When it comes to defending yourself against an attack, you have a number of choices for what your end goal may be. I explore the broad buckets they fall into below. Your choice may change over time or with respect to different types of attacks and attackers. Whichever you choose, they are all equally valid. …
When attacked: to fight or not to fight, and for what? Read More »
Now that we are emerging in to the post-pandemic landscape, one of the things I’ve been doing is ramping up my Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu training back up to pre-pandemic levels. It means more and more time spent struggling to escape inferior positions and survive against someone whose sole goal for the moment is to choke me …
In the last thirty hours or so, I’ve gone to a BJJ class, lifted weights twice (and hit a personal record on my back squat by ten pounds!), and had a dry-needling session where I’m finally working on chronic problems instead of acute injuries. It’s a lot of time and I’m pretty tired, because I’m …
Safety is a tricky, squishy concept. We talk about it as the ultimate goal when it comes to self defense or personal protection, where it generally refers to some sort of freedom from or avoidance of physical injury to our bodies or, more ideally, even the threat of that injury. We more rarely think of …
On Wednesday evening, I was on Minnesota Gun Owners Caucus’s Caucus Live, talking about bogus self defense products. One of the areas of discussion was how you can tell if a self defense product is worth carrying. I want to expand on that topic a little, because I think it’s too complex to really get …
Travel. It’s probably one of the first and most frequent “on our own” activities many of us experience. As kids, it might start with summer camp, or being allowed to take the bus to a friend’s house. As we get older, we begin to hit the road for school and leisure, perhaps a spring break …
New experiences are both fun and scary. We often seek them because we want to know what they’re all about. They sound interesting, or someone has told us how much we’ll enjoy them. At the same time, new is different. We have no true model for new. We don’t know what to expect, and that …
Last month, we met SW from ND when they shared a number of safety tips learned from their sex work career but relevant to any of our lives when we decide to start spending intimate time with someone we don’t yet know well. There’s a piece of advice for just you that I held back, …
Courage is what defines the brave. We think of them as heroes, the people we look up to. Rarely do we think of ourselves as one of them. We think of them as the people who run into danger, who save lives, who do the sorts of things that ordinary people can’t or won’t. Our …
Less than fifteen years ago, the iPhone took the world by a storm as one of the first smart phones to hit the market. It’s hard to believe we’ve only had tiny supercomputers attached to us for only that long, less than many of our adult lives. As mobile Internet has become more ubiquitous and …
