As much as I enjoy a good football game (of either variety) or late-night volleyball or what, there's one big reason I enjoy martial arts more: it makes me think. The other night for example, my brain was definitely using way more calories than my body. We weren't even using our bodies very much - the only thing that was sore afterwards were my deltoids. I got hungry in the same way I do when I'm trying to piece together a term paper, the kind of hungry where I need to eat to maintain my thought process where it needs to be. Furthermore, beyond just wrapping my mind around the concept at hand, I was trying to tell my body to apply it - or rather, to let my body just do it, which takes its own kind of mental effort.
      Tangentially, the almost three hours of workout today was interesting in and of itself. We had a karate/wing chun person, a taekwondo person, a kenpo person, a kickboxing/aikido person (not sure what the hell to label myself striking-wise), and a kickboxing person (who, absolutely tangentially, was totally hot). So with all these people with training in different disciplines, there was a noticeable range of styles, with each person moving entirely differently. It was crazy, I tell you.

Alexander - the Great waste of three hours. I'm not even sure where to start. There was no character development whatsoever (seriously, anything where they have to tell you straight off the bat that he's Great, rather than showing you...). In that vein, none of the other characters were developed much at all, unless you count mascara boy or the psychotic mother. Furthermore, for a movie about Alexander the Great, there were only two battle scenes; while I grinned that they had Alexander use a supercool falcata (yay kukri stylin'!), every military and otherwise (building cities, reform, &c) accomplishment was pretty much a spot on the map and a few seconds worth of narration. I'm not sure whether the nude scene was a rape, the constant dude-dude sexual tension would have probably been a lot less uncomfortable had they actually consummated something, and there were so many Oedipal and Freudian things laid on thick in the beginning of the movie it was like the Xuemei's cake that collapsed from too much frosting. The couple interesting points for me were the visuals of Babylon, the costuming and other aspects of the Persian and Indian armies, and the random Voldo dance. I don't know what the hell was with that.

-as referenced in Red vs Blue, I bring you: the Turducken. (via Wyatt)