Too sleepy to think of a title

Was just dinking around on google (looking up some song lyrics) and this blog post from someone named Jezza came up randomly:

"today i pledge to take responsibility for my life and for what makes me happy. it may sound simple but it's a task that requires unwaivering committment. i get one shot at life and i'm going to give it my all."

It was Jezza's birthday that day. Happy birthday to Jezza and thanks for the reminder about living life vigilantly to ensure it's everything you want it to be, not to mention the fact that it's sometimes difficult. (Is it wrong that I wanted to correct her spelling on "waivering?" The way she spelled it has a different meaning, assuming the gerund form is actually a word.)

(And yes. I noticed "committment" too. I just didn't want to be totally jerky. I'll let the lack of caps slide, though I don't know what e. e. cummings would say.)

Fittingly, I'm eating cake, left over from Carla, Tristan, and Lisa's birthdays (Carla, Tristan, and Lisa are all my co-workers at the store. Well, Carla owns the place with Gilberto), which were all this past weekend. Happy birthday to all of them! Nope, it's not a cheat day. So since the cake is full o' carbs, I'm eating a bunch of beef jerky with it so I can stay in the Zone, and maybe enjoy the cake but not feel all addicted to the sugar. Strange combo, but no stranger than 6 slices of turkey, an apple, a handful of broccoli and 3 olives.

Okay, maybe a tiny bit stranger. But I wanted cake. As Danny noted, it is happiness flavored. It's one of those grocery store cakes that has all kinds of artificial ingredients, a crapload of icing, and little pieces of Snickers as decoration. Come on. How could I not have cake? (And beef jerky?)

Plus, it's Halloween. Ron and Danny are dressed like gladiators. Lisa is dressed like a pirate. I am dressed like the buzzkill that I am--it didn't even occur to me to find a costume. But I took pictures of them--them and Tristan's python Balthazar, which they fed some mice today--and they said I could post them. So I'll do that eventually.

I've been kind of sleepy and out of it lately. I'm training and doing CrossFit as much as ever, which means getting up at 5:30am on M, W, and F, and staying on the mat as late as 10pm some nights. But add to that the fact that I have started to teach my online courses (one on program evaluation and one on writing for research) and will be picking up a consulting project this week, and you have a busy, sleepy me. It's just hectic because my learning curve for the courses is steep and the deadline for the consulting gig is only about 6 weeks away.

But Val needs some money, and is pretty fortunate she can make a decent amount and STILL have a flexible enough schedule to train and CrossFit whenever she wants. It just means I'm (yeah, enough with the 3rd person) tabling some other stuff for now: namely, deciding where to live, doing anything re: the dating scene, and sleeping enough. Oh, and competing. The California Classic is this weekend and I was thinking about jumping in. But it's not gonna happen. I'll go and cheer Jimmy on if he competes, but I kept meaning to register and not doing it, and nowadays when something like that happens, I definitely take it as a sign that I'm not interested or supposed to pursue it. So, no competing for me at the moment.

One fun BJJ development is that I have started to train a little with Cristian, a brown belt under Johnny/John/Rodrigo who recently moved back to LA from AZ. He's such a fun training partner, and he's connected to some other BJJ devotees in this area that I don't know. So I got to train with him and his friend Ray over the weekend, and am hoping to train with them this week too. We did a round robin, where two people would roll for 3 minutes and the 3rd person would rotate in. It was great to just roll. What fun!

I think my teaching is getting a little better too. One of the students commented that I am definitely gaining confidence, which I can see for sure. Part of it is that we're going through the curriculum for a second time, and part of it is that I'm finally allowing myself to believe that I actually do know a thing or two about jiu jitsu. So that's a nice place to be. I also got a compliment from a female jiu jitsu player I know: She said that if it weren't for me, she probably wouldn't have continued to train. That made me feel really good!

In other news, apparently the gold medalists from the US grappling team that went to Turkey are on the cover of USA Wrestler magazine. So that means me. I know the picture too--it's on themat.com, and Darren has it on his myspace page. I look bad. But I still want a copy. I haven't received one yet, even though I am a card-carrying member of USA Wrestling. What's up with that? I'd better call them. Don't they know who I am?