• Mood: exhausted
• Music: "Old Time Religion" by Pete Seeger

I'm a brown belt!

After an incredibly grueling promotion that ended with nine rounds of fighting against three different students (who each got to rest for two rounds), one of whom is a black belt who fights in international fighting tournaments. Every time I fight this particular senpai, I always think of the bit in Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip when James Lesure's Captain Boyle says to Nathan Corddry's Tom Jeter: "You wanna hit me? Might make you feel better. And lookin' at you, lookin' at me, I figure it's not gonna hurt."

I also had a huge cheering section of all the other students going for promotion (about a dozen or so), plus several other black belts and Kyoshi. And that was after going over all the material I'm supposed to know, which I did just fine with (except for one brain cramp where Kyoshi asked the word for "back" in Japanese, and my brain thought he meant the body part rather than the direction, and I had no idea; it's ushiro, if anyone's wondering).

Anyhow, I'm a brown belt now. Click here for why this means so much to me.

Now I'm off to belatedly celebrate popfiend's 40th birthday.....