So I had an odd phone call the other day. TB wanted to come home because he felt terrible but he said right away that he wasn’t sick. Instead he had had an argument with a good friend and it didn’t get sorted and he didn’t know what to do.

Maybe I did the wrong thing, but I went to pick him up and let him come home for the afternoon. That’s not the letting him down part, though, that came way before.

See, I don’t often argue. Not with my husband, not with my friends, not with my family.

That doesn’t mean I’m a pushover (I mean, seriously, are you new?), I have strong opinions, and I disagree with people, but I usually let things settle a bit before confronting people. Or I figure out a way to get what I want while avoiding the confrontation.

That doesn’t mean I am all zen and wise and in control of my emotions, it means I have a fairly agreeable nature, and a group of fairly agreeable friends, and when we disagree we usually hash it out at a low volume.

But that’s where I’m letting the kid down. He rarely hears an argument, and because he’s 8 and remarkably adept at tuning out grown-up voices, he doesn’t register the disagreements that go on around him. Not that I want him to be surrounded by yelling, but how will he know that it is safe to disagree, and even to disagree loudly, if he never sees/hears that happen and never gets to witness it being resolved.

Clearly, I am not going to take up tearing a strip off my friends so he can learn how to argue, but there has to be another way of modelling that experience for him.

Now I just have to figure that out. Damn it.

So on October 23 I took  part in what may have been the only direct competition of my (almost) 38 years and it was truly bizarre.

I know that the only way to really test yourself is to get on the field, and for my Taekwon-do school that means taking part in the October competition.  I could choose to do just patterns or just spar or I could do both.  I figured I might as well go the whole way and do both.

It was really tough, I was terrified.

I know that many people compete in things like this from a young age, learning a graceful way of losing and, hopefully, graceful way of winning.  I didn’t get that practice so I generally avoid competition entirely, either putting myself out of the running before I start, or, when competing in say, a writing contest, I convince myself that I am in the situation for something besides winning, say for experience, or for understanding or whatever.  And then, I often just don’t try, because if I don’t try, I can’t be judged on the results.

I say this like I understand my motivations in the moment, but in truth,  this took me a long time to figure out and I’m still working on this all the time.  How do I make myself try hard enough to have a chance, yet accept that I may not win, and learn to deal gracefully with that without looking for fault in the system.

So I spent the whole week in a tizzy, trying to strike a balance between my desire to win and my knowledge that my patterns needed work and my sparring might not be all that.

The pattern I did was this one:  Dan Gun , which is somewhat complicated for a fairly uncoordinated person like me (although taking Taekwon-do is helping with that).  The thing that gets me is the timing, when I land in a certain place , my hands have to be in a certain position and my feet in another. It is black and white,  cut and dried, it is either right or wrong.  It isn’t a matter of opinion.  Even the things I studied in university weren’t often like that, and I am way more comfortable with an intellectual test than a physical one.

But, I did okay.  There were only three people in our group so we were each were going home with a medal.  I got second place, which I was pleased with.  If I had gotten first I probably would have fainted from shock.  The real gain though was that I actually did it.  I put myself to the test, and I did as well as I could.*

The sparring was horrible though.  We tend to practice with light taps, and the woman I was sparring with was from a different school (of both Taekwon-do and of thought) and she pulled no punches (nor any kicks – I swear she was hopping around on one foot and kicking me with the other). It was, well, horrible.  It was only 90 seconds of fighting, but it seemed to go on forever.  I couldn’t really get my bearings and my techniques were not instinctual enough to call on under pressure.

But.

This is huge.

I stayed in the ring.  Even though I was losing, rather badly, I didn’t cry and I didn’t cry foul.  I just kept trying, did what I could and then I came out of the ring determined to try harder for next year.

I also came out of the ring with a rather unpleasant feeling in my hip and across  my stomach from a poorly placed kick that took a few hours to get over, but I was really proud that I ended thinking of how to do better for next time rather than frustrated with myself for this time.

And I don’t feel nervous at the idea of competing again.

I can totally do this.

In other news, 2000 words today!  That’s a total of 6221!

*Not to be confused with doing my best, because I’ve done a far better example of that pattern than I did that day, but at least I did the damn thing.

Okay, so I haven’t had much luck with the exercising (aside from Taekwon-do today, but that barely counts since I always do that) but I have done well with my writing. I’m up to 4192 words so far and I’m excited about it.

The only other novel-ly type thing I have written was for last year’s NaNoWriMo and I only got 18,000* words into that. I usually write short stories, and I try to be snappy. I try to go for short, clear little pieces of prose with each word carrying just the right amount of weight.

This writing is more drawn out, almost like filling in the frame of a puzzle before you get to the picture. There’s time to fully explain things, to really colour everything in, I don’t just have to sketch and hope I have enough of the picture for everything to make sense.

I’m not used to it. I’m working hard not to write the main story quickly, not to reveal too much at once, and I don’t know if I’m making my characters seem to know things too soon.

But I guess that’s the beauty of NaNoWriMo. I don’t have to know anything about what I’m doing, I “just” have to get to the finish line. There’s time for editing and smoothing later.

I don’t think I could do this sort of writing for the first time without that combination of deadline pressure and the removal of the need for perfection. It will be fun to see how this all plays out.

*Only is an odd word to use there but my point is that I didn’t finish the project. This year feels different.

I’m not sure what you’re going to be able to get done in November, you might as well adjust your expectations now, because I am planning on claiming a pretty big piece of the awesome for myself.

Even as I say that, I laugh, because hell knows there’s lots of awesome to go around, but this month, instead of leaving mine out there somewhere I am putting it in one of those environmentally friendly shopping bags and dragging it home with me.

When I’m doing goal-setting I go about it in one of two ways, I either pick a bunch of baby-steps and do them, well, in baby-steps or I pick some giant goal and then shoot toward it like an arrow.  This is an arrow situation.

Not only am I doing NaNoWriMo but I am going to exercise for an hour every day (including at least 5m of that wacky Shiva Nata stuff),  and me and the boys are going to do a weekly project from Andrea Buchanan & Miriam Peskowitz’s The Daring Book for Girls.  Yes, I know I have boys, not girls, but I have the book and years ago I promised to talk about it on my blog, and that didn’t happen, so I’m going to report on it now.

So basically, unlike most years, when November disappears in a flood of birthdays (Myself, The Boy, The Little Guy, my friends K, D and M were all born in November, it’s hectic), this year I OWN this month, and I am going to come out of it with a novel (quality may or may not be present), great arms, and a bunch of cool memories of fun stuff with my boys.

And to start the month off properly, I got a haircut this morning and I have streaks of the most delightful shade of green, I’m considering it my warpaint and I am off to do battle.

My friend Shawn’s band.

It’s just him and his buddy Lance, playing guitar and singing away but I like their enthusiasm and their earnestness and I love the way they sound.  It’s friendly music.

Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you… The Faded Yellow Line