(no subject)

Sitting in the blue room, listening to Indigo Girls... I used this stuff as driving music when I was an egg (when I wasn't using Meatloaf or Queen - Indigo Girls is the only driving music from my teens that I still listen to, that doesn't have overwhelming emotional subtext by now, which is interesting trivia, if you like your trivia that way).

I'm thinking about karate. I didn't make it to the dojo at all this week - snow storms and dates intervened, and this week, class and probably more snow and more interviews are going to intervene. I still look like a total phenom at this dojo because my memory of the kata are just complete enough and because (sad to say) some of their senior students suck. I cannot for the life of me understand why someone who looks like she'd break her arm if she ever landed a punch has a brown belt. The women between green and brown belt have an uncommon number of bad stances as well - they don't look comfortable in front stance, and their more advanced stances are not better. I haven't noticed men throwing obviously wretched techniques or falling over sideways, just women. I have noticed it in all the women between green and brown belt level. One of the visiting sensei at the last batch of rank tests even commented that the women, specifically, need to bring more realism to their training. Who's rubbing this stuff into the boys and not dealing with female students the same way? On the one hand, the sensei has been appropriately hard on me, but on the other, a problem does not get this kind of pervasive without the sensei contributing to it in one way or another.

My last dojo had some problems with sexism.

I worry that this dojo has more subtle problems with the same stuff.