Friday, July 21, 2017

Good morning crew,

I got in a bit of trouble during promotion testing at the taekwondo school last weekend.

We have a little 6 (going on 7)-year-old who tested for his deputy belt, that is the belt right before black belt, and part of testing for the upper belts includes stamina training.

So I was instructed to take the little guy off to the side and coach him through 100 jumping jacks, 100 push-ups, 100 sit-ups, and 100 squats. And he did not, I repeat not, want to do any of it.

I quite literally had to grab the back of his belt and help lift him off the floor in order to get him to do a push up. And he lay in such recalcitrant repose on the floor for sit ups that that I had to grab him by his shirtfront and haul him upright. I was getting more of a workout than he was.

After 15 or 20 minutes we were both getting a little frustrated with the whole ordeal, but it was almost over. The only exercise that remained was the squats.

But with this drill I couldn't help him, short of putting him on my back and doing the squats for him. So my only recourse was to encourage and cajole. And that mostly took the form of yelling.

After about 50 squats I guess he had had enough of both me and the exercises because I could see little lower lip start to quiver. The tears were going to start flowing any minute. In the back of my brain I knew the smart thing to do was to call it 'close enough' and just let him go. I mean, who would know or care?

But we never got to find out if he would have finished the exercise because 5 seconds later his mother appeared over my shoulder and exclaimed, "Can't you see that he's crying?"

Which he really wasn't--yet.

I guess after more than six years of training little kids I have become a bit jaded toward this kind of thing, because my spontaneous answer was, "So what?"

In hindsight that might not have been the best response.

Laugh it up,

Joe

joe@gophercentral.com

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"Police in Florida are searching for someone who stole 360,000 nickels during a house party. Police believe the suspect is almost to the end of the street." -Seth Meyers

***
"A man set a new world record after kicking himself in the head 134 times in one minute. He broke the previous record of zero." -Conan O'Brien

***
"A recent study shows that standing at work for long periods of time is bad for you, after earlier research indicated that sitting for too long at work is bad for you. So really the only thing we know is, work is bad for you." -Jimmy Fallon

***
Once upon a time, there were four people; Their names were Everybody, Somebody, Nobody and Anybody.

Whenever there was an important job to be done, Everybody was sure that Somebody would do it. Anybody could have done it, but Nobody did it.

When Nobody did it, Everybody got angry because it was Everybody's job.

Everybody thought that Somebody would do it, but Nobody realized that Nobody would do it.

So consequently Everybody blamed Somebody when Nobody did what Anybody could have done in the first place.




*-------------- Guaranteed to Roll Your Eyes --------------*
Did you hear about the two guys who decided to try duck hunting? They bought new outfits & equipment, and went out to a place in the woods where they heard the hunting was really good. But after several hours of thrashing through the woods, one fellow said, "I don't know about this. We've been out here all day and haven't caught a single duck. Do you think we're doing something wrong?"

"I don't know," replied the other. "Maybe we're not throwing the dog high enough."