Love for Jiu Jitsu and Underpants.

Just discovered a fun, well-written blog by a fun grapply girl named Kerawin.

She writes:

Life is good. Life is sweet. I love love love love LOVE Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. I absolutely love everything about it. I love getting worked and bruised and slightly hurt when I'm in class. I love flipping big boys onto their backs with a catch and a bump. I love learning new stuff that enables me to pant and sweat and think and twist and throw. I love giggling like a girl and cracking filthy jokes like a boy. I love being a girl, and I love the smallness of my own body in comparison to the thugs I play with. I love feeling vital, and I love feeling my bones melt in repose.

I love the strength of my fingers, and the beautiful, intricate network of tendons and ligaments that make them move. I love the beauty I can create with them on my piano (and hopefully one day on my lovely acoustic guitar and the Renaissance bass viol da gamba I dream of having access to). I love thinking without thinking, and creating without time constraints. I love my incredible Boy and three little Piggies, all of whom push me and pull me and challenge me in love. I love the boys and girls in my classes because they're funny and kind and smart and strong and laugh at my stupid jokes. I love Pig Thursdays with my Girl Friday after my BJJ classes. I love ~ and am so dang-proud of ~ my far-flung friends who are out there doing wonderful stuff that I would also so love to do.

I love my travel-laden daydreams, and I love most of my realities ~ even the awful ones ~ because they make great stories, are often kind of sickly funny in retrospect, and provide fodder for future work. I love that I learned how to skillfully use power tools and solder when I was downwards of seven (even though I'd be getting the beats 'cuz I might've been complaining about having to do it at one or two in the morning) because I was helping to build speaker systems and control switches for concert halls, churches, and seniors' homes ~ so I could help put food on the table and pay for our then-agonizing array of now-appreciated lessons. I love that I have been learning how to stand up for myself, even though I still find it far easier to stand up for someone else. And I love how I'm still learning. I'm still learning.

I love that I'm writing like a sixteen-year-old because I'm probably one of the most emotionally-retarded people I know (Irishmen don't have that monopoly, sorry!). I don't say "eighteen-year-old" because that's probably when I was my most confident and outspoken, and either maturity or fear, and some modicum of renewed insecurity, has shut me up some since then. So, sixteen. At least, for today.

And later, she also writes:

I have a secret weapon that's actually not such a well-kept secret. After all, they've been pointed at, alluded to, and mocked. I guess it might have something to do with how they sometimes peek out over my pants which can ride down a bit from the rough and tumble of drilling and rolling, and they also have the tendency to daringly eyeball the world through the side-gaps of aforementioned pants.

I am speaking, of course, about my Lucky UnderGis.

The first time I noticed there was something perhaps slightly unkosher about my choice of grappling skivs was when Tits'n'Gritts ~ who was at the gym picking up BJJ Mastah ~ waved her finger at my waistband and loudly announced, "Ooh, nice lacey panties! You can totally see them, you know." After momentarily freezing with mortification, I looked down and thought, Oh, shoot, you're right: I can see them. You can see them. Everyone can see them.


Read the rest here.....