Semi-Charmed Life

Monday Morning Thoughts

I've been extremely busy lately. Not the good kind of busy nor the bad kind of busy, but just busy. It feels like there are just not enough hours in the day. I started a new gig where I have to be in the office by 6:30am. This is what my schedule looks like Monday through Friday

5:20am: Wake up
6:30am - 4:30pm: Work
6:00pm - 7:30pm: Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu
8:45pm - 10:30pm: Get home, shower, eat, check all the websites that are blocked at work (email, fb, etc.), then sleep.

Rinse and repeat.

If I sleep any later than 10:30pm, I feel like shit the next day. One or two days of the week I substitute BJJ with the gym. A friend of mine joined the same gym, so it's nice to have someone to work out with.

I just did my first no-gi class in BJJ last night. It was fun but it felt completely different. It's weird not to have the grips on the gi to use, and the pace feels so much faster. I just placed an order for two of Matt Thornton's DVDs (FJKD3, disc 1 & 2). Expensive as hell. It's 39 a pop and there's 9 DVDs in the set. I only ordered the first two because it'll probably be more than enough for me to digest. The reviews were good, so I can't wait to check it out. The next DVD set I want to get is Brandon Quick's Fade to Black. It's supposed to be an amazing instructional, focusing on chokes.

In other news, if anyone has been following the news at all they might know about the shooting that happened in Binghamton on Friday. I went to SUNY Binghamton, and the place where the shooting happened was a few blocks away from the house I used to live at. This is a tragedy. I don't know why these mass murdering rampages have been so common in the past several years, starting with Columbine.

Anyway, I was upset to find out that the shooter was Asian. A friend of mine remarked how he thought it was funny how I got worked up about the fact that he was Asian. This is a tragedy regardless of his race/ethnicity/religion, but I cringed when I found out he was Asian because we have been in the media lately for some crazy shit. There's the Virginia Tech psycho. Then the Canadian guy who decapitated someone on a bus, and another Virginia Tech guy who decapitated a woman in a coffee shop. Now this.

I don't want people to have the impression that Asians are repressed psychotic individuals who will snap at any moment. May be a little too late for that though.

Anyway, as I was reading the paper this morning, some of the accounts from the survivors really got to me. One man told of how he wanted to protect his wife because all he could think about was how he needed her to be alive to raise their two children. He threw his body over hers to protect her, but a bullet that hit him went right through and fatally wounded her. He stayed with her body for over an hour until the authorities came in. Tragic.

So many senseless murders lately that it's almost becoming the norm. I just read this morning about the guy in Seattle who killed his five children and finally himself. It was discovered that he snapped because his wife had planned to leave him.

What's wrong with the world today?

I started this post on a positive note and now it's ending on a sad one.