Chapter 224: Advanced Aikido Class

Wednesday, May 18, 2005 (Continued)

Leaving school was almost a feeling of déjà vu, as there was a crowd waiting for me in the parking lot, mostly of middle-school girls. We were spotted and mobbed by the hordette, asking, "Is it true?", "Are you really rich?", "Are you really a millionaire?" Etc.

They let Julia and me through to the car and my sisters. Thank goodness my mobs have all been made of people smaller than me; hordes would be terrifying if I was Julia's size compared to them. I positioned Julia, my sisters and myself so our backs were to the hood of the car, and the mob was in a semicircle on the grass in front of where I'd parked. That way they weren't standing in the parking lot, as they were generally too pretty to be road kill. I motioned for silence, then addressed them, "I've heard lots of you calling out, 'Is it true?' There's been so much noise I missed the rest, but I assume you're asking me to confirm I have the best sisters and girlfriend in the world?" It's very hard to put your arms around someone when they're holding the arms in question, so I settled for smiling at each of the my girls.

From the hordette, "No! Is it true you're RICH?"

"I think that wonderful sisters and a fantastic girlfriend are worth more than money, But in answer to your question, yes I am. I hope you still like me anyway?"

They did still like me. After their expressions of admiration they all started shouting out money-related questions at me.

I held up my hands for quiet again. "I don't have much time, so I'll quickly answer some of your questions..." I trotted out my usual cover story answers. It took less than five minutes, especially because this audience didn't want detailed answers. I was also amused to notice that their questions had different priorities than those of high-schoolers. This crowd were mainly interested in what I was going to spend the money on, and in my giving so much money to Carol. I rather embarrassingly had to face questions about not giving any money to Donna: I blamed Mom.

^-- I finished with, "I don't want to be rude, but meeting in the parking lot is no good so I'm not going to encourage it by hanging around. I appreciate that you think today is special because today is the day you heard about my being rich, but today's not special for me. It's the same as yesterday and the day before, etc. It's nice to see you, but I have several things I have to do before 5pm, so I'm going now. Goodbye!"

My passengers and I started getting into the car.

Diana and Claire broke out of the crowd to rush up to me. Diana rushed to say, "We want to thank you very much Mark. For you know what. We can't believe you're interested..."

I crouched down to their level, interrupting, "Believe it. I think you're both sexy." Being up-front about that was a good idea for many reasons, including that I wasn't going to beat about the bush getting sex from them, and I wanted them to know that it can be honest, healthy fun (not so honest that they'd tell their parents or Mackenzie though!) "There are many sexy girls in school, but I like you two so much because I like your personalities. You're both lovely girls whose company I enjoy. We can talk more next time, but I have to go now. Bye."

#3: <We forgot the third reason, having sisters is HOT! What a pity Mackenzie was such a repressed, jealous, delusional pain in the ass.>

#1: <I wonder if our being rich will change her attitude enough. I saw her with some funny looks on her face today, but I never bothered studying her to work out what she was thinking.>

#2: <Even if she turns into a raving nymphomaniac because we're rich, she's too unstable. There's far too much risk of her getting possessive again, then ratting out her sisters if she knows we've had sex with them. Which kind of makes it difficult to have a foursome with all of them. Mackenzie would be sure to notice the other two girls are her sisters.>

#1: <I agree. The last thing Diana and Claire need is to have their parents going ballistic on them over sex. Let's forget Mackenzie. After her stupidity I'm not attracted to her anyway.>

#3: <Your attitude might change if she was naked and begging for it.>

#1: <True, but I don't think it'd change enough to risk getting Claire and Diana into serious trouble. Us too, if their parents got seriously upset, and it's hard to imagine their not getting that way, considering how frosty Mrs. Norris got when we said "panties".>

There was only one topic of conversation on the way home: how everyone at school had reacted to my news. Carol, Donna and Julia all had stories to tell, and not enough time to tell them in.

There had been an unexpected difference between the reactions of the high- and middle-schools. I've already described the high-school reactions. The middle-school kids believed they had no chance of becoming important to me - even the Ducklings and Carol's friends had no real hope of that - so their responses were impersonal. There was no point in them being greedy, for example, because they had no hope of extracting any money from me. For the same reason, lust (as a possible reaction of middle-school girls) or being pissed off because now I'd get even more girls (a possible reaction of middle-school boys) were quite rare.

Mostly there was admiration and liking, especially in Carol's grade. A lot of the middle-school kids weren't affected much by an older boy having millions of dollars, but they totally understood that I'd given Carol $300,000 of her own. Carol was now RICH because her wonderful brother had given her a very large amount of his money. That made me the best brother in the Universe!

By the way, Carol had sat Donna down for a serious talk about why Carol got money but Donna did not. Donna would have preferred to be given $300,000 too, but she was reasonably okay with it. [Obviously this autobiography would be unreasonably long if I included even summaries of conversations between important third parties. Also obviously, many of my own conversations are omitted, but I will mention one example of a type of omission because it becomes quite important later: Carol and I are spending MANY hours talking together (and with Julia and recently Ava) about our hopes, dreams and aspirations, as well as likes, dislikes, reasons behind our reactions to events, etc., etc. We are getting to know each other FAR better than EVER before, especially because our talk is so personal.]

When we got close to home we saw several cars parked in front of it, and half a dozen girls hanging around on our front lawn.

"God, now they're staking out our home!" I stopped the car as soon as I saw them. They'd been eagerly awaiting the arrival of my money (in the form of me), so they'd been looking up the street. Seeing our car, they waved excitedly and started running toward us.

"Do you want to come car shopping with us, Carol? Donna?"

Carol started getting out of the car, saying, "We can handle this. Come on, Donna."

#1: <Carol's confidence just keeps getting better and better.>

#4: <Yeah. It's great to see.>

I confidently locked my door, suggesting to Julia she do the same. I used NP to lock the back doors as the girls closed them. No one was close enough to see, and it'd look like I used power locks anyway. Then put the car in reverse and backed up the street far enough to be able to do a quick turn in someone's driveway, then I made a clean getaway.

Julia commented, "One of my ideas was for you to show your bank statement around school, so they could see the $16 million of deposits. I think I was right when I decided they'd be impressed enough without it."

"Yeah, I think they're impressed MORE than enough."

"For once in your life, you'd better drive over the speed limit. You're going so slow they might catch us."

We got to visit the various car lots without incident, even though we had to do more driving around this afternoon as the ones we wanted to see were scattered around town. We had the same problem as yesterday with sometimes not being taken seriously, but it didn't matter much yet. We still managed to eliminate some of the cars on Julia's list, and I started gaining some understanding of what I wanted in a new car, which was a very good thing to happen since I was going to be buying a new car whether I understood or not.

Some of the factors that concerned me were somewhat unexpected. As one silly, but still real example, I found out that my ass was fussy about temperature. Most of the cars that I was allowed to sit in had heated seats, which was 'cool' (in one sense), but there was a problem. Many of the heater controls had only two or three positions, either on/off or high/low/off. "On" and "High" were too hot for my ass, and "Low" in those cars that had it wasn't noticeable. Neither was "Off", in case you need to have that mentioned. I could've overridden my body's natural feelings by using my subconscious control, but why should I be reminded of a design fault in my car every time I took a drive on a cold day or at night?

There were other things, like the latest Jaguar had rear view mirrors that I thought were obviously too small and would therefore have unacceptably large blind areas. Given how far we had to drive to find a Jaguar dealership, that was damned annoying. How on Earth could people produce an upmarket car that suffered from such an easily remedied and potentially dangerous fault?

#4: <Probably designed by a woman, so image was more important than function.>

After car scouting, we returned to Julia's place. That'd been my intention even before seeing my home staked out.

I called Carol to see how she managed with the idiots.

"It was easy. I told them you were very pissed off, and you'll be red-carding anyone who hangs around our home from now on. They REALLY don't want that to happen, so they ran away, haha."

"Well done. I'm constantly amazed by how much confidence and ability you're developing."

"So you constantly keep saying. It's nice of you, but it was nothing this time. Donna and I have been using a similar threat to keep our friends from coming here uninvited. It's even easier with high-school girls because of the red cards."

"I'm still impressed by you. Have I told you recently how much I love you?"

"Lots of guys are trying to get very friendly with me recently. You're not just after me for my money are you?"

"Of course NOT! I resent that insinuation. I'm only interested in you for your cooking skills." I would've said "body", but this was over the phone, which our 'benevolent' Government could be recording.

After Carol's laugh, Julia wanted to talk with her about girly stuff so I didn't really listen, and then we called Ava to talk with her.

Ava had some funny stories about her classmates' silly overreactions to my news, as well as a bit of news about her parents. They were dithering over their vacation. The earliest they could go was May 28, a Saturday ten days away, but the trouble with that was that they were concerned their not getting back until just before Ava's exams might disrupt her studying (they were going to be away for two weeks). Waiting until after finals meant traveling during summer vacation that they'd rather not do, especially because they'd rather be available to spend more time with Ava those days. After the summer vacation was so far away that their health might have declined too far to allow them to travel enjoyably.

Julia got Ava to put her parents on the line.

"You're going on May 28." Julia had a firm opinion and good arguments to back it up. Her top reason was that Ava would be staying with Julia while they were away, and Julia theatrically moaned, "Do you have ANY IDEA how much studying my parents make me do before finals! This year it's going to be even worse than usual because I've been spending so much time with Mark instead of doing schoolwork," which was a well-intentioned lie. Julia had resigned from many clubs, committees, etc., to devote herself to me. The net effect on her schoolwork time wouldn't have been significant. "If you're worried, tell Mom or Dad how many hours you want Ava to study, but I promise you they'll almost certainly make us do double what you think is a reasonable amount. They're slave-drivers of the worst type."

Ava's parents were convinced, even though Ava begged them not to go on vacation at all.

Dinner was fun, even with just Vanessa and Prof being there (The Boys were both at their girlfriends'). They had some good stories about what had happened when their coworkers found out I'd given them a million dollars.

Prof added, "I even had the Dean call me about you just before I came home. He's very impressed by your day trading abilities. We talked about your impressive studying progress too. He's feeling very happy about investing in your education. Maureen also told me that she's available for marriage any time you are. She's already married to a nice guy, but said she didn't mind trading her current husband in for a rich stud muffin." (Maureen is the head secretary of the Math Department. A hard-case, 40-year old woman.)

I couldn't think of anything to say, but Vanessa suggested, "Tell her Mark says he'll need to take her for a spin first."

Prof chucked, "Will do."

Julia and I also talked about some of our experiences today. Vanessa had a few questions for us, but nothing difficult, just about how we'd managed beggars, the increased attention from girls, how guys had reacted, etc. Easily answered questions.

I dropped Julia at my place on the way to Aikido, but early so I could talk with Mom and Dad for a while. They told some of their funny stories, adding how impressed everyone at their workplaces were with me. I didn't get any proposals of marriage from their workmates though, which was a bit of a pity because from the occasional times I've met some of them, there are a couple of very good looking ladies working in Mom's sales department. On average, Dad's lawnmower assembly coworkers aren't quite so attractive, or as feminine.

I arrived at the dojo in plenty of time, eager to see what an advanced Aikido class was like. There was another class in its final couple of minutes. I sat on the side while Sensei finished his talk, they did their final bowing, and then everyone got up to leave, get changed, or whatever.

Sensei spent a few minutes talking to various students from that class, then wandered over to me. After the usual greetings Sensei said, "We will spend half the class doing the basic forms that you know, then some multiple-attacker training because I cannot show you that in our Monday sessions. You will see that the basic forms are done with considerably more movement than you are used to, but I will demonstrate them all first and I am sure you will adapt without difficulty. I will also rotate your partners often, so you get experience training with different people. Is it all right with you if I introduce you by your first name and say you are a private pupil of mine?"

"That's fine, thanks for asking. One point though, won't the class be annoyed to spend half their time doing the basic forms again just for me?"

"Not at all. They are called 'basic forms' not 'beginner forms'. They are fundamental to Aikido, so we train on them frequently at every level."

Sensei left me to talk with other students. I spotted new arrivals, who were pretty obviously coming for the advanced class. They were fit, healthy, mostly in their 20s with a scattering of older students, and moved quite well. Not as well as Sensei and me, but still somewhat better than most people (moving gracefully isn't an obvious giveaway, but is noticeable if looked for, especially when the people are semi-conscious of how they're moving, since they'd just arrived in the dojo for a class). Plus there was the small extra hint that they were wearing black belts! Most of them were wearing hakama too (black pants that are worn over top of the white gi pants), so their 'blackness' contrasted strongly with my 'whiteness'.

My white belt (which means I'd never been graded, so a raw beginner of only a few weeks experience) caused them to ignore me. They obviously knew each other well, and got into their own conversations easily.

When the previous class had cleared the room, the members of the advanced class started warming themselves up in very much the same way I'd seen the beginner classes do, only a great deal smoother. Sensei motioned for me to join in, which I did. They were too busy to talk with me, but I could see some curiosity on their faces. Surprisingly little though. I would've thought a new member of the class would've caused much more interest, as the existing members had presumably trained together for years. A new guy wearing a white belt had to be a very unusual event, but they accepted my presence with little reaction.

After warming up, Sensei called the class to order, which means all the students sit on the long edge of the mat facing Sensei sitting in the middle. Sensei indicated I should sit at the right hand end. We did the bowing thing (it's a show of respect between teacher and students, not a sign of subservience, and definitely not of any religious significance).

Sensei said, "You will have seen that we have a new member this evening. Mark is a pupil I tutor privately, consequently he misses out on some of the benefits of training in a group, so he will occasionally be joining this class. I will partner him with as many of you as I can during the class, and I urge each of you to pay attention during the time you have with him. You might learn some things."

One of the class asked, "I didn't know you did private tutoring, Sensei?"

"Normally I do not, but Mark's situation is unusual. You will pair up to do the basic forms shortly, but first I want Mark to see each of them quickly." Sensei called up two of his most advanced students (I could tell that by what followed), and got them to go quickly through the first nine techniques I'd learned. "Quickly" being the operative word - they flew through them (literally at times). It was a pleasure to watch, and VERY different than the training I'd seen or done.

In the beginners' classes I'd seen, and how I train with Sensei, a technique starts with the attacker and defender standing facing each other. The defender will extend an arm and the attacker will grasp the wrist. To exaggerate slightly, the defender will then collect himself, and when he is ready, start the technique, so it's somewhat wooden. I would never have thought of using that adjective before, as Aikido is graceful, but "wooden" seemed very appropriate when I saw how the advanced students performed the same techniques. They did everything on the move - the attacker rushing into the attack while the defender moved away, although with one hand extended so the technique could proceed. More often than not the defender would start using the technique on the attacker even before the attacker had touched the defender's wrist, let alone actually grasped it. The rest of the technique flowed even more than the beginning did, with the attacker swept in large circles, spun around, sent flying, or whatever the technique being performed required; those movements being FAR more than what happened in the static versions I'd learned. And the moment one technique was over, the defender would let go and retreat a few paces so the attacker could leap to his feet and rush into the next attack.

When they'd finished the nine techniques, which I'd swear took less than a minute in total, Sensei thanked them and they returned to sit with the rest of the class. Then, "You will pair up and start with Ikkyo. Every three or four minutes I will call out for you to change to the next technique. Mark will move from pair to pair, making his group a triple. He will attack each of you once first, then defend against each of your attacks once, before he moves to the next pair so he can experience as many different partners as possible. In the interests of time please keep the techniques flowing quickly. Okay, begin!"

The last statement got everyone jumping to their feet, quickly choosing someone to pair with, and spreading out around the mat. One thing that was different from the beginner classes, was that these guys (actually about a third were female) needed a LOT more room. Fortunately, and probably essentially, the class size was much smaller.

There was no sign of any annoyance at their having to do the basic techniques, or at the apparent favoritism I was being given either. The students happily leaped to their feet and rushed to comply with Sensei's instructions. The pair that formed closest to me asked me to join them with nothing but friendly curiosity in their expressions, but Sensei arrived next to me then and indicated for them to start without me. Sensei asked me, "All right?"

"Daunting. There's a lot more movement than I'm used to."

"Yes. I am throwing you in the deep end, but I am sure you will adapt. You grasp principles very quickly, and I am sure you will find the movement is easier and more natural than what you are used to."

Sensei walked me toward the closest pair, waited until they'd finished the technique, then said loud enough for the pair and me to hear, "Attack Michael for an Ikkyo, Mark." It was a mixed gender pair, so there was no doubt which was Michael.

Michael held out an arm and started backing away. Nothing else for it, I rushed forward, reaching out to grab Michael's wrist.

I want to write, "Next thing I knew I was flying through the air," because it sure felt like that. There were two problems with that statement though. First Ikkyo is an immobilization technique, so I ended up being pinned to the mat rather than being sent flying. Second, the "next thing I knew" was wrong. The technique was performed about three times faster than I'm used to, but it was slow enough that I was still able to follow some of what happened. I was certainly not able to stop it happening though! Michael easily had me spinning around, off balance and then pinned on the mat. It felt very different than all the times Sensei had done the technique on me. When Sensei does techniques with me, he moves my body by using physical force. It's force applied in the direction of least resistance - so I have very little chance to prevent it working - but it's still force. Michael's technique had used considerably less force than I'm used to; instead he used momentum to do most of the work. Most of his force had been used to guide my movements rather than create them. It was a substantial difference in technique.