A Fairy Tale

The last 6 weeks were made of a fairy tale. I joined a group that did circus, I met the most supportive and loving group of women I could have imagined, each beautiful by her own right and with a sense of humor.

In the performances, something went wrong for everybody and everyone broke a little at some point, but every time I saw another girl or more was there ready to help her get back up and at it. If you even looked frightened someone was there to help you.

Yesterday was the cast party. It was fun, with people running around and just enjoying themselves. Children and dogs were welcome. People were responsible with their children and generous with their food. There were none of the little annoyances we ignore every day.

I was going to let it all end there originally, but it appears there will be a 6 week fabric class for only $15 a class and a tumbling class. I might take these. It is ridiculously tempting. What is more, one of the girls I met wants to go skating and another wants me to start dancing with them. She can teach me poi and I can teach her weapons. It sounds wonderful. I'm not ready to part ways with all of these fantastic people. It makes me want to cry that it is over.

I have no idea how I am going to be able to go and handle real life when I know that people can be like this. I feel like I was in a fairy tale and now I have to go back to the real world filled with insecure nasty cynics.

Circus Day 15

Spent all of circus today going over acro stuff for the show on Friday. This is apparently the most ambitious show they have ever attempted for this level. It was a lot of fun and I realized how far we have all come as we prepared for it and were able to do moves easily that we thought were really hard a bit ago. Nothing new, but there were three things that I was able to do without a problem that I had not been able to do in the past. I have a giant painful bug bite on my elbow, but barely noticed during the class (I have since discovered all anti-itch creams in my house have aloe as the first ingredient, which I am allergic to).

On the way back, we had a hitchhiker who was along for the ride to help on costumes. She is from Montreal, so I asked a question that has been seriously bugging me. This is whether there are other circus school opportunities like this one. She said yes, one other, in Australia. This amazes me. I really hope that other circus groups will take that to heart and start helping random women work on circus stuff. This has been one of the nicest groups of girls I have ever met and a seriously positive experience. It has renewed some degree of faith in humanity for me.

Circus School Day 14

Tonight was fun. I did a clown piece with . We have a lot of good interactions together. It was hilarious and we are perfecting it even more.

Aerial was a blast. We did a couple of runthroughs of the act and the music is awesome. I was able to get up the cloth in a way I wasn't on Tuesday, but I am still having a major problem making myself do one of the drops. I have watched THREE other people do it. I was in a hugely painful position for many minutes looking down at the ground thinking "okay... NOW... I mean... NOW!" I have done it in slow motion three times. I will get this damn thing down before the show, but I seem to have major trust issues with things even as solid as a piece of fabric.

I will get this. I will I will I will.

The instructor for fabric told me she had the same damn hangup.

Circus School Day 13

Today was aerials only. We have a routine that seems both doable and challenging. This is exciting. Two of the three of us tried the first drop. I had some problems getting into star position (pants are not good for this position and somehow it snagged and my hip was being pulled out of place), so I didn't get to try the drop. I will next time, however.

We have to do that routine twice in one day. Oy. But it will work.

This has become an extremely fun class. I am so glad and lucky I was able to take it.

On the way back, we saw the most beautiful sunset. I will post pictures soon taken by the goddess_ironica on my camera. They were actually worth it, methinks.

Circus Days 11 and 12

Day 11 was aerial and clown.
Aerial was fun, but since I missed the warmup as I hit traffic on the way out of albuquerque, I felt weak and not as brave as usual. I think the almost fall on day 10 helped with this fear problem, but I should be okay in the end. We started coming up with a routine, which is continually mutating but is definitely attractive. is doing her bits in the middle since she is much better at being pretty than the other two of us and the other two of us will be symmetrically (with slight asymmetry) climbing up and doing tricks from the air.

Clown was hilarious. Clown is basically a game of "let's pretend" and I have plenty of experience with that. Like Dr. Dorian in Scrubs, I spend a large part of my life silently watching witty counters to real-life situations. I was told that some of the things that come out of my mouth are hilarious. For me, these things are normal. I guess I am a natural?

Day 12 was Acrobatics, Performance Skills, and Conditioning

Acrobatics was somewhat fun but mostly spent figuring prancing and showing off so that Kate (one of the acro teachers) could figure out the movement act. In the end I get to do some things including a double-dive-roll across the floor. I need to figure out how to do ironing board with Nancy. I can do this. All it needs is a handstand (which I've mostly got) and to keep my legs straight. My hips need to remember to be flexible. Stupid hips.

Performance skills was pretty boring. We spent the first half arguing about colors. The lesson was to make eye contact. I will gladly do so if I am not 10 feet in the air freaking out. We all already knew this.

Conditioning was fun. My abs are extremely sore. My rotator cuffs I think are mildly strained but functional. I am a stronger girl than I was before conditioning. Yay!

Today, Aerials only. and I need to come up with an act for Thursday clown.

circus school days 9 and 10

Sunday was performance skills. I don't think either of us learned much, which was sad. I felt like it was pulling teeth just to get my group to come together and figure something out. We missed the acrobatics part of class for a wedding. C'est la vie.

Today was aerial fabric only. I had a blast and got to relearn some stuff. Unfortunately at some point in the class I had complete arm muscle failure 5 feet above the ground at the point when the knot in my foot slipped, but the instructor helped me get down before I died. My foot was even with her head, so this puts me at around 5 feet. I need to stop thinking I am infallible and can do anything. I am wrong. Other than that scary moment, I did all sorts of fun stuff. Every once in a blue moon I make the mistake of realizing how high up I am and freeze, thinking "whose stupid idea was this???" but I think I'm over it for now. Going down stairs, which used to hold some level of trepidation for me, is now easy though. ;)

Circus school was fun yesterday, clown and stilts.

I forwent the stilts and just spotted since I was sick yesterday and had major vertigo। इ देसिदेद स्तायिंग ओं थे स्तिल्ट्स व्हिले दिज्ज्य वास अ स्तुपिद आईडिया.

Clown was awesome. The more we do it, the more I think that I use clown logic all the time. The other girls had some interesting concepts. I now have two red noses in my car. I hate those things with a passion. The whole time it is on, I feel stupid and like I want to claw the stupid thing off of my face.

We had to choose specialties yesterday. I chose clown, aerial fabric, and poi. I'm excited. I need to make some nicer poi that don't hurt so much when I hit myself in the head however.

Circus day 7

Circus school yesterday consisted of acrobatics and aerials.

Acrobatics was awesome. We did a lot of tumbling type stuff without the mats. We did partner-cartwheels. We worked on handstands. My wrist started whining at some point so I had to slow down a bit and wrap it. I cannot do a handstand yet, but will certainly be able to by the time class ends, darn it all. We then did partner acro. I paired with this girl who is exactly my weight and we had a lot of fun. The first one I have no memory of name of, but we got balanced right away. That one is actually fun to fall on. The second thing we did is called possum. She liked it so much we did it over and over and over again. We worked a bit on box and swan. The instructor was impressed when on something we were doing she dropped me and I fell landing on my forearm instead of my wrist or elbow. All the falling training I've had from the various things I've done continues to pay off! For a small person, I make a good base. People love me as a flier because I don't weigh anything. It is awesome. By the end of class, I was exhausted.

Then we had Aerial:
I finally figured out the single-foot unassisted knot for fabric. I was pretty happy about that. It is harder than the one she is teaching but I think more applicable. We did some other things, including one thing I didn't have the strength for when I last took fabric. Then trapeze. My rotators in my thighs are too strong apparently and started pulling my hips out of socket for one of the trapeze moves. I did the rest, but got the hell out of that position quickly. I'm just plain not built for trapeze, although it is fun and the instructor adorable. I have a total girl crush. Yes, I'm still straight. :-P

Most of the girls are adorable and all are nice. This is continuing to be a positive experience.

Circus school day 6

Circus school was fun today: acrobatics, clown, and conditioning.

Acro:
* Two-person tumbling is awesome.
* I make a good base, not just a good flier.
* I need to keep working on my flexibility. I'm not quite there; the instructor was sympathetic because she was once where I am-not flexible but pretty strong.

Clown:
* Entertaining
* The instructor is really good at inventing games for us to play.
* We got to play the different elements. This was entertaining and fun.

Conditioning:
* Insufficient-it was taught by the clown instructor. While the lower body conditioning was probably sufficient, I don't think the upper body conditioning came close. To be fair, there was only a single instructor there at that point so it is possible it wasn't safe to do more.

Circus School Day 5

Today, more acro and stilts.

Since I'm an uber-newbie to partner acro, this is interesting. I finally managed to do a decent cartwheel, possibly for the first time in my life. I like basing more than flying, but am kind of small to base most of the people, so will have to stick with flying more often than not.

Stilts were also fun tonight. We did a lot of kicking and wandering around. I'm still vaguely terrified, but did fall on my own tonight (on purpose-this is how you get off of them). There are plans in the works to make some just for fun, but first I need to find a decent soft wood without knots in it. I've been told that all the places in Santa Fe suck for this, so hopefully can find something suitable in Albuquerque.

Circus day 4

Circus school day 4 was a blast. The first half was stilts and the second half aerial stuff. The stilts were awesome-I am actually pretty comfortable on them now. I also got some shorter ones as opposed to last week since I seem to be more comfortable on shorter ones. I can do half grapevines, turn, walk backwards a bit, shuffle sideways, and not fall over. It was amusing.

The aerial was fun. I am pretty certain I pulled my left calf muscle in conditioning Sunday so there was one trapeze trick I didn't do because I couldn't trust my leg to hold. I enjoyed fabric, but the things we did were much simpler than what I did in Cathy Gauche's class. She had a way of tying the knots without having to use another extremity. I will spend some time figuring it out before class next week because it is really bugging me. I suspect she isn't a full expert on this and it makes me sad.

Today's thoughts

I'm going to start posting happy thoughts, hopefully every day, to attempt to counter the negative family things. I'll never quite understand why family members feel free to take advantage of you over and over again, breaking their promises repeatedly.

Today's happy thought: Today will be the first aerial class in the circus school sets.

Circus day 3

Yesterday was a lot of fun. Acro, then juggling, then conditioning.

Acro was a blast. I got to play with a girl called Eliza who is almost exactly my size for basing and flying. We are both reasonably certain we can lift each other so this always works well. We did swan and cathedral. Cathedral is hard, just for the record.

We also did some tumbling stuff and my cartwheels still officially suck. I started working up to handstands by standing with a spot. We could kind of get it with cathedral (me and Eliza) and were almost free-standing by the end.

Juggling had the usual, balls and clubs, as well as diabolos (now I have to buy a new one), plates, contact jubbling balls, and poi. Plates were interesting; goddess_ironica had it almost immediately. I tried for a little while and eventually got tired of being hit with my plate. I played with the diabolo for a while until I wandered to try actually, you know, juggling balls, and found the poi. Soon I was outside spinning. Another girl also does spinning so we traded some tricks, including how to turn around. Contact juggling was fun, but I definitely need more practice.

I think they are trying to kill us with the conditioning, but I did manage to climb the rope without much trouble. Yay me!

Circus day 2

Day two, yesterday, was pretty awesome. After the warmup, the first class was stilts. If you don't know, I am absolutely terrified of heights. I volunteered to go up first in my group of three (one person up, two spotters egging you on). I froze and got the deer-in-the-headlights look. Within five minutes, I was tottering around the room. They were impressed at how quickly I got over my terror. I was impressed that I didn't die. It was pretty fun. The way to get down is to fall on your knees (kneepads on of course). I was glad I keep my derby gear in my car-my kneepads are fantastic. The other two girls did better than me (partially because they didn't waste time being terrified). It was a lot of fun. One of them accidentally knocked a big metal thing on my head when we were next to a big tall cabinet that she was leaning against, but it wasn't intentional. I cried tears, but mainly from the shock of being slammed in the head than anything. I was embarrassed by all the attention which I dispersed as quickly as I could, refused the ice, and we kept moving. I have a bump on my head this morning, but we fuss in our society far too much about bumps and bruises. I wanted to play!

The second class was clowning. Clowning is the art of creating a fantasy world and making people believe in it. The type of clowning we are going to do does not involve wigs, paint, or shoes. It involves creating a world for our audience to believe in complete with its rules. You have to stick to your own rules, so be careful trying this. ;) Our task was to find a way off of a chair using clown logic. I painted someone in the air to lift me down. goddess_ironica found the problem with getting off the chair to be that the floor was far too hot. She eventually licked her feet in a ridiculous manner and ran out of the room. There were some other skits, some with the problem of sticking to the chair. All were hilarious. And, as a bonus, I didn't get hit in the head!

EDIT: I've never seen such a large group of people with positive attitudes as these girls. They are all sweet and friendly and just them. We admire each other and cheer each other on. It is an entirely new experience for me.

Found I passed everything this semester with B or better. Yay-everything counts for my continued progress through grad school!

Went to circus school for the first time. It was a lot of fun and I did a lot of things I never imagined doing. They are trying to teach us to trust each other. As skeptical as I am of that, there is at least one person much more skeptical than me.

It was a blast.

Bedtime now. I am exhausted and I can tell I will be sore tomorrow. It is a fantastic feeling.

Plans

So the plans of what I want to learn are continually changing. This year and next, I want to learn crazy silly tricks like tumbling and juggling and trapeze, I want to learn to be graceful; in all I want to learn to be somewhat of a performance artist.

This excites me.

Does anyone know of a good place to get a diabolo? I lent mine to a derby girl for a weekend once and she lost it.

I also need to learn stick juggling soon too.

Is there anyone interested in a once-a-week out-at-the-park group where we can just practice juggling, poi, etc. in the warm sunshine (or in the cool shade)? Not until this summer when school is over, obviously, but I would love to have a (smallish) group do this.

Heaven is...

having a roommate who, finding you sick, knows your weakness for macaroni and cheese and makes enough for you even though you have said "no thanks" knowing that at some point you will nose your way out of the pillows because your stomach is awoken by the delicious smell.

What Privileges Did You Have?

1. Father went to college.
2. Father finished college.BS in Mechanical Engineering
3. Mother went to college.
4. Mother finished college. PHD in psych
5. Have any relative who is an attorney, physician, or professor.
6. Were the same or higher class than your high school teachers.
7. Had more than 50 books in your childhood home.
8. Had more than 500 books in your childhood home.
9. Were read children's books by a parent. (At least I don't remember being read them)
10. Had lessons of any kind before you turned 18. Ballet to teach me grace. Didn't work.
11. Had more than two kinds of lessons before you turned 18.
12. The people in the media who dress and talk like me are portrayed positively. 1337 girls...
13. Had a credit card with your name on it before you turned 18.
14. Your parents (or a trust) paid for the majority of your college costs.
15. Your parents (or a trust) paid for all of your college costs.
16. Went to a private high school.
17. Went to summer camp.
18. Had a private tutor before you turned 18.
19. Family vacations involved staying at hotels. Does it count if they kept making you go to disneyland and you hated it?
20. Your clothing was all bought new before you turned 18
21. Your parents bought you a car that was not a hand-me-down from them. (I never got a car from them-I got to borrow one of theirs until I got my own...)
22. There was original art in your house when you were a child.
23. You and your family lived in a single-family house.
24. Your parent(s) owned their own house or apartment before you left home.
25. You had your own room as a child. A very small room.
26. You had a phone in your room before you turned 18.
27. Participated in a SAT/ACT prep course
28. Had your own TV in your room in high school.
29. Owned a mutual fund or IRA in high school or college.
30. Flew anywhere on a commercial airline before you turned 16.(relatives were all in NY, brother was obsessed with disneyland)
31. Went on a cruise with your family.
32. Went on more than one cruise with your family.
33. Your parents took you to museums and art galleries as you grew up.
34. You were unaware of how much heating bills were for your family.

(c)From What Privileges Do You Have?, based on an exercise about class and privilege developed by Will Barratt, Meagan Cahill, Angie Carlen, Minnette Huck, Drew Lurker, Stacy Ploskonka at Illinois State University. If you participate in this blog game, they ask that you PLEASE acknowledge their copyright.

Morning thoughts

I am sick this morning but at work trying to ignore it anyways. Vacations make me feel like if I don't work for the three days that comprise the week afterwards I am a lazy butt. If I get worse I will go home.

I had dreams that I was 15 weeks pregnant and hadn't noticed. I woke to find myself still slim and un-pregnant. I've been feeling fat lately partially due to the pain thing making me not very active, so I attribute those moments of insanity to that. On the weird side, I wasn't too upset by the being pregnant thing in the dream. I am eating cucumbers and avocado for lunch.

I read that ravelry.com sends out 500-800 invitations a day. As there are only 3100 people ahead of me, I only need to be patient for, at most, 6 more days. I am currently making lovely arm warmers from a really fine knit. I was going to undo them and start with a larger knit because they are taking a while, but I really like the fine knit. I am hoping I can spend some time this weekend watching a movie or something and finish at least one of the arm warmers. I'm kind of guessing on the pattern as to how many extra stitches to add per x rows to fit me, but it looks like they are working so far. I really should have started bigger and gone smaller with time, but this will do.

Therapy with my brother and parents went well yesterday. I feel comfortable bowing out and letting them continue solo.