Random raves

The nice thing about YouTube and such things is not just music, but being able to find a huge variety of clips on pretty much anything of interest. This is the best Hun Yuan tai chi clip I've found yet. Just lovely. Ignore the n00b comment in the post that questions how accurate the form is - from my limited understanding, it's spot on. And it looks gorgeous too. It's fantastic to see the flow when a top practitioner does an entire form; I love the dynamic leaping movements that then end with his feet seemingly planted to the earth. He's got a whole pile of other videos which include the 38-form "Cannon" version, and a sabre form. The 9-section whip is fascinating (although the video isn't that clear). There's a mini-doco on the whip here; the master who demonstrates in the second half is amazing.

Anyways, one of the benefits of tai chi and many other meditation and martial art practices is supposed to be an enhanced sense of calm and balance. I also go to the osteopath semi-regularly, and that sends me off into another zone as well. However, as I mentioned to saluqi and faxon yesterday, it doesn't seem to necessarily be a positive thing. If I do good tai chi (relatively speaking!) or have a big osteo treatment, I feel very calm and quiet and open. Then something comes along to upset that calm, and it sends me into instant irritation. I got severely irritated with a manager shoulder-tapping me about something relatively trivial after an osteopathic treatment on Friday. While I wasn't outright rude, it was bordering on it, and despite the fact I'm an evil snappy Cancerian most of the time, I can normally express irritation without being rude and in less potentially self-damaging ways.

I suppose when I'm really evolved, feeling open and acutely-aware won't necessarily translate to "vulnerable" and "over-sensitive". Speed the day. Although it's nice to know that I'm apparently not the only one.

Despite people's first impressions on meeting me (so I've heard), I'm actually fairly shy by nature. Once I get to know people, I'm fine, but being put into a new situation and/or with new people is not one of my fortes. However, I'm still functional in the social sense, so it doesn't bother me as much as it did when I was younger (and trying to go out and pick up gurlz in dark smoky clubs - thank god for those women who didn't assume that butch = extrovert).

Related to that is a more pathological tendency to stage fright. I started playing a number of wind instruments in my teens... up until the point that I'd either have to perform in public, or do exams with external assessors. No thank you. Again, it's dealable-with, but the greatest number of people I've had to present to at once is less than a dozen (and that was about work, an area in which I'm not terribly lacking in confidence). I do still tend to avoid situations where I feel put under the spotlight. I have a fairly strong distaste for being observed and possibly judged wanting. The worst thing you can do to me is embarrass me; I actually cope much better with outright abuse.

So, tonight was the first night of tai chi lessons after a brief hiatus. We have a new instructor, which is hunky-dory. Being in the front-left corner is the equivalent of wearing the gimp suit in some of the sequences, and guess where I ended up this evening? I actually aimed for the middle of the room, but everyone hid behind me, the buggers! That was fine, until we got to the part where we had to go through the form and basically get checked out for our progress. No worries, until someone to the front of me (we were turned to the right) got in a knot and put me off. Normally that's ok (actually, normally I don't get put off), but I couldn't pick up the sequence again. Three more times I tried to continue with it, and each time I got flustered and lost it again, until I gave up altogether. Buggery. I slunk to the back of the room and hid for the rest of the lesson.

Now, the sequence was the last few moves that we had learned most recently. It wasn't super-familiar, but I'm fine with it, and I'm actually better than half the class... as long as I'm not screwing it up for myself. It wasn't a question of my feeling especially inadequate in the circumstances, but I've not felt that degree of flusterment in years, actually, especially not over something so trivial. So I've been kicking myself for the hour about why the fuck I got myself in such a knot on that occasion.

It seems to be - and this is why I'm bothering to write about it -  an accumulation of tricky situations that makes me more prone to getting excessively self-conscious about stuff. Today at work was reasonably rotten, to be frank. It wasn't a disaster, but there was an extremely complicated situation which could not be anticipated, and which involved a group of users being without email for a few hours. The fact that they deal with external customers directly added extra fun to the mix. The fun was enhanced when it turned out that the issue made obvious an area in which some of our network settings weren't correctly configured. Then I managed to individually screw up the settings of the group's director... and I didn't catch that error for another couple of hours (a typo - funnily enough, mail can't be delivered if the address is wrong, even by only one letter). Only that last was something I mucked up myself, but all the other stuff had to be implemented or co-ordinated by me anyway. Other than my one screw-up, everything was fixed in reasonably short order (at least I knew how to go about it), the punters are all happy, and I got to go home at the usual time.

Following on from that, I think it was feeling very put on the spot work-wise today (I'm not even going to start about the tricky report I've been avoiding writing all week) that made me much more prone to feeling self-conscious in an area in which I'm not so confident. It doesn't really seem like all that much of a stimulus, but I suppose in the areas in which we are weak, that's where we get pinged. And, well, better to get all in a tangle in tai chi than do it at work.

I'm glad I figured it out, rather than continuing to beat myself up. OMG, perhaps this is maturity coming on me at last!

• Got my Aussie Medicare card! Yay!!! Now I can actually visit the doctor without paying through the nose, which will be good, because my knee is giving me severe gyp. It's been raining these last couple of days, and I'm wondering if there's a link, because it's been pretty decent for ages.
• Am I the only person who attends tai chi and gets stressed out by the meditation music? Fuck, I hate that stuff. If I feel like listening to sounds while practising at home, I listen to ambient dub. It works really well, and it least it goes somewhere.
• Also, when you're getting your energy moving, it gives you this lovely prickly sensation. I'm used to it in my hands - I didn't need tai chi to feel it there - but when it's extending to your upper arms and you've got roughish seams in your t-shirt, it irritates. Apparently, if you can sustain it, your whole body gets to feel that way. Oh joy.
• At least the 50-ish guy with the pot belly and the chicken legs has stopped wearing an old form-fitting rugby jersey and tight leggings. Standard trackie-daks are much less distracting.
• I just found out that the ACT Libraries have online subs to zillions of excellent resources, including the OED!!1! *SQUEEE!* The only problem is that due to the ports they use, I can't get access from work, but getting it from home is just dandy. I would have liked to have known this a year ago, however.
  
• We finally got the Red Hat guy in to review my Postfix implementation. There are 5 pages of system build (which the Unix guys did for me) recommendations, and ONE page of Postfix stuff to consider (moi). There are no outstanding issues with what I did. Bloody good result, although I hope the implication isn't that Postfix is so idiot-proof that it's hard to completely stuff it up. :-)
  
• Finally, while I'm blowing my own horn, my SIUD post about life, the universe and everything for the budding and not-so-budding dyke has been linked from the community info page. Heh. It's nice to be appreciated. *blush*

PS: Last fm is making snarky comments at me