Grappling
So I'm doing Brazilian jiu-jitsu now. Which makes me like many men of my age (36) having a mid-life crisis. I kept losing my temper at amateur soccer matches. Getting yellow cards. Yelling at the ref. Getting into handbags with other players. Ego, I suppose.
I chose jiu jitsu as an alternative with the hope that I could enter into ego-free. I played soccer my whole life and at the collegiate level, but my identity was too bound up with the sport anytime I stepped on the pitch. If I failed or underperformed, it cut deep. And I couldn't play just "for the fun of it." Any athlete knows that if you're competitive at a particular thing, you can't just turn that off.
So I started doing jiu jitsu instead. I had always had an interest. I thought the gis were cool, frankly. I've always wanted to do a combat sport, and I didn't want to get bonked in the head with boxing, so jiu jitsu felt like the most obvious choice.
I've been doing it for roughly a year now. I suck, but it's liberating. It's liberating being a beginner, being the least skilled guy in the room but owning it. It's been awkward, for sure, but I'm proud of myself for doing it.
It's a reminder of the power of showing up to do something, week after week, even when you quite literally get your ass kicked each time. But the thing is, BJJ is fun. Other areas of life are not as inherently fun (for me), so the same grit is harder to come by.
I think a part of me wanted to become this cauliflower-eared tough guy, but as soon as you actually start a martial art it really puts a lot of the combat sports stereotypes to bed. People (at least at my particular jiu jitsu gym) are some of the nicest, most supportive people I encounter. Yes, this is within the context of the gym, and these people could be less kind in other venues, but niceness and genuineness is hard to come by these days.
I've had a job in academia that I think I'm leaving, for a host of reasons. Of all of those reasons, one that really struck me was how unkind, cold, and aloof my fellow faculty were. Maybe it was my specific rung on the hierarchy as a non-tenure track teacher that contributed to this, but even (and perhaps especially) amongst this milieu things felt odd. Passive aggressive, political, and just plain bad faith. And the backstabbing and politicking didn't even make sense really to me, because what the fuck are these people gunning for? To be a dean? For tenure? For me, the ends of academia did not at all justify the means I saw those around me employ to get there. So yes, I feel a bit naive in that the sense that of fucking course academia is a soulless capitalist entity, but some part of me actually bought into the social justice horseshit advertised by the department in their literature. I don't know what I thought I would do. Radicalize the students? But really I think I just didn't expect the lived, day-to-day experience of a job in academia to be such a fucking downer.
All of that is to say. I'm starting something new. Need to find a new job. Getting married soon. Have a kid already. Still feel like I'm fucking Vincent Adultman half the time.