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Wednesday, April 16th, 2025 08:20 pm
One of the kids asked about why we learn aikido, a martial art, if the goal is to simply not be in situations where we need to fight. Said kid got, after class ended, a discussion of that where each of the three people responding had a slightly different (but cohesive!) take on the matter, which boils down to: Try not to get into a fight, but train yourself so that should it ever happen you know how to respond as safely as possible for everyone involved.
The other layer of aikido, the one that doesn't happen on the mat, is something I think the parents heard in our answers but the kids probably didn't. Which is: the philosophy of aikido can be applied to any situation, not just physical conflict. It's aikido when you defuse an argument before it happens. It's aikido to see a misunderstanding and clarify the matter. It's aikido any time someone comes at you with aggression and you respond with de-escalation.
The kids seemed fascinated by this, and accepted the explanation. The parents were quite delighted by it.
Also in work news:
Apparently, starting Monday, we're doing overtime for a number of weeks that could be just two, could be a month, and could just be... ongoing... They're gonna judge on a week-to-week basis. (This is not mandatory. They cannot make it mandatory. It's just set up so that you need to explicitly opt out on a day-to-day basis, so realistically we're probably all doing overtime most of the time.)
It'll be 10hr days M-Th, and then our normal 6hr day on Friday. Apparently if they get more pressure about us being ~behind schedule~ (which: hah, who's surprised, it's a big project and also one of the things we're working on is an add that someone else fucked up and we're being paid to fix) they might add Friday overtime and also Saturday overtime, neither of which I'm going to say yes to (I like having weekends, thanks, work eats enough time as it is). But it sure will be interesting if that becomes a Thing!
The other layer of aikido, the one that doesn't happen on the mat, is something I think the parents heard in our answers but the kids probably didn't. Which is: the philosophy of aikido can be applied to any situation, not just physical conflict. It's aikido when you defuse an argument before it happens. It's aikido to see a misunderstanding and clarify the matter. It's aikido any time someone comes at you with aggression and you respond with de-escalation.
The kids seemed fascinated by this, and accepted the explanation. The parents were quite delighted by it.
Also in work news:
Apparently, starting Monday, we're doing overtime for a number of weeks that could be just two, could be a month, and could just be... ongoing... They're gonna judge on a week-to-week basis. (This is not mandatory. They cannot make it mandatory. It's just set up so that you need to explicitly opt out on a day-to-day basis, so realistically we're probably all doing overtime most of the time.)
It'll be 10hr days M-Th, and then our normal 6hr day on Friday. Apparently if they get more pressure about us being ~behind schedule~ (which: hah, who's surprised, it's a big project and also one of the things we're working on is an add that someone else fucked up and we're being paid to fix) they might add Friday overtime and also Saturday overtime, neither of which I'm going to say yes to (I like having weekends, thanks, work eats enough time as it is). But it sure will be interesting if that becomes a Thing!
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