Jew-Do

So I recently started Judo.

I had been going to the gym for a while with no noticeable effect on my body, to me at least.

I mean sure, I was getting stronger, but I never got skinnier and something about the gym never really made me feel at home. Either I was at NYU-Coles and with the motley crowd of NYU’s ghettoized athletes or over at Crunch with exercise bulimics and famous actors. Either way, I felt like a douchebag and out of place.

I also used to play Magic cards. It’s embarassing, I know, but it’s something to do. As someone in to film, or maybe as a 20-something, you find yourself with long swaths of time with nothing to do. A Tuesday evening, a Saturday morning– I have a propensity for waking up early and going to sleep decently late, something that made these sort of time slots particularly onerous.

So it was that I found myself become a “gaymer” and eventually, upon the closing of my gaming site, with a surfeit of time I didn’t want to spend in the gym.

I guess it doesn’t make sense that I ended up in Judo. I was always terrible at wrestling in high school. I guess there just was that primal need, that male longing to want to beat someone up, to not necessarily beat someone up, but, you know, to be able to. It’s the sort of thing perhaps that stopping gaming also left its mark in my life in: that the satisfaction of beating someone in a game might replace that need for the sort of showmanship of real life. Again, lacking that, I was… lacking.

So I started Judo.

Now, almost every day, everything’s sore. And I suck at it, really badly.

But yesterday at Judo, I realized my partner who I practiced with was the same man who I had played against at my gaming store. We both were just looking for something to do in the wake of that part of our lives.

It’s too bad I’m not as good at Judo as I was at Magic.

Then I wouldn’t be so sore.