic. I have been assisting her where I can, primarily with massages and running errands. And as of the last day of the year, she can be found on DoorDash, if you are in Grand Rapids and search for Asian food or simply “Gallafe.”

Last Christmas we picked up a new cat, Pepper, from the same Upper Peninsula farm where we adopted Poe the year before. Being from the same colony as Poe, they are related in at least one way. They are certainly cousins, though Poe might also be Pepper’s aunt, at no more that two steps removed.

As Zyra recently pointed out, Pepper is Poe’s emotional support animal. The cats have been an absolute joy, providing Zyra and I with endless entertainment and affection, and offering a release valve of sorts for our relationship, giving us other living creatures to focus our attentions on, which was vital for the long days of us having no other human interaction than with each other. Having lived with cats for two years now, I can’t imagine ever going back to a pet-free household.

Martial Arts

Master Lee’s School of Tai Chi Praying Mantis Kung Fu and Tai Chi Jeung continued to meet throughout this past year, online from January through the middle of March, and outside at Wilcox Park in the Eastown neighborhood of Grand Rapids through the end of October. We are now holding hybrid classes, in person at From the Heart Yoga and Tai Chi Center, the studio senior instructor Rick Powell runs with his wife Behnje Masson. We have a camera set up so students who are not comfortable practicing in person can participate remotely.

I and our other assistant instructor Tracy also hold informal “office hours” over Zoom to assist students in the time between classes, which has been a big help for the remote-only students, as well as a morale booster for me, because it provides a little more human interaction, which has been sorely restricted for the past two years.

We are able to practice about 75% of our pre-COVID curriculum. Out of an abundance of caution we are forgoing most drills and exercises which involve more than incidental personal contact. We hope that this will change as we move into the new year, but with new COVID variants spreading through the country we are trying to be patient. Better to have to re-learn a few skills in a year than to be the vector for one of our students becoming seriously ill.

Reading

2021 was a good year for reading. I started the year with Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, which I have tried but failed to complete several times of the past three decades, but this time I made it through to the end. And I ended the year with Dostoevsky’s The Eternal Husband and Other Stories, as it seemed appropriate to book-end the year with classic Russian literature. In between I was all over the place, reading genre and literary fiction, a wide variety of nonfiction, and many books of poetry. The grand total for the year was 57 books and over 120 short stories read.

Writing

Much to my surprise, considering how 2020 sputtered and ground to a halt at the beginning of November, 2021 was an excellent year for writing. I completed drafts of two short stories and over 30 poems, and am over halfway done with the pre-first draft of my NaNoWriMo book Racing the Flood Down to the Sea.

Friends and Family

This is where 2021 was the worst. I lost four friends this year, and in early September my mother, Sharon Prine, passed away just after her 84th birthday. Surprisingly, none of them died of COVID, which shows that even in the middle of this pandemic, the mundane world is still taking its toll.

So I will go into 2022 with holes in my life in the shape of Simon, Bill, Caroline, Beth, and Mom.

Work

I am still employed at the same company, and plan to remain here until I either retire or am made redundant. For most of the year I have been on one project, which in other years would become boring and unsatisfying, but for this year, predictability and stability are very much a good thing. And I am learning many new skills.

To Sum Up

I am glad that 2021 is over. Though I had some small personal triumphs and accomplishments, overall it was a year full of hellish stress, and though I am resigned to the fact that whatever is going on now is likely the New Normal, I am tired of reacting to the slings and arrows, or waiting for them to find another target. If I have a  goal or resolution for the new year it is to begin digging myself out of the deep funky hole I have been in for most of the past two years.

52, or 2 x 2 x 13

John Winkelman

Me at 52

As of this morning, I have been out in the world for 52 years and a few hours. Actually I’m probably still asleep as this posts, as I usually schedule these things for the early hours of the morning, and this year my birthday falls on a Saturday. Of course I’m usually awake at 5:00, seven days a week thanks to the the two furry orange maniacs which have entered my life in the past year.

Poe and Pepper have been a constant source of attention and affection and stress relief in the COVID times. Zyra and I probably owe no small part of the health of our relationship to our cats, who have provided such entertainment while we endured the quarantine which is finally lifting.

Here at the beginning of June, most of the restrictions here in Michigan are lifted, and the remaining ones will likely be removed on July 1. One year and four months which changed the world in ways we will still be discovering a decade from now.

I have attempted in the past to write birthday posts, but being as close to my life as I am, it is difficult to form the necessary distance in order to write about it from the outside. The passage of time helps, but that means that I can only write about those events which have occurred between the bounding horizons of the moderately recent past, where subject slowly becomes object, and the event horizon of memory where I can no longer be sure the things I remember are the the things which happened, or things I invented to fill in the gaps. I am 52 years old. That’s a lot of lived experience, during much of which I wasn’t paying attention.

I have been with the same employer now for seven years. Ten, if you count my time at Cynergy before my current employer bought us, lock stock and barrel. Ten of my 22 years as a web developer. That is by far the longest I have been with a single employer. I have to say, as a middle-aged techie, stability is a Good Thing.

When I turned 51 I was nearing the middle of a crazy project which had me working second and third shift for two months, then a long and late first shift for two months. During springtime I was able to attend the martial arts class maybe twice. When we switched to first shift, which roughly coincided with the class moving to Wilcox Park after almost three months of meeting on Zoom, I felt my age. It has been a running theme among my tai chi classmates that, as we age, other people in our cohort seem so much older than we are. As I discovered, two months without regular sleep and regular exercise are all that stand between Us and Them.

With a more regular schedule I found more time to read and write and edit, and in October of 2020 one of my short stories was accepted for publication at Coffin Bell. The story was published in January 2021. This was a big deal for me, made even bigger by the fact that this was my first unsolicited piece of prose to be published. I have other publication credits, but they were solicited for specific publication. “Occupied Space” was the first to be rescued after being sent out into the wild.

I started my 51st year with profound sleep deprivation, an unemployed and injured girlfriend, extreme social anxiety, and a small orange cat. Here at the start of my 52nd year I am experiencing mild sleep deprivation, my girlfriend is busy starting her own company, I am vaccinated and therefore feel comfortable out in the world, and we have two small orange cats.

Oh: and in the past year Donald Trump, the conservative white supremacist sex predator, failed to be re-elected, like he has failed at everything else in his life except being a sexual predator and a white supremacist. I laugh out loud every time I pass a “Trump/Pence 2020” sign on my way to visit my parents. And since there is a lot of rural Michigan between here and there, I see a lot of those signs.

So 51 started low and improved steadily. If 52 continues the same trajectory the next year should be amazing.

They Grow Up So Quickly

John Winkelman

The 3288 Review, vol. 1 issue 1

It’s here. It has landed. The first issue of The 3288 Review is out and available for purchase. How do I feel about this? Hmm…let me think…

BOOYAH!!!

…or words to that effect.

I took a personal day on Friday so I would have a a full four-day weekend. Rolled into the Caffeinated Press offices around 11:00am, and right at the stroke of noon UPS arrived with five boxes full of magazines. 100 copies of the inaugural issue. They are beautiful! Three full months of hard work, long days, late nights, and learning the Ten Great Skills (page layout, InDesign, etc) and the Thousand Minor Skills (talking to people, avoiding Papyrus and Comic Sans, etc).

It has all paid off! Responses from the viewing public are enthusiastic and orders are starting to roll in. Close to half of the initial print run are already spoken for. With any luck we will need to place another order by the end of the week.

In the other parts of my life, the martial arts class has recently been ascendant. On August 11 I and my friend and classmate Rick loaded bags into a rented van and drove Master Lee and his wife and his visitors from Vietnam to see the Niagara Falls (Canadian side). It was a great trip! We heard several stories of what class was like back in The Day in Saigon. Rick reminisced about his trips to New York and back, when he would pull up to the falls and sleep for a couple of hours before continuing the drive.

I have never been to the Falls. They are amazing! Huge and powerful and the rumble starts in the feet and rises up through the viscera and makes everything seem just the slightest bit out of focus. At one point the walkway overlooks the edge of the falls and you can look straight down the cataract to the lower river. Here I felt a strong pull, like the falling water was calling to the 60% of me which is also water. After five minutes staring at falling water, everything else I looked at seemed to rise slightly.

It Gives a Lovely Light

John Winkelman

Hello, my friends and foes. Wow, what a summer this has been. A series of semi-connected data points follow.

Caffeinated Press

The new office of Caffeinated Press feels like an office! I work the day job from there a couple of days a week, next to an open window serenaded by songbirds in Ken-O-Sha Park and traffic accidents at the intersection of Kalamazoo Ave and 32nd Street. The first issue of The 3288 Review is on track to hit the shelves by the end of the month. Half a dozen books creep ever-closer to production. We have several seminars on the calendar, centered on the getting published side of the writing process. Everyone is exhausted, but excited. Once we have a catalog we can register with the larger professional organizations and that will, we expect, open the flood-gates of submissions. I think I have read around 300,000 words of unpublished manuscripts and poetry over the past six months. 300,000 words in six months isn’t really all that much, but for me usually those words have other peoples’ eye-prints all over them. Thus I feel a certain responsibility to those words.

Martial Arts

Our annual Sifu Day celebration took place yesterday downtown. Loads and loads of food, an iron shirt demonstration, and half an hour of hamming it up with posed photos. We are blessed by the presence of some of Master Lee’s students from Saigon – the same people who showed Rick and I the sights in Vietnam this past October. In a couple of days Rick and I will travel with the whole lot of them on an overnight trip to Niagara Falls.

I am embarrassingly far behind in posting photos of the previous year or so of class events. Once the Caffeinated Press workload dies down I will spend a long weekend getting caught up.

Work

As of today I am off of the crazy project which kept me burning the midnight oil for most of July. All of the extra time I hoped to have during the hiatus from the iron shirt class was co-opted by the day job. Thus the upcoming burning the midnight oil for CafPress. On the positive side, I learned a lot more about advanced Backbone/Marionette programming techniques. This can only help me going forward, if I ever work on another Backbone project.

Life

Still making plans for upgrades to my house, now that I have paid off the mortgage. The bank account is rebuilding more slowly than expected because of the amount of cash I invest in CafPress. Ah, the life of the startup entrepreneur. Practically, all that means is that the work which would have happened in the autumn will now happen in spring 2016, and spring 2016 work will now happen in autumn 2016. Big expensive projects over long time spans, and I want it all to happen NOW.

The Farmer’s Market is at its peak. Almost everything in the world is in season right now. Two weeks ago I was in during the magic time when strawberries, blueberries and sweet cherries were all ripe. It’s difficult to gain weight on a vegetarian diet, but during times like these it is possible, and also delicious.

Random Stuff

I haven’t had a lot of time for entertainment and amusements this summer. Based on a conversation with Jack Ridl I picked up Mile Marker Zero, the story of The Scene in Key West just after Hemingway’s time there. A week ago I watched Paris at Midnight, Woody Allen’s beautiful exploration of wistfulness and acceptance and the literary scene in the Paris of the 1920s (which also involved Hemingway). There’s a meditation to be written on the confluence of these two experiences.

And now off to work on the magazine. These pages won’t write themselves.

Last Day of May, 2015

John Winkelman

Sitting in the Lyon Street Cafe with a journal book, a notebook, a Chromebook, Esperanza Street, and Rudy Rucker‘s recently released Journals 1990-2014. The work book, apparently, covers a lot of ground.

June approaches, and with it a titanic pile of work. In the day job the current project will hit the “WE HAVE ONE MONTH LEFT” milestone tomorrow. In Master Lee’s class we have one week until the Festival of the Arts performance. Rick and I are fitting in private practice sessions whenever we can, to offset the time we spend teaching in class.

But the biggest news involves Caffeinated Press, and it comes in two parts. First, today is the last day for submission to Brewed Awakenings II, the house anthology of short stories. Tomorrow we start looking at all of the submissions and figuring out which ones will make it into the anthology. I don’t know the exact submission count, but I do know it is probably closer to 100 than it is to 50.

The second is The 3288 Review. Submissions are rolling in. At the same time we are working on the website (going live very soon!) and meeting frequently to hash out the final details of design, distribution, etc.

Oh yeah: June is when we set up our new office space on Kalamazoo Ave, just south of 28th Street.

In the spare moments left after all of this, I still have a house to maintain and numerous repairs and upgrades.

And at some point I will need sleep and/or food.

Hello, April!

John Winkelman

Well, it’s been a quiet week here in Lake Wobegon Grand Rapids, near the shores of Lake Michigan. Spring has sprung with the crocuses running rampant in neighborhood lawns and our first, albeit brief, thunderstorm Thursday morning. Work has been quiet thanks to the one hand being out of synch with the other, though that will likely change very soon. Bench time is a precious commodity and not to be wasted on frivolous pursuits. We will shortly move into our new office space on the fourth floor of 99 Monroe Ave, overlooking, um, Z’s Bar and Restaurant.

Energy level in Master Lee’s classes is still high. The students are practicing hard, and we are giving them a lot to practice. We have two upcoming events – our annual demonstration at the Grand Rapids Festival of the Arts on Saturday, June 6; and our Sifu Day celebration on August 8. We seem to have passed a tipping point of some kind and have a lot of students suddenly learning more advanced forms.

Caffeinated Press is going strong! We have at least three novels in the editing pipeline and many stories submitted for Brewed Awakenings II. The 3288 Review is approaching the edge of the precipice where it goes from being an idea to being A Thing. I have a stack of lit journals on my coffee table which is approaching two feet tall. We are homing in on the format we want, and from there on to the amount of content we can have for each issue. Then we need to figure out advertising, distribution, compensation, all that fun stuff.

All this is lead-up to our community introduction event at Schuler Books and Music this upcoming Monday, April 6, at 7:00pm. We hope to see a room-full of writers to whom we can offer our services as editors and publishers. Word on the street is that we will have something close to a full house. I am allowing myself to be cautiously optimistic. Regardless, We can expect a significant surge in submissions.

All of which is to say, Spring will be busy, and summer likely moreso. But all in a good way.

Early-Mid March Update 2015

John Winkelman

The first taste of Spring is in the air. The thermometer on my car read “42” briefly yesterday afternoon in the parking lot outside of Pho Soc Trang. Of course the huge bowl of pho contained within my corporeal self could have been throwing off the reading.

Caffeinated Press has hit the ground running! Our first event at the UICA attracted at least 30 people to listen to authors read excerpts and publishers discuss their craft. Our pool of editorial talent continues to grow, and the spring melt is causing our trickle of submissions to grow to a small stream. In addition to book-length manuscripts we are accepting short form submissions for both the Autumn 2015 edition of Brewed Awakenings and the inaugural edition of the 3288 Review literary journal.

Master Lee’s school is still going strong. We just elevated one of our senior students to instructor status. It was well deserved. Congratulations, Tracy! Now the real work begins.

One of our students from Back In The Day, Han Lin, is in town this weekend. His contribution to the class, both as a martial artist and as a translator for some of the finer points of Master Lee’s instructions, cannot be overstated.

Over the past year we have had a few students return to class after long absences. Hearing them talk about how the class has changed, and how it has stayed the same, reinforces just how long I have been a student. Hearing them ask about other people who have themselves been absent for long periods of time. Seeing how much they remember of old, old lessons. Realizing how much the style has evolved under Master Lee. Being immersed in the system, it is sometimes difficult to get a sense for how influential it is on our lives, and hearing it from people who have left and returned is a valuable lesson.

As for reading, most of mine has been short stories by members of the local writing group. I have managed to get about 75% of the way through The Three Body Problem, by Liu Cixin. I really like it so far! Engaging, interesting, complex story; and the translation by Ken Liu displays a masterful level of precision – as should be expected from a writer like Liu.

As for my own writing, it has slowed considerably as I devote more time to Caffeinated Press. I am concentrating more on revising than writing. Two of my short stories have been through first reads, and two more are still out in the wild. The reader notes have been both encouraging and eye-opening. This is the first time, I think, that more than one or two people have read anything I have written which I intend to publish. The work never ends, but every step is rewarding.

That’s it for the moment. Work will send me to Chicago during the week of St. Patrick’s Day. Maybe I’ll get to see the river dyed green.