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.