Well, I can't complain: equal third place at the New South Wales novice foil state championships. And the other third-place winner was someone from my club. (Our coach is very pleased indeed.)

I was third after the pools: I defeated three (interestingly, including my club buddy), and was defeated by two. The two who beat me ended up first and second after elimination, so it seems to have been a very fair process.

Things I was grateful for: compassionate referees

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Data point one: a few months ago, a young man of about 16 started fencing at my club. He was arrogant, superior, with the half-closed eyes and lift to the chin designed to communicate "I already know something about anything you could possibly say" -- and proved it by trying to top whatever anyone happened to mention. He wasn't talent-free, mind you; nor was he particularly rude or nasty. Just kind of obnoxious, in a pathetic way.

Over the last two or three weeks I've

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I'd been training in karate for a while when my teacher asked me to start training as a class assistant (preparatory to becoming an instructor). Now that I would have to understand how people learn (which you have to do in order to understand how to teach them), she keyed me into a concept so fundamental it applies to every learning situation I've encountered ever since. She said that at the beginning, people can only concentrate on the completely basic, absolutely mandatory core of what they're

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Tonight I realized that every single moment I was bouting tonight, I was grinning like a fool inside that mask. My face hurt by the end of the night, from all the ceaseless grinning.

That's got to tell you something about me and fencing. BFFs, me and fencing.

I'm reliably told, by my coach and by the people I bout with, that I move forward way too much. And even though I try to balance things out a little better now that I've been made conscious of the problem, I'm told it persists.

To me it feels perfectly natural to keep moving forward. In sport sparring (tae kwon do), backing up is almost never a good thing to do. It's easy to step out of the ring, it gives you far, far fewer options for counterattack than a simple side-step would,

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