optimizing the optimization

I talked about how shopping is tiring because it uses the Choice Muscle. I just realized that board games do t he same thing to me. I came to this realization after playing the same (awesome) game with a friend three times over a period of seven or eight hours. I love Factory Fun, and it lacks any overly frustrating elements (overreliance on chance, ability to screw other players) that turn me off of other games. But it does engage the compulsive optimizer in me to come out, and it that's fun for the first game but almost physically painful in the third. This may explain why I prefer movie nights to board game nights.

The friend I was playing is not a compulsive optimizer. He believes in heuristics and "good enough." His moves take less time, on average. It's worth noting that I won- with the high score of the night- the first game, but lost the second and third, and in fact attempted to resign from the third before realizing we only had one round left anyway. You can say I should stress out less about being perfect, but it looks like the problem wasn't that I was overly sensitive about making mistakes, it was that I was trying to use a resource that had been depleted. And I'm prepared to believe that this tendency is affecting less pointless aspects of my life as well (see: work, interpersonal problems at).

I'm not prepared to give up on compulsive optimizing for good: I liked that first game. I enjoy optimizing. But I'm clearly wasting large parts of my choice-power pool, and am not recognizing when the well is dry (aka I'm not optimizing my use of it). It would probably be good to swing around to the other side for a while, just to see what it's like. Board games are one good place to do this, but martial arts has frequently been valuable by acting as a laboratory for life in which experiments return data quickly, so it might be good to try it there too.

I'm trying to figure out what that means. Caring less about my technique/being sloppier? I can actually see how that might help; it's entirely possible that being overly precise is tensing me up in ways that aggravate my joints, and that I'll find more natural, lower energy ways to do things if I'm not pushing so hard to do the "correct" way. On the other hand, I might just start sucking, that is an option. It probably means being less hard on myself at sparring. It's not that I expect to win against people who are bigger than me and better trained, but I feel like I could do more than I am.. It definitely means taking more shots in sparring. I'm pretty conservative: I mostly focus on blocking, and only take a shot when I see a specific opening (and I miss a lot of openings I recognize too late). T has compared me to a cat more than once*.

There are a few reasons for my judicious use of attacks. One is that many people are just too tall for me to kick, especially because if they block me the right way it aggravates my hip and that's scary. But also, attacking and failing can really hurt** Getting better at blocking immediately pays off in getting hurt less, getting better at attacking goes through a nasty phase where it hurts more. I'm also dissatisfied with the amount of control I display, and don't want to risk hurting someone. But honestly, as long as I'm aiming for the torso, I don't think I'm strong enough to cause real injuries, so I'm only left with fear of hurting myself, and meh, I'm not using epsom salts and I'm barely touching the arnica. If I end up getting too bruised there are many things to try before I even need to lower sparring frequency. It would also be great if I didn't stand there stupidly while evaluating whether a block worked. That's valuable flanking time whether I got hit or not.


*Fingers crossed this comes up when I get my nickname.

**Did you know there's some weird spot in your foot that, if hit at exactly the right angle by someone's elbow, causes a peculiar kind of nerve pain? I learned that on Saturday