Testosterone

Grace was talking about an article in the New York Times for Father's day. The gist was that the more you take care of the kids, the more your testosterone levels drop. 

"So what's your point?" I asked. 

"So people were saying, 'Does that mean the more you take care of the kids then you become Caitlin Jenner?'"

"So what's your point?" I asked again although I may have used a few expletives. 

I have noticed that since my kids have gotten older, and I noticed my bad posture and started reviving my old Kung Fu practice that I have become sort of more manly. In other words, I am taking care of the kids more like a Sifu now and less like a father. After all, this is the age that I am already familiar with. My older students that are now teenagers started at 4 and Jonah is 4. 

So planning for the summer of Kung Fu is kind of like growing balls again in a way. I can feel it. 

But with that, I seemed to have lost patience for other things. 

So what I want to know is, do I want to have low or high testosterone levels. 

Countless commercials and advertisements will tell me that testosterone is what keeps your muscles big and dense and wards off diabetes and other health problems that kill you. But they are trying to sell me Testosterone supplements. 

I heard this thing on NPR about records of Korean Eunuchs, and how all of them lived over 80 years, and this was back in the day when I don't know what the life expectancy was, but it was probably like 30 or 40 or something like that. Now living in the palace probably helped, but I think even palace life expectancy was low. And in that program they talked about high testosterone contributing to heart attacks etc etc. 

So let's go into the world of fiction for a moment because the scince depends on whose selling what. 

Did you ever read/watch Proud Smiling Wanderer? You know, Siu Ngo Gong Hu. The protagonist is Ling Hu Ching and he masters duk gu gau geem, a sowrd technique of now technique. 

This is the most powerful sword in the book other than, pik che geem faht, from a book called Kwai fa bo deen, a type of sword technique developed by Eunuchs. The only problem is, to practice it, you will have internal injuries once you get to the high level... until certain charcaters like Lam Ping Ji and Dong Fong but Bai realized the meaning of the secret phrase, "In order to practice the Enuch Gung you have to loook like a Gung (eunuch) i.e. you have to cut your balls off. 

I would like to thrown in at this point that don't dogs that are gelded live longer? And also don't horses with one ball have stronger staying power because they don't waste energy or something? In the Town the bulbous nosed villain who also played Hakeswill in Sharpe's Eagle mentioned something about gelding a horse or a man in a "chemical" way as opposed to  just cutting them out, But I digress.

So Pik Che Geem faht was the secret of Lam Ping Ji's family, but none of them could ever get any good until Lam Ping Ji went all in and cut his own balls off. But the founder of the family was a monk right? And he adopted a baby instead of getting married and was world renowned for his powerful sword. So did he cut HIS balls off? Or maybe his understanding was different since he was a Buddhist monk. Of course for some reason the women charcaters do not practice this books Kung Fu which I feel is sort of a plot error right? 

But here's the thing, (of course Jin Yong wrote this book in the 70's but let's pretend the novel is just actually real.)

Maybe the founder of the Lam family didn't have to cut his balls because by raising an adopted child from a baby as a single parent father his testosterone levels dropped and he was therefore able to practice PIk Che geem faht, appearing to be a eunuch without actually cutting. 

So does this mean I can now practice Pik Che geem faht?