"Dirty Fighting"

That's the street term for the new class that My friend Lisa and I are doing. The real name is Pekiti Tirsia. It's a Filipino form of martial arts. But see, the fun part is you learn it with weapons.Pekiti-Tirsia roughly translates as "to cut into small pieces, up close." There are big long sticks and Knives and little blade things. For our purposes everything is rounded and taped off. It's a good thing too, because it's rather awkward in the beginning. I am the first to admit how uncoordinated I am. Coordination is a funny thing, I can do all sorts of fancy tricks that involve bending and twisting and a whole lot of balance but when it comes to using both my hands and my feet in a moving stance while wielding weapons, well, that's a whole other ball game. You should see me dance, which you won't, unless we are out and we have had quite a few cocktails. Lisa is coordinated. She does step class. She wins the over 18 dance contests at Bar Mitzvahs, like they're going out of style. I swear this is true, when we were in Turkey she would be practicing her dance "moves" a la the "drop back at all hours of the night. I'd be fast asleep and she'd be jamming out to No Diggity, No Doubt. In this class though we were a little like dumb and dumber. We could never both seem to understand the same move at the same time. Our poor teacher. Rob. Rob has a sleeve tattoo and wears a skull ring and looks like he enjoys getting his party on, but apparently he is in the upper echelon of this fighting form. This is coincidentally (from yesterdays post) the same form of fighting that Matt Damon uses in the Bourne Identity movies. Funny, first Gary Busey kept popping up, now Matt Damon. So Rob was very patient. Lisa and I were laughing at ourselves because why do you think we would need to learn to fight with weapons? I don't know. Self defense perhaps? We learned about someone coming at you with a knife, how to hold a knife in either the "heaven-knife up" position or "Hell-blade down" position. They have fancier names too, but I wouldn't begin to know how to spell them yet. I wasn't sure Lisa was going to like it because it wasn't a huge workout. She loved it though, she said she felt like Angelina Jolie training for a movie. And I am one to believe everything happens for a reason, even when you choose that thing to happen. So poor Rob, we'll be back next week. Watch out out there. It's not just yoga anymore kids.