The islands

I haven't had a concrete idea of what to write about like I normally do, thus the paucity of posts. Of course, in the attempt to think up a topic, one question invariably enters my head: "Am I over thinking all this?" However, I think the very existence of this blog makes that a rather open and shut question. I do wonder if other people spend as much time analyzing and agonizing over themselves as I do (masochistic narcissism?), but knowing either way wouldn't change anything.

I do want to muse a little over a bout I had a few weeks ago at the last Open. In the foil event, I had a bout in my pool against someone who is a very good fencer, possibly one of the best fencers I've ever fought. And while I did lose 5-2, that is not so badly as I have lost to terrible fencers in the past. And it was just downright fun. This is because said elite fencer did everything right, just like I've been taught to expect and how I've been taught to respond. It was GOOD fencing, not like what it often feels like at these events: fending off some barbarian so lacking in tactics that they would seem more adept at wielding tree trunks than foils. There were some rather exhilarating extended blade exchanges and I was able to keep up for many of them. I might even have surprised my opponent a little bit on the two touches I did get. And the next day, when I got a touch on a well-timed reassemblement during an epee bout....

My self-satisfaction was noticed in the retelling the day after and a rather dulcet phrase was coined by Maitre: "Island of Perfect Execution." The idea is that we begin accomplishing things as individual bits of perfection, one by one. Sometimes they might slip by unnoticed but eventually there will be many that when strung together they form an archipelago of perfect execution (my words)...which means you're actually doing some excellent fencing.

Here's to the islands (and a glass-half-full-post for once).