The other day I was thinking about a school I used to attend. If you lived in the Midwest and followed the ninjutsu craze, you’d know the school I’m talking about.

Well…I was in ninja school, working out with the other students. We were practicing shuriken-jutsu, or blade throwing. We were throwing stars into a thick pine target board. The way you get them out if to lay the outer edge of your thumb along one side, grasp the back with your other hand and sort of rock them out.

Our instructor, a dickhead who believed in instructing through student intimidation, had whipped his star into the board so hard that no one could get it out. Including him.

Hm.

So Super-Sensei runs to the office to get a tool.

NOW: I’m standing there thinking “Hey, we’re training to be ninjas, if this were a real-life field situation, we coldn’t just run off and get a tool, we’d work with what we had. So WWND (What Would a Ninja Do)?

I took stock of what I had on me…I was wearing a standard karate gi (uniform), no pockets, no tools, no shoes, just a gi and a jock. And of course the uniform was closed with a belt…hmmmmm…

So while the sensei is digging for a tool in the office, I whipped off my belt, stuck it through the hole in the middle of the shuriken and gave it a good yank. And pop it came right out of the wall.

The students were standing around me watching this, not sure whether they should praise me or not. I’d done something right, very right, but the sensei hadn’t thought of it first, so they didn’t want to piss him off. So they waited to see his reaction before they said anything.

He walked up about the time I popped the star out of the board. I pulled my belt out of the hole and handed him the star, still stupidly expecting to get praised for my ingenuity and ablity to problem-solve.

Instead he looked at me like I’d pooped on the Buddha because I had used my belt to pull the star. “Very creative”, he said, “but not the way of the ninja.”

???

Not too long after this I left the school. I knew what I knew…I knew that I was a ninja, mostly because I’d pissed that bully off, and I knew that I was wasting my time waiting for him to approve my skills.