Ryan Giordano in California

This should be preserved in a more permanent form than the ragged piece of paper I played off of during the last bell at School No. 3, and what are more permanent than the internets? So here is my translation of the new Kazakhstani national anthem, with guitar chords:


a min E a min
A golden sun in the sky, golden grain on the land

C G E
A verse of proud manliness -- this is my homeland!

a min e min d min
In ages long ago was honor born and strength was found

a min d min a min E a min
A nation proud, great, and strong -- this is my Kazakhstan.

a min d min G C F G C
My Kazakhstan, my Kazakhstan, I am like a flower planted in your land

a min F a min
I am like a song sung for you, my country.

G a min E a min
You are my homeland -- my Kazakhstan.

1. I got Yang's book (recommended by Tim Peterson Laoshi), Taijiquan, Art of Nurturing, Science of Power, in which I learned that:




• I have been thinking about qi breathing wrong all my life (I've suspected this for a couple months now).


• I need to practice wuji more.




2. The Mountain View library has a lot of great movies.


3. I am a fan of the MMA fighter Фëдор Владимирович Емельяненко, who is a badass in the classic Russian style.


4. For my second barefoot run, I stepped it up to 2.5 miles, resulting in sore calves and hurting soles but still no debilitating ankle or knee pain.


5. Leaving a bike in my yard, even under the eaves, will result in the chain rusting.


6. Eating a lot of beets one day might make you worry briefly that something is very wrong with you the next day.


7. If you make a tv show on ustream at 2am in which you do nothing but play an egg shaker while yellow text reading "AIN'T NO DAMN SHOW" scrolls over your face, nobody will watch you.


8. Visiting friends are an excellent, almost irresistible, excuse to drop a lot of change at the bike shop.

Having only taken Tai Chi for seven months and only two Tango lessons total, I am completely unqualified to speak on this topic. But here's why I think studying the Tango and Tai Chi together makes sense:

- They employ the same basic posture: upright torso, slightly bent knees, and a very deliberate centering of the balance.
- A central skill for both is the awareness and control of another's balance. Keeping the appropriate tension when leading and following is a skill similar to push-hands.
- Both are less showy and more "internal" than the typical member of their family of activities. Compare the Tango to the Lindy and Tai Chi to Wushu Kung Fu, for example.
- They are each about the mastery of the passions: in the case of Tai Chi, your own, and in the case of the Tango, another's.

I am finally getting a blog set up for California, largely because on my bike ride to work I something think of things I could write in it. I think basically my parents and Randall Phelps are the only people who might still follow this, but that's good enough for me. (Randall actually emailed me -- twice -- when I stopped posting, which I thought was very nice of him and very surprising to me. I hope I'm not embarrassing him here.)

The default template is probably here to stay since making it pretty doesn't look like all that much fun, and if I'm going to choose a pre-made one, I'm going to choose the simplest one. I did redo the pictures for the home page, though, since Kazakhstan and Boise were getting treated unfairly. In particular, I remember picking out the Kazakhstan one before I even left, thinking an ice-covered road was a nice joke. And although it turned out to be a truer picture than I expected, it also isn't a fair summary of the place, and I think the sunset on the Soviet apartment blocks of Kokshetau is a nice balance of the good and the bad.

The California picture there is kind of lame, but the pretty pictures I have of the mountains and the seaside don't really characterize my life very well. Maybe I should take a picture of a Google micro-kitchen, or use a screenshot of a Goobuntu desktop running R in a shell, or a photo of a suburban thoroughfare as seen over the handlebars of my creaking bicycle. Between these three things, you have about 85% of what I see every day.