monkeybird

"Hey!" said the trapeze gods to one another, "We haven't done anything heinous to Julia's feet lately, have we?"

"We've been slacking," the other gods agreed.  "We'll get on that immediately."

"And how about her self esteem?" said another.  "That's been going entirely too well."

"True," said the other gods.  "Let's take her down a notch, shall we?"

And thus began the summer term at Circus Center.

So, um... there is a rather steep learning curve between Static Trapeze 1 and Static Trapeze 2 classes.  Steep.  If you wrote down today's syllabus, it might easily be mistaken for a list of things I can't do.  Conditioning exercises that I'm accustomed to doing with a generous spotter are now to be done with no spotter whatsoever, and half the class followed up by rattling through a succession of skills that I've only seen in shows and YouTube videos.  "I'm going to need a little help with this," I said to Helene, the fabulous (and exceptionally patient) teacher, about six hundred thousand times.

I should then add that the half of the class in question has taken Static 2 before.  This should make me feel better.  It doesn't, because I'm in the other half of the class, or as we're now fondly calling ourselves, Remedial Static 2, and the view isn't quite as good from the bottom of the pile.

I should also be excited that my classmates were doing skills that I usually only reserve for my wildest trapeze fantasies.  When I'm sitting on the bus, listening to music and composing elaborate and lavish routines to whatever song is playing, I will frequently throw in skills like, oh, heel hang (left) and a little toe hang, with the expectation that I will only learn these things, in real life, several years from now.

I should therefore be thrilled that Helene promptly strapped us into lines and taught us these very things, right?  I... guess I'm thrilled, but it's the kind of thrilled where I expect I will be doing these things in lines for the rest of my life.  And the kind where it hurts to wear shoes.

That brings me back to the feet thing: these two particular skills savage parts of your feet which might somehow have been spared in other ankle-intensive skills.  For toe hang, you have to scrunch up all the skin on the front of your ankle before you settle your feet onto the bar (there is also some tricky business in getting your second foot on, which made me very happy to have someone spotting me).  This is a little uncomfortable.  And heel hang gave me some wicked foot and calf cramps.  I don't think there are too many nerves in the skin on your Achilles' tendons, though.  Small mercies.

The physical pain, however, was no match for the psychological takedown.  Learning something new and hard is one thing; being asked to do things that the devil on your shoulder tells you that you should be able to do (because look at them!  they're doing it, right over there!), but which you can't actually do... it leaves one feeling less-than-inspired.

At the end of class, one of the other girls (who joins me in taking level II for the first time) and I looked at each other with matched expressions of disbelief.  "That was rough," she said.

"Yeah," I said, thinking that there needs to be a better word for "rough" that doesn't involve swearing.

"I feel bad for the others," she said.  "We'll be holding them back."

I tried to think of a response that would not reveal my total lack of compassion for my fellow students (or involve swearing), and couldn't.  I settled on, "Yeah."

I left feeling defeated.  I got on the bus and looked around sadly at all the people who would never watch my incredible theoretical act, who would never shower me with their ecstatic applause, because I suck so hard at this.  But then I rallied: rallying involves, as it usually does, taking a walk on the beach, getting a bite to eat, and having a good think about it.  And during my think, I decided that a) I may as well get used to being humbled, because this certainly isn't the last time (nor the first), and b) there's no shame in not knowing how to do something if you try, and I certainly did try.  I can't think of anything that I could have done to try harder or do more, so I have to be satisfied.

Which is all well and good, but I have another class tomorrow.  I need to go do something nice for my feet before they find out about that.

So, Circus Center just wrapped up a pair of shows: the first, "Pratfalls and Rising Stars," was put on by the graduating students in the Professional Aerial Program and the Clown Conservatory.  The second was the school's annual Showcase, and acts were provided by regular-old-students like me (except, like, better than me) and by the Youth Circus.  Although I would normally have nothing but dark feelings for any conjunction of events which kept me off a trapeze for almost two weeks, I saw both shows and they were both good, so I guess I forgive them.

The website had a little blurb about the Showcase that actually applies to both shows-- and, as a matter of fact, my life:

"What happens when the circus takes over your life? Our performers from varied backgrounds train hard for inconceivable reasons, all for a few moments of glory. Circus Center celebrates their dedication and bravery with music, sweat, laughter and applause. Join us and leave happy!"

Note the insinuation of madness ("train hard for inconceivable reasons").  Very apt, that.  When the circus takes over your life, your friends usually decide that you're nuts.

Nor do laypeople necessarily intuit the compulsive, life-consuming power of circus arts, but this was on display in every act to take the stage in both shows.  Here were people who spent all their time, at least for the past few months, practicing.  In the case of the Pratfalls show, the students had been hard at work for between a year (for the first level of the Clown Conservatory program) and three years (though some of the aerialists get off with two).  I can personally attest that the aerialists work hard, since there has rarely been a day between April and June that I didn't see one or several of their acts being rehearsed while I was practicing in the gym.  The end result was spectacular: any of the acts could have been plopped as-is into a respectable circus and no one would have blinked.  This wasn't by any means a hi-tech production (the gym, the school's main space, had been converted into a theater with some lights, some bleachers, and a handful of black boards to create the illusion of a backstage), but the simplicity of the apparatuses meant that the talent of the performers shone brightest.  They conveyed that combination of grace, strength, and daring which makes aerial work so delightful to watch.  At the end of the night, I was inspired: this semester, I'm going to practice more!  And better!  And with enthusiasm!

The second show, the Showcase, was a little more diverse.  The tone was a little less sophisticated, a little more relaxed, which suited the fact that there seemed to be more children attending.  (A note to parents: I applaud your support of circus arts and your attempt to interest your small child, but if said child is terrified of clowns, perhaps a show that is 50% clowns, such as the Pratfalls show, is not a good first step.  Nor should you and your screaming offspring sit next to me during the performance.  Thank you.)  The aerial acts, always close to my heart, continued to be largely excellent: there were not one, but two static trapeze acts that thoroughly impressed me, and the show opened with flying trapeze.  I always forget the sheer pleasure of watching people fly around and catch each other. It's so beautiful, and I was on the edge of my seat the whole time.

The Youth Circus, a gaggle of acrobatic teenagers, showed up regularly.  They themselves were good, but there were some questionable music and costuming decisions made on their behalf, and the clown gag that was used to introduce them got old, fast.  But then, if you're fourteen I guess it's your prerogative to be a little awkward, and I can't but be impressed by a group of people who performed floor acrobatics, Chinese pole, and hoop diving (and some of them did more than that) in one night-- and that was the day's second show.  Some of the other acrobatic acts were impressive, too.  How about Chinese pole with roller blades?  Or hand balancing on tiny little wooden blocks, stacked end to end?  During the second act, my little peanut-gallery brain was certain he was going to fall, and I wanted to cover my eyes, which never happens to me.  But I didn't, because my desire to see him not fall overwhelmed my fear that he was going to fall.  He didn't, and the crowd went wild.  Which is the way it should be.

(And once again, by the end of the show, I was inspired to go practice.)

But I'm forgetting the clowns, and you should never do that (they can always pluck you out of the audience and make fun of you).  Many of the clowns did double duty in both shows, but they recycled very little material, which must have meant a lot of work for them.  In the Showcase, a lot of their work was bring out or taking away crash pads for the aerial acts, or otherwise distracting us while equipment went up or came down.  In the Pratfalls show, though, they were the stars.  A clown orchestra provided music (you haven't heard Beethoven's Fifth until you've heard it done by clowns), and its component members demonstrated a wide variety of clowning techniques, all of them funny.  I can't recall a single piece in the Pratfalls show that wasn't at least mildly entertaining, and some of them made me really laugh.  Really: one piece brought tears in my eyes, and I couldn't breathe, and my abs were starting to hurt.  (I won't try to re-create the act, but it involved making fun of the aerialists.  Always a good time.)  Incidentally, they delivered on the actual pratfalls, too: there were a couple that looked so real, I thought the clown had actually fallen, but I was already laughing in spite of it (the Clown Conservatory curriculum includes a lot of acrobatics and body awareness so that this kind of thing is possible).  If this makes me a bad person, I'm okay with that.

And it was a couple of clowns that gave me my favorite moment of both shows-- and before the show began, no less.  I volunteered to help set up the concessions area, which first involved climbing a lot of stairs and retrieving tables and things from very strange little storage areas throughout the CC building, and then required me to stand behind a table and sell drinks.  Before the show began, some of the clowns came out and started mucking around in the lobby to entertain people as they arrived.  There was a little girl-- about seven, I guess-- sitting with her parents, and she could not stop giggling.  Like, cracking up.  The clowns could do no wrong by her, and her laugh was infectious.  Soon, we were all grinning at each other behind the concessions table, and the people buying tickets and popcorn were smiling.  Even during the show, I could hear her way across the gym, laughing her lungs out whenever the clowns got going.

It made me remember, for the first time in awhile, why I wanted to be involved in circus.  It's not that circus performers have super-human powers, though it might look that way sometimes: we have human powers, and the connection a good circus act forges with its audience is uniquely and fundamentally human.  I'm not a clown and I don't know that I'd make a very good one, but I have the same goal of crossing the barriers that we put up.  My goal as a performer is to lift hearts in the way that mine has been lifted so many times.  It was lifted by both of these excellent shows, and even by thinking about them now.

So, yes.

Now I'm going to go practice.

I had a lovely vacation.  I met lots of nice relatives that I never knew I had, and saw several that I knew about already (like my parents and sister and aunt), I saw Alcatraz and Coit Tower (below) for the first time, I went on a botanical rampage with my dad, I hung out in a beautiful house overlooking an estuary in Bodega Bay (left), I went kayaking with my sister (and my cell phone took a little dip in the Bay...), and we all drove around the Russian River Valley in search of wine tastings at ten thirty in the morning.  The food was delicious, the weather was freakishly good, and everyone in our party walked around looking windswept, tanned, and beautiful.  Trust me.

(there is plastic covering the windows at the top of the tower, but industrious people have managed to slip coins through the edges and onto the windowsill.  That's what you see in the foreground, because I was being fancy.) (You can also see a reflection in the plastic, because I don't really know how to use a camera.)

Alas, it is impossible to gently ease yourself back into the real world after that kind of vacation.  I'm already back at work, and seem to be acquiring an alarming number of extra shifts, such that I may end up tethered to the front desk for the whole of July.  I have scads of e-mails to delete-- I mean... read-- errands to run (including a trip to the phone store), and, yes, a whole new semester of circus school starting up in a few short days.  I'm continuing my lessons with Daniela and going on to the next level of static trapeze, which I am approaching with some slight trepidation.

I'm also approaching it with several minor, kayak-related injuries.  Yeah, kayak.  The little plastic boat.  Turns out that, in spite of a) not having a motor or, really, any moving parts, and b) being taken out on a body of water with no waves and little traffic, kayaking is somewhat damaging to my well-being in addition to being potentially harmful for small, electronic devices.  The Bay itself was beautiful: we saw a seal and a shipwreck, and we irritated the inhabitants of the estuary (which may not be wise in the town where Hitchcock's The Birds was filmed).  But somebody (my sister) didn't row very much, and trying to move a tandem kayak on your own apparently results in a tweaked wrist.  It's getting better, but right now it's excruciating to hold anything approximating the size and shape of a kayak oar... like a trapeze bar.  Hopefully this will be better by Tuesday, when classes start.

I also got sunburned on my knees, which is like having a terrible rugburn and, stupidly enough, is keeping me from practicing splits or anything else that involves knee-friction.  In my defense, I smothered myself in sunscreen before we went kayaking, but I had to roll up my pant legs in order to deal with the rising tide within our boat.  (It didn't help, we were both sopping and muddy by the time we got out, and not just because a certain sibling of mine pulled the boat forward as I was disembarking, causing me to flail about and drop one of my shoes into the Bay.)  From now on, I do not intend to go out in the sun without the aid of a large, black parasol.  I may also be cautious approaching kayaks, next time.  Those things are dangerous.

Ever since I moved to the Sunset, people have been telling me, "Oh, it's nice out there now, but just wait until summer!  By June, you'll be so deeply immersed in fog that you and your neighbors will begin to turn into mole-people for want of sunlight, until, weak with vitamin-D deficiency, you manage to crawl on a cross-town bus that will deliver your pasty butt to the Mission."

You mean June, like now-June?  Like, "I was walking on the beach today without shoes, and I got a little sunburned" June?  This June?:

I really shouldn't jinx it with my family a few days from visiting-- although I, like everyone else, promised them fog-- and I know the fog is coming, and sooner or later.  At that time, everything your mother ever told you about layering will prove true, and we will walk around bundled up as though it were about to snow.  Even should the sun come out, I will probably take to carrying six or seven additional items of clothing (scarves, mittens...) in my bag, as I was wont to do in February.

This trend carries over into circus school attire.  I'm sure you've all been wondering how we stylish circus students look when we saunter into the gym every morning.  Words cannot do the look justice, and so I give you the most elaborate diagram ever:

Can we all take a moment to pause and appreciate that argyle sock?  That thing took me awhile (actually, this whole post is taking me awhile).  Let's have a close up:
And when you put the whole look together:

Note that this is only for women-- boys get away with far fewer "warmers" of different kinds.  Nor should it be confused with performance attire, because that must involve quantities of sequins and spandex.  Must.

I'm not making fun, either-- well, kind of, but only because I'm jealous.  My own wardrobe has several major failings:

• not enough good socks (especially argyles)
• everything is black
• no ankle corsets

The last one is especially irksome: for ankle protection, I use Ace's elastic ankle supports, but these are inadequate, and I don't trust my leg warmers.  They have a shifty look about them, like they might just slide right off my calves while I'm in the middle of ankle beats, causing me to plummet to my doom.  Now, the really nice ankle corsets-- like the ones my once-and-future teacher Hélène is wearing at left-- are made of leather or something else nice, and have laces or zippers, and in general are extremely sexy.  Ace bandages?  Not so much.

But it was a very narrow escape.

As you can see from the overwhelming number of posts around here, the semester is winding down.  This week marks the end of the spring semester, and summer starts up after a week's break. 

During that week are two shows at Circus Center: the professional aerial program and the clown conservatory are teaming up to put on their end-of-term show ("Pratfalls and Rising Stars"), and then the annual showcase is the following week.  If you live in San Francisco, you must attend-- well, I can't make you, but I can look at you beseechingly (...over the internet) until you agree, because you ought to go.  The people who are putting on the show have worked terribly hard and are terribly talented.  I know, because I've been watching them practice their acts for weeks.  They've all picked snazzy music, too, which is a good thing, because we've all been hearing a lot of it.

I think I'll be able to go see both shows.  Even better, my family is coming to see the aerial/clown show.  It's not quite like I can say, "See?  This is what I do!"  More like, "This is what I'll someday be doing...hopefully," but the people in the show are better equipped to entertain and impress than I am.  For my part, it will be comforting to see that hard work does eventually pay out in the form of costumes, lights, and riotous applause.  And so it will for me, too... hopefully.

Meanwhile, classes have been trundling along-- Daniela put us in safety lines for part of last week's class, which made us feel important-- and my practice buddy and I have been teaming up on weekends to commiserate over the state of our hands.  We are going to be in the same Static II class next semester (safety in numbers) and will certainly continue to provided one-woman cheering squads for each other during practice time.  The logistics are a little tricky during the summer, because there is a kid's camp during the day, and there is no quicker way to get me out of the gym than to fill it with small children.  On stilts and trampolines, no less.  Even so, I intend on coming in to practice on single point on my own in the summer, since Daniela has been coaching me on rigging.  I somehow did not learn knot-tying in Girl Scouts, which means that it has been an uphill battle for me to learn how to tie down the trapeze, but I'm getting it.

Keep an eye peeled here and perhaps on the Circus Open group for a report on the shows.  But first, I have a weeklong summer vacation coming up-- by happy coincidence, it falls during the weeklong semester break, meaning that I would have been at loose ends if they weren't coming to see me then.  (And good thing for them, or I probably would have made them come watch one of my classes, which would be mind-numbing to watch after the first three minutes.)  So essentially, I'm substituting practice time with going out to dinner and hanging around on the beach in Bodega Bay.  No complaints.

I found a practice buddy!  On of the other students in my static class joined me at Circus Center this weekend to practice together.  It worked out well: she's stronger than I am, and I have the skills down more solidly (between the two of us, we'd make an awesome trapeze artist...), so we inspired each other.  I know I worked a little harder than I usually do on my own, even though she left without doing any conditioning (her boyfriend was watching and she was worried he might get bored with us just doing crunches and push-ups).

TANGENT: I've noticed that I do much better if there's a passing chance that somebody is watching me-- teacher, other student, some dude up in the bleachers, whoever.  It doesn't matter if they're actually watching, but if I'm aware that they might be, I do a little extra and go a little further than I might on my own.  This bodes well, I think, for my dreams of glitter-clad circus stardom.  END TANGENT.

Hopefully we can continue to practice together in the weeks to come.  She's such a nice person that I'm even willing to suspend my rule which states that I automatically loathe other female aerialists who can do more pull-ups than me (which is to say, any pull-ups at all).

About these "pull-ups."  For some reason, my teachers always get around to conditioning and turn to me and say, "So how many pull-ups are you good for?"

"None," I answer.

And they look startled.  The problem is that my arms look as though they ought to be strong.  I don't know what they're made of, because it's obviously not muscle and it doesn't seem to be fat... cartilage?  Maybe my arms are full of cartilage?  (And is it weird that "cartilage" immediately makes me think "sharks?"  I guess I was paying attention in biology.  Oops, there goes another tangent.)

Anyway, I used to be flattered when someone assumed that I could do pull-ups, since it indicated their belief that I  was strong and I knew what I was doing.  Then, after the first dozen times, I decided they were indicating that I should be able to do pull-ups, and since I can't, I don't have my act together.  I realize this is all in my head, but I do wish that the daily conditioning routine would, you know, provide some kind of result.  Other than building the cartilage in my arms.

Of course, I pine for strength, and strong people in my class look on enviously while I twiddle my thumbs through stretching.  I tend to disparage my own flexibility-- not that it was (or is) easy and fun, but because I still have a long way to go.  However, it is true that Daniela has advanced me to oversplits (by putting one foot up on a foam roller instead of on the floor; the objective is to get more than 180 degrees between your legs).  I was pleased-- pained, but pleased-- and wore my foam roller like a flexibility badge.  But I expected that I would spend the next four or five months with my hips dangling inches above the floor.  Then, lo and behold, on Sunday they touched the floor on my more flexible side.  If this is the payoff for having no upper-body strength, I guess there are worse things than having fancy splits.

There is a point at the end of each week's static trapeze class in which the trapeze begins to look suspiciously like a noose.  This usually occurs in the last ten minutes of class, during conditioning.  Our hands are ragged, our arms are tired, and when Daniela cheerfully announces, "Okay, time for skin the cats!" we feel that we're the cats in question.

Ever the class guinea pig, I stepped up first to the chalk bucket, conveniently nailed to the wall next to the trapezes.  I looked at the furious calluses on my palms and remarked, "I don't know that there's much chalk can do for me at this point."  Then I looked up at the chalk bucket and had a wondrous vision: directly to the right of the bucket, there should be another bucket.  And this one should be marked in large, magical letters, "fairy dust."

No!  No!  Stay with me!  It's like this: chalk only keeps your from slipping off or sticking to the bar (depending on how sweaty you are and/or how fresh the tape on the bar is), but at that moment I realized that I'd been applying it all morning even when I was not in great danger of slipping/sticking.  Partly, I do this because the ritual forestalls the inevitable moment when I have to get on the bar and do something, but also because some part of my brain believes that chalk has magical properties which will help me beyond issues like sweaty palms.  In other words, I've been mistaking it for fairy dust.  Let us fix the problem with a second bucket.  A bucket called "Fairy Dust."

Obviously, actual fairy dust* would be ideal, but I think that we could all settle for glitter and the placebo effect.  Plus, we'd be shiny!  How can you say "no" to shininess?

In an odd coincidence, at the moment I sat down to write this, my dad e-mailed me an article about bioengineering's own brand of fairy dust.  If you read it, be warned that there's a picture of an injured finger that even grossed me out; if you don't read it, suffice to say that for bioengineers, "fairy dust" = "ground up pig parts which causes the mysterious regeneration of human tissue."  (Per Mr. Arthur C. Clarke, "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."  No kidding.)  Please note that this is not the kind of fairy dust that we should have in the Circus Center's proposed bucket.  A juggler with three arms is all well and good, but my calluses are quite freakish enough without any help from the pigs, thank you.

--
*I should state for the record that I am currently near the end of Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, an enormous (and wonderful) book about magic, and after 776 pages of fairies and magicians, nothing about the phrase "actual fairy dust" seemed unrealistic to me when I first typed it.  So it's possible that this whole idea was actually just a literary hangover.

It is very hot here.  Eerily summer-like, you might say, for a place where summer is supposed to be characterized by unbroken fog.  It's hot enough that the Pacific Ocean is beginning to look inviting, and this is surely a sign of incipient sunstroke.  To prevent lasting damage, I have been cowering indoors, doing my best to make my room into a sunless cave and drinking lots of ice water.  Give me back my fog!

The Circus Center is a fine old building, but like most fine old buildings in this area, it doesn't have air conditioning, which meant that lately it's been a fine old oven.  Trapeze in the heat?  Not much fun.  For one thing, your hands sweat beyond the powers of chalk to help you.  Every time I put chalk on my hands, it seemed like it was gone before I got back to the trapeze.  Did it trickle away?  Did it evaporate?  Did my hands absorb it, and if so should I be concerned that I've now absorbed a rather large amount of chalk?  Can you get chalk poisoning?*

Anyway, Daniela granted my silent wishes by teaching me two new things.  And so, I learned again that you should be careful what you wish for.

The first was called "unicorn" (the person in the picture, by the way, is pretty dang talented, which you will discover if you click around her other photos-- go ahead, I'll wait until you get back).  This picture was the first I'd seen of the finished skill, since Daniela basically just talked me into it.  However, the picture fails to convey that this is fiendishly difficult to get into.  "Roll up from gazelle" actually means "claw and climb your way up from gazelle and likely get stuck halfway there."  I managed three of these-- I think I gasped, once, "is it pretty?" because I still had no idea what I'd just fought so hard to get into-- and then on the fourth I simply couldn't haul myself up the ropes.

We followed this up with "cheek" (pictured by another very talented person, who is practicing at the Circus Center in these photos**), because Daniela promised that it involved no hauling up ropes.  True, but it does involve keeping your arm strong and my arm was wobbly and slippery, so we decided to try it again some other time.

I had kind of hoped that my collapsing out of two consecutive skills would get me off the hook for conditioning, but Daniela never misses the opportunity to make me wobble through some push-ups.  I was obviously hallucinating to have thought otherwise.  I write the whole lesson off to the heat.  And the chalk poisoning, of course.

--
*Google says you can, but you have to swallow it.
**Seriously, there is a wellspring of static trapeze photos.  Before, I would struggle to find something which approximated what I had learned, and suddenly you need only google "trapeze gazelle," or something equally unlikely, and five or six flickr photostreams pop right up.  I don't know where they all came from, but good on ya for allowing me to keep forgetting my camera.

EDIT: In case anyone thinks I'm exaggerating:

I actually began to feel a little hysterical when I saw this, like maybe the best thing would be to hyperventilate and pass out, only waking up on Monday (or whenever it actually decides to cool off; perhaps September would be safe).  And what is that "spare the air" nonsense above "100?"  Spare the air?  How about the people and the dogs and the buildings that were constructed before air conditioning was a glint in its father's eye?  Unless I'm mistaken, the air is part of the problem, because the air is not moving in a fashion productive to cooling us all off.

As you may have discerned from my lack of posts, there is not much to report here in Circus School Land.  Not even by way of new and interesting bruises.  I know!  I can't believe it, either.

Amazingly, the semester is halfway over and I'm coming up on half a year in San Francisco.  It recently occurred to me that this year has gone by quickly because I'm no longer in school, and we all know that there's nothing like a lecture hall to screw with the space-time continuum.  (The Circus Center gym does the opposite, such that the half hour I have with Daniela on single point is actually only seventeen minutes.)  But, conversely, because San Francisco weather does not differentiate much between January and May-- certainly not on the order of Central Texas, where temperatures have not crept so much as rocketed toward triple digits-- I get the Groundhog Day-esque feeling that no time is passing at all.

This is the feeling that predominates for me in circus training.  Although now I can do ten push-ups with my feet on the cardio ball-- versus about 2 at the beginning of the semester (have you tried those?  they're kind of hard), there haven't been any huge leaps or big new skills or even interesting new bruises in the past few weeks.  I just go in for class twice a week, and try to spend three or four of the other days of the week practicing on my own.  I have found the true essence of circus: doing the same thing every day without apparent progress.  Don't be fooled by the glitter.  It's all about the mind-numbing conditioning exercises.

But, you know?  I don't mind.  I trust that somewhere, maybe on a cellular level, I am indeed improving.  I've been waiting such a long time to do my mind-numbing conditioning exercises (provided that they peripherally involve a trapeze) that I still look on my time toiling at Circus Center as a treat rather than a grind.  Yes, that's right, I like practicing.  Not even because I expect an eventual payoff (though, yeah, that too).  I just like the work.  I don't know if this is a badge of my dedication, or proof that the rest of my life is incredibly boring.

Regardless, stay with me: I can't promise I'll suddenly learn a bevy of exciting new tricks, or even that I'll manage to create a bruise shaped like Florida on the back of my calf (the Panhandle always screws me up), but Daniela has promised this week to show me the essentials of single point rigging this coming week.  We do this so that I can soon come in and-- yes!-- practice single-point on my own.  More practicing-- and this time it's guaranteed to leave me dizzy as well as sore and bruised.  That's what I call progress.