Cat Charity

Originally posted by at post

Via Citykitties (emphasis mine):

A good samaritan found this cat today in a gutter by Clark Park, half dead. He is now at the Cat Doctor with a body temperature of 90 (normal is 102) and blood PCV of 8. The Cat Doctor housecat, Diamond, is currently donating blood to save his life. During the exam, the vet found that this cat has a microchip. When called, his “owners” reported that he was acting sick, so they put him outside. If this makes you as angry as it makes us, please channel your anger in one of two ways: visit our website at www.citykitties.org and make a donation to help us pay for his care, or share this post and encourage others to do so.



Click to donate.


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Thanksgiving Advent, Day Twenty-One: My Date of Birth

No, not my birthday; my date of birth. Which is to say, September first. I was born early, though I’m not sure by how much (I used to think my due date was the eleventh, but recently my mother said otherwise, and now I can’t remember what date she said). But really, the amount doesn’t matter — just the result.

Why does it matter? Because my school district, like most, had guidelines for determining when children should start kindergarten. You had to be five or older by the cut-off date. And what was that date?

September first.

I don’t know how strictly that was enforced. Maybe if I’d been born a few days later, I still could have started school that year. As it was, they gave my mother the choice, to start me or hold me back. Given that I was already a ferocious reader, she opted to boot me out the door and into kindergarten. And for that, I am more thankful than I can say.

People who would probably not have been in my life if I had started school a year later: kurayami_hime. She would have been two years ahead of me, instead of one, and we likely would not have become friends — at least not such close friends that these days, my parents refer to her as their other daughter. kniedzw: even if I still went to Harvard, he would have been more than a year out of college rather than recently graduated when I showed up, and by then would have distanced himself more from the friends he still had in school. We would not have begun dating, and I would not be married to him now. teleidoplex; it’s unlikely I would have gone to the Castell Henllys field school in 2000, which means we would not have met there. And while I still might have gone to Indiana University for graduate school (thus giving us a second chance to meet), I don’t know that I would have ended up playing in the Bloomington Changeling LARP — which created most of my social circle for six years, shaped my academic research, and led to me running Memento, the tabletop game that ended up inspiring the Onyx Court novels.

. . . to name just a few.

This is not to say I would have had no awesome friends, boyfriend/husband, or adopted sister had I entered school a year later. In both high school and college, I had friends a year behind me; I probably would have been closer to them in this alternate history, and they are very cool people, too. But you know what? I like my life. I like the path it’s followed. And so much of it is the coincidental result of being at particular points in the educational system at particular times. Shift me back a year, and a lot of the things I’m happiest with suddenly vanish, to be replaced by god knows what.

Dear Mom: thank you for sending me off to kindergarten on my fifth birthday, rather than holding me back an additional year. And thank you to whatever gestational butterfly flapped its wings and caused me to enter this world on September first, just a little bit ahead of schedule.

Thanksgiving Advent, Day Twenty: Yuletide

I’ve talked about Yuletide before, but as signups for it closed this evening, I was reminded that it’s a thing to be thankful for. Why? Because exchanges of that kind are a fun form of gift-giving, surprising somebody with a story written just for them. And while there are lots of exchanges built along these general lines, Yuletide is the two-thousand-pound gorilla on the scene — if the gorilla was made of fannishness and squee, and flailed around being happy and excited, occasionally grabbing people and sweeping them up into great big hugs.

I’m thankful for it because, as I’ve said before, fanfiction is one realm where story goes back to being pure play. Not that I don’t love my work — I’ve already said that I do — but it’s valuable to have a realm in which I can chill a bit more, and not worry about all the concerns that go with writing fiction for a living. The end of the year is, for me, a particularly good time to do that. I’ll be sending off the revised draft of A Natural History of Dragons soon, and once that’s out the door . . . well, okay, there’s something else after that which has a deadline, too. And technically Yuletide has a deadline. But my point is, writing my story for that will feel like a reward. Which is a thing to be thankful for, at this time of year.

Thanksgiving Advent, Day Nineteen: Travel Opportunities

I sometimes avoid bringing this up, because it can seem like bragging when talking to people who haven’t been able, for one reason or another, to travel as much as I have. But I really am thankful for the amazing opportunities I’ve had to go other places — particularly foreign countries.

Where have I been? The British Virgin Islands. Costa Rica. Northern England (South Shields), southern England (Winchester), Israel. Wales and Ireland. Ireland again. Japan, with a second trip nine years later. London, four times. Italy, Greece, and Turkey. India.

It’s quite a lot for a thirty-one-year-old, especially when you figure in how many of those places I went before finishing college (hint: that list ends with the first Japan trip). I sometimes forget that, since various factors have combined to make my family in general kind of ridiculously well-traveled; I’m hoping kniedzw‘s work sends him to Poland next year and I get to tag along, because it’s rare for me to beat my parents or my brother to a country. (Er, none of you guys have been to Poland yet, right? Watch me be wrong about that.) They’ve been to Russia and Malaysia and Hong Kong and Laos and Mongolia and Switzerland and China and Germany and I won’t bore you with the rest of the list. But I’ve been to a lot of places, too.

It’s done so much for my mind, I can’t even put it into words. Not only seeing beautiful and famous landmarks, though that’s often been a cool perk; just seeing other places, and all the differences that go with it. It makes the inside of your skull a bigger place. Not always in a comfortable way; it’s tiring, the constant mental effort that goes with being surrounded by a foreign language, and with changing your behavior to fit your environment. There’s a reason that kniedzw and I, when considering honeymoon possibilities, opted for a Mediterranean cruise; it allowed us to get a taste of some places we were dying to see, while still relaxing and putting out a minimum of effort. I’d love to go to Macchu Picchu someday, or visit China, but the physical work of one and mental work of the other were not what I wanted on my honeymoon.

I have joked — sort of — that what I need to do is decide where I want to travel to, and then think up books to write that would justify the trip as a research expense. It’s only sort of a joke because I really, really want to go on traveling. I don’t have a lot of extravagances in my lifestyle; I don’t drink alcohol or coffee, I don’t smoke, I don’t drive a fancy car or buy much in the way of fancy clothes. I’d rather save that money, and spend it going somewhere cool. The fact that I’ve been able to do so on so many occasions is a great joy to me.

The DWJ Project: Tough Guide to Fantasyland

This book is single-handedly responsible for a 900% reduction in the frequency of stew in fantasy novels.

(True fact: there used to be stew in the doppelganger books. I took it out because of Diana Wynne Jones.)

It is not, in the normal way of things, a book really meant to be read cover-to-cover. It isn’t a novel; it’s an encyclopedia, mocking the tropes and formulas of quest fantasy, from Adept (“one who has taken what amouts to the Postgraduate Course in MAGIC”) to Zombies (“these are just the UNDEAD, except nastier, more pitiable, and generally easier to kill”). Oh, sorry — you don’t start with Adept, you always, always start with THE MAP. (“It will be there. No Tour of Fantasyland is complete without one.”)

I decided to read it cover-to-cover anyway, because if I’m going to do a completist read-through of her work, then dammit, I’m going to be thorough about it. And it’s still entertaining; it just takes a while, compared to a novel of similar length. It also forms useful, though not completely necessary, background for Dark Lord of Derkholm, which takes the idea of the quest-fantasy protagonist being a Tourist and runs for the end zone. But for that, you’ll have to wait for another post.

Thanksgiving Advent, Day Eighteen: Central Heating

I grew up in Dallas, lived there for eighteen years. I don’t care that my ancestry is largely Scandinavian and Swiss German; I don’t like the cold. I am a creature of sunlight and warmth.

At this time of year, and for the next five months or so, you can be damn certain I am thankful for central heating, which for is the difference between living, and living in hell.

. . . now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go create a conflict between a previous object of gratitude and this one, by standing in the cold for three hours or so.

Signal Boost: Trust and Treachery

You know how we keep having these discussions about anthologies that take the best stories, regardless of who writes them . . . and somehow those stories end up all being by white men? (Totally by chance, you understand, and the editors can’t be blamed if that’s what was sent to them.)

It’s nice to be able to talk for once about somebody doing it right. I’ve been contacted by the editors of an upcoming anthology, Trust & Treachery, who are actively reaching out to get more quality submissions from women. To quote:

One of the items that we made specific mention of in our original call for submissions was that we’re looking for works representing the entire range of experience — including all races, ethnicities, genders, ages, religions, sexual orientations, abilities and views on life. The world of fiction and its characters, especially genre fiction and speculative fiction, can be diverse places with a richness and depth in both culture and community. As editors, we made both a personal and professional commitment to have that same richness represented in this anthology. But we need to you help us do it.

This? Is good, pro-active editing. It’s realizing that imbalances aren’t automatically a reflection of the fiction that’s out there — only the fiction that’s being sent in. And that’s something that can be changed, with a little effort.

So I’m happy to give them a signal boost. Description of the theme is here, and submissions guidelines are here. And props to Day Al-Mohamed and Meriah Crawford for their hard work.

Thanksgiving Advent, Day Seventeen: Dishwashers etc.

I lived for about five years in places without a dishwasher. (Well, longer than that — but the four years in college don’t count, since all I had to do was dump my tray at the appropriate spot in the dining hall.)

I am so very, very thankful to have one again.

Dishes fall into that deeply annoying category of “didn’t I just do this chore?” No sooner have you cleaned them up than, oh look, there’s another dirty plate. Laundry is the same way, and words cannot express how glad I am that I’ve never had to do that by hand. The one time I ever tried was with a pair of trousers when I was at a field station in the middle of the rainforest in Costa Rica; I got about a minute in, very feebly, before a pair of hands appeared in my field of vision and took the soap and trousers away. I watched the very nice Costa Rican lady do what my fourteen-year-old self could not, and marveled as if she were turning water in to wine. Combine that with my reading about what it used to take to do laundry in the pre-washing-machine past . . . yeah. There are entire months of my life that have been saved by me not having to do laundry by hand.

Dishwashers. Laundry machines. Vacuum cleaners. Hell, showers — even bathing used to be a bigger undertaking, back when you had to heat the water and fill the tub and so on. Be thankful, people. Be very, very thankful.

Thanksgiving Advent, Day Sixteen: Hair Screws

Tonight, I am thankful for these things:

I first encountered them years ago at my ballet studio. Bought some for myself, lost them over the years, and then my mother made herself a hero of the revolution by tracking down more. These days, Goody makes their own version, which are a bit longer (though not as nicely coated) as the kind she found for me.

What are they? They are magic. I know they can be put to other hair-related uses, but to me, they are the things that hold my bun up. For those who haven’t seen me: my hair is down to my hips, and is relatively thick. When I put it in a bun (for ballet then; for karate now), I end up with a mass of hair more than half again as big as my fist. This is a lot of hair to bun, y’all, and it takes a vast number of hairpins to hold it, not very securely, in place.

I can hold my braid up with two of those, messily. Four makes it tidy. Six makes it secure enough to stay in place through two hours of karate and kobudo.

They are freaking magic.

We call them “hair screws;” I don’t remember what Goody calls them. If they might be of any use to you, go out and buy some, stat: I want Goody believing there’s enough of a market to go on manufacturing them. Otherwise, I will be back to buns falling down, and I will be sad.

Almost missed it!

Gah. The sixteenth not only sneaked up on me this month; it almost sneaked past. But I ran over to SF Novelists and dashed off the next (and probably final) post in my “Research for Writers” series: Get Help.

Comment over there; no login needed, but if you’re a first-time commenter give me a little while to fish your comment out of the moderation queue.

Thanksgiving Advent, Day Fifteen: Occupy Wall Street

I could ramble on for a long time — not in a “thankfulness” way –with a lot of only vaguely-connected thoughts regarding Occupy Wall Street, corporate accountability, the current state of U.S. politics, media imbalance, economic inequality, police brutality, and a bunch of other things way too big to fit into a blog post. But since I can’t begin to sort those into anything like a coherent enough order to inflict on other people, I’ll excerpt out one tiny slice that does fit into this series:

I’m thankful for the Occupy Wall Street protest, and its cousins all around the country.

Why am I thankful? Because I’d started to believe, in a fatalistic, “fuck it, I might as well just give up” kind of way, that the political left in this country had lost its will to fight. Let them pass draconian anti-immigration laws, state constitutional amendments against gay marriage, tax cuts for the people who don’t need them, cuts to benefits for the people who do, religious initiatives and attacks on women’s rights and wars that never end — we’ll just sigh and turn on the Xbox for some mindless entertainment.

No. We’ll protest. And not just through meaningless online petitions that only require a few clicks of the mouse: through physical action, through civil disobedience, through a movement that persists until the media can’t ignore it anymore. And this isn’t Tea Party-style activism, either, where the big corporate interests barely even try to hide their hand inside the puppet: it’s grass-roots instead of astroturf. It’s real.

Which isn’t the same thing as perfect. The movement is more a thousand-voiced scream of frustration and rage than a single message; there are so many things that need fixing, so many of them intertwined, that it isn’t as simple as (say) an anti-war protest, whose win condition is clear. OWS supporters want lots of things, and don’t necessarily agree on how any of them should be achieved.

But it’s my end of the political spectrum finally speaking up. Finally fighting. And doing it with enough force and persistence that people are paying attention. The United States is a big ship; she’s slow to turn, and we may not (probably won’t) get her on exactly the heading I’d like to see. Still: every degree of turn is a victory. I’m glad to see so many people do, in fact, have the will to grab the tiller and pull.

Thanksgiving Advent, Day Fourteen: Modern Health

When la_marquise_de_ and I were doing the podcast thing at World Fantasy, one of the things that came up was the sheer physical discomfort people used to live with as a matter of course.

Now, I know that there are many people ven now — possibly some of you reading this — who likewise live with chronic pain, disease, injury, disability, or other such conditions. I have no desire to trivialize those things. But taking the long perspective . . . my god. Things have improved so much in the last century or so, I can barely even conceive of it.

I’m talking about everything from the major achievements (smallpox used to kill or disfigure vast numbers of people; now it’s been eradicated) down to the minor ones (most of us still have all our teeth, and they’re probably pretty straight, too). Thanks to vaccinations — but no thanks to the anti-vax movement, which I won’t rant about here because this is supposed to be about thankfulness — we no longer have to run the gauntlet of measles and mumps and rubella and whooping cough and everything else that used to drop children like flies. We have antibiotics: no more “and by the way he spent the last three years of life with a supperating ulcer in his thigh” for us! We can repair torn ligaments, use hearing aids to combat deafness, replace freaking hip joints, man. If I didn’t have astigmatism, or U.S. had approved toric ICLs already, I could get a lens permanently implanted in my eye to correct my vision.

Dude, Beck Weathers lost his nose to frostbite, and they grew a new one for him on his forehead.

So while I extend my heartfelt sympathies to everyone who suffers from ill-health of one kind or another — my GOD am I thankful for modern health. If you threw me into the European past, I would not want to be treated by any doctor from before maybe 1940 or so. (I don’t know enough about the history of medicine in other parts of the world to make judgment calls there, except to say that Europe was late to the smallpox-vaccination party.) I’m sure any number of things we do today will be considered barbaric and dumb by the people of the future, but from where I’m standing, we’ve made amazing progress.

Thanksgiving Advent, Day Thirteen: The (Forgiveness of the) Internets

‘Cause I, well, forgot to post yesterday. I remembered at one point during the afternoon, but I hadn’t yet picked a thing to post about, and then next thing I know it’s, well, now. (And I already did the meta “get out of jail free” thing with being thankful for days off. Clearly, weekends are hard.)

So I’m thankful that you all forgive me for missing a day. You do forgive me, right? Right???

To avoid totally copping out on this post, though, I’m going to be thankful for the internet more generally. I was talking with kniedzw the other night about signal to noise ratios in our current society, and he complained about internet searches: fifteen years ago he could go to Altavista or whatever and type in [some kind of techie query; I can’t remember what his example was] and turn up a useful tutorial on how to do that thing. Now he has to wade past various auto-generated SEO traps to get to the actual info. I conceded this may be true . . . but on the other hand, fifteen years ago I doubt Altavista could have pointed me at an online account of the exact route taken by Elizabeth I’s coronation procession. The Internet back then was a paradise for techie topics, maybe, but not so much for everything else.

These days, I may indeed have to wade past random crap — but the information is out there, so often it simply boggles me. I can, without leaving my office, look at a topographical map of the area around Dover Castle, or read back issues of the London Times, or get instructions on embroidery stitches. The sheer amount of info contained in Wikipedia alone is astronomical. When I try to imagine writing the Onyx Court series without the 2007-2010 Internet to help me out . . . well, actually, I try not to imagine that, since it leads to me curling up under my desk and wibbling. (I dunno. Maybe it would have been great, because I wouldn’t have had so much red meat to feed my obsessive tendencies.)

So I’m thankful for the Internet, and all its wonders.

You do forgive me, right?

The DWJ Project: House of Many Ways

Charmain Baker gets sent, against her will, to look after the house of her Great-Uncle William, who is also the Royal Wizard of Norland, while he’s away being cured of illness. The house turns out to have all kinds of dimensions not immediately obvious to the naked eye, but there are problems from rebellious kobolds and a dangerous lubbock, as well as difficulties for the Kingdom of Norland, which is very nearly bankrupt.

(Random aside: can I just say how distracting the lubbock was to me? So far as I can determine, that’s not anything from folklore. And I associate the name with a rather dreary city in Texas, known to me mostly because a) it’s where we stopped for lunch on road trips to Arizona, and b) it’s the home of Texas Tech University, from whence came the various correspondence courses I did in high school. So yeah, that’s what I kept thinking about.)

Like Castle in the Air, this is less a direct sequel, more a related book. Howl, Sophie, and Calcifer appear (and their influence is more apparent than in Castle), but mostly they’re there to facilitate someone else’s story — in this case, Charmain’s.

I wish I liked her better.

for the Yuletide-interested

Fandom nominations have opened. If you haven’t been following the admin community, be aware there are some changes: three fandoms, four characters each, and only characters who have been nominated will be eligible for requests or offers. There’s a partial list of ineligible fandoms, as well as a post (with spreadsheet) for what people intend to nominate (so people can avoid duplication) and a post for what has been nominated so far (since the official list won’t be visible until it’s over).

You have until 21:30 EST (edit: on Monday, sorry to have left that bit out) to get your nominations in; signups will open soon after.

Happy Yuletiding!

Thanksgiving Advent, Day Eleven: Naps

If you guessed that today’s post is brought to you by what I’m about to do as soon as I post this, you’re exactly right.

I haven’t talked about it much here, but I’ve been having issues with fatigue for several months now. I’m getting enough sleep; it just isn’t good enough sleep. We’re working on a solution to this problem (so no, I’m not looking for suggestions), but until then: naps are what allow me to function.

So if you don’t mind, I’m going to go take one now.

<zzzzzzzzzzz>

Thanksgiving Advent, Day Ten: Alternative Pizza Sauces

What? I never said all of the things I’m thankful for were going to be meaningful.

In this case, I am grateful for alternative pizza sauces. I am currently chowing down on a pizza crust that bears cheese, chicken, spinach, and pesto sauce. I could have had creamy garlic instead, and next time I may go for that. Mmmm, garlic.

Why am I thankful for this? Because when I lived in Bloomington, pizza was very nearly the only food you could get delivered.* And my friends and I gamed a lot, or watched movies, and the result was a whole lotta pizza ordering. Much to kniedzw‘s sadness (because he could eat pizza every night and be happy), after six years of this, I became so very tired of pizza that I almost never wanted to eat it. Three years on, I’m slowly regenerating my interest — but that’s helped a lot by restaurants that offer me greater variety in my choice of sauces. See, if it’s got a non-tomato-based sauce, it’s enough Not Like Pizza that I’m more willing to consider it. This, incidentally, makes not just me but my husband happier, and those are both good things.

*Except for Baked! And here I’m going to go on a tangent and talk about something I miss a great deal, and would be thankful for if somebody else would seize upon the WORLD’S BEST IDEA and make it available where I live.

Baked! was a restaurant that would, until about two or three in the morning, bake you custom-ordered cookies and deliver them to your door. Fresh. Hot. And you don’t even have to get off the couch. You could choose your dough (sugar, chocolate, oatmeal), your fillings (chocolate chips, raisins, nuts, etc), a frosting if you wanted it. I adored sugar dough with dark chocolate chips, craisins, and walnuts. You had to order at least a dozen cookies total, I think, and the minimum for any given flavor combination was three — but like that’s a hardship.

And yeah, the name was no accident; the business was basically run for stoners, by stoners, and sometimes forty-five minutes after you placed your order you’d get a phone call from a spacey-sounding driver who couldn’t find your house and turned out to be on the wrong side of town. But you know, that’s a small price to pay for fresh cookie delivery. Why this has not taken over the world, I don’t know.

need some suggestions for not!Hebrew and not!Judaism

So one of the things I’m doing with the new series is basing the dominant ~European religion on Judaism, instead of going with the usual default of pseudo-Christianity. Which leads, of course, to me having to make lots of decisions about random worldbuilding details. I’ll talk about those more later, probably — I’m having an interesting time extrapolating both a nineteenth-century form of Temple-based worship, and a widespread state-religion form of rabbinic Judaism — but one of the most obvious flags on the reader’s end is the names of things.

See, in light of the aforementioned extrapolations, I don’t want to make the reader think this is supposed to be straight-up Judaism, as it was practiced in the real-world nineteenth century. Because of this, and because the main character comes from a British-equivalent country, I’m mostly using English-language variants on the Hebrew names for things; for example, they have a holiday that corresponds to Purim, but I’m calling it “the Casting of Lots” instead. (Insert lots of thoughts here about how English terms and concepts from Christianity are often unmarked and can therefore be read as “generic,” but terms and concepts from other religions are marked and therefore assumed to be referring specifically to the real-world version.)

This method currently falls down in two particular places: the name for the ~Hebrew language, and the name for the religion itself. My current placeholder for the former is “Ivrit,” which is, yes, the name of Hebrew in Hebrew. (Presuming Wikipedia hasn’t lied to me.) I cannot keep this, unless I want it to be an in-joke for the Hebrew readers in my audience. The current placeholder for the latter is “[Judaism],” because the one time I referred to the religion as a whole I was tired and just wanted to get the night’s writing done instead of bogging down on naming. I cannot keep this, period.

Suggestions for either one? I can’t read the Hebrew alphabet well enough to do my usual thing, which is to look up semi-random words and then fiddle with them until I get something I like. The language could be based on the real Hebrew word for “speech” or something in that vein, following the common tendency in some parts of the world for a tribe’s name to simply mean “the People.” The religion . . . I dunno. A currently-unsold book idea of mine has already laid claim to the word “Messianism,” which I kind of feel works better for ~Christianity anyway, given the different attitude toward the whole Messiah thing. I need something that can be used to refer to both the Temple-based form of the religion and the rabbinic offshoot (which in this setting occupies the role of the Protestant Reformation, in terms of dividing up ~Europe along religious lines.) Not sure what would work for that.

Any ideas?

Thanksgiving Advent, Day Nine: My Dojo

Just got back from two classes in a row at my dojo, one in kobudo (weapons) and the other karate. From when I walk out my front door to when I get home, that’s pretty much three straight hours in which I don’t sit at my computer, barely moving, alone with the imaginary people on the screen and in my head.

This is a really, really good thing.

It’s exercise, which sedentary types like writers have to be very careful to get. The exercise actually starts with walking out the door; our dojo is close enough that I generally hoof it there and back. Takes a little longer, but it gets me out into the fresh air, and gives me some good contemplation time. Then there’s stretching, and the mild cardio of doing kumite (sparring) and kata.

It’s also social time, which is likewise very important when you write full-time (or have another solitary-making job). A couple of years ago, when I was working on A Star Shall Fall, I went through a stretch where, to meet my deadline, I needed to write about 1500 or 2000 words each day, and revise 5000 of what I’d already written. This coincided with the dojo being closed for two weeks while the black belts and sensei decamped to Okinawa for the World Karate Championships. While it was good from a freeing-up-time standpoint, ask kniedzw what it was like, living with me for the duration. I went crazy. Workworkwork all the time + no real outlets = bad news.

Our dojo is a really cool place, too — very welcoming, very laid-back while also being committed to excellence. Shihan, the owner, is ninth dan in Shorin-ryu (our karate style) and eighth dan in Yamanni-ryu (our kobudo style); he regularly travels the world to do guest seminars in foreign countries. He’s that good. One of the other sensei recently made sixth dan. My sister-in-law, the lowest-ranked sensei in the lot, is third. The excellence is there for you to learn from, without being one of those scary-competitive places like the Evil Dojo in the Karate Kid movie. <g> Working there wakes up all the old gears in my head, left over from my ballet years, where I think on a fine-grained scale about what my body is doing. It’s a very good change of pace from how I normally spend my time. (Even if sometimes I’m thinking about how to apply what I’m doing in a story. Shutupdon’tjudgeme.)

When I moved here, I didn’t really want to study karate; there were other styles that appealed to me more. This place was convenient, though, and I knew people there, and I liked the atmosphere. When it comes to actually going to class and enjoying it, those things matter more than the details of the style. I’m very thankful that I had someplace this good so easily available to me.