day 173: recovery

forms:

• 64 palms side B

Saturday was a slow-moving day. turnout was a little low, and everyone was moving at a pretty leisurely pace. i think a lot of it was a post-tournament hangover, with everyone still recovering from the prior weekend trip to the Las Vegas tournament and the immediately subsequent disciple ceremony (more on this below). that, and i also think that everyone was in the process of trying to catch up on a lot of school and work that had been postponed because the tournament, meaning that everyone's mind was otherwise occupied.

i should note that Sifu and several other members of his generation in the Wutan organization (Masters Yang, Hom, Wong, and Su) conducted a disciple ceremony the previous Monday (Labor Day), with several senior students from Kurt Wong's school and our school being officially inducted as disciples into the Wutan system. it was a pretty formal ceremony, and a reflection of Sifu's plans to try and institutionalize Wutan Los Angeles as a formal branch of the international Wutan organization.

i would have taken pictures of the ceremony, but the battery in my camera died (booooooooo!!!), and so i have nothing really to show. i can say that it was typical of most ceremonies you see for induction into any organization, with formalities and oaths and celebration. but it was also different, in the sense that 1) it followed a lot of Chinese traditions, none of which i am familiar with, 2) it was in Mandarin (sic?), of which i know nothing, and 3) involved some secret lessons (well, sort of...it was not so secret in the sense that the doors were still open when they were presented, but it was still secret in the sense that everything was in Mandarin and so i didn't have a clue about anything that was said, raid, or fed). it was, to say the least, intriguing. i'll leave it at that.

64 palms side B

Sifu announced his plan to begin refinement of 64 palms side B. he wanted to wrap up the refinement of side A, and then spend some time on side B, which should consolidate everyone's form enough to enable learning forest palms. he instructed Phunsak to lead the review of side B, and then went to work with the baji and mantis students.

we spent the remainder of class on side B, doing several iterations of each palm (the usual 8 per palm) along a line. i took some time during breaks to also go through some of side A, just to refresh my memory.

most everyone went to lunch at the end of class, but i had to skip it today, since i had to meet a friend of mine at UCLA to have him show me the library system.