Juggling is not something you do to attract girls. The juggler may fantasize that chicks dig it, but the reality is that it’s too close to being a clown. Nobody wants to introduce their boyfriend the clown. Over the years there’s been a growing trend of hip people who “play” fire. While I’ve never been to burning man, I’m guessing the mediaization of the event has helped change the image of people who light stuff on fire and do things with it. It’s much less of a clown thing and more of a hippy-freak thing. The funny thing about fire is that it’s really not as dangerous as people think. Juggling three things on fire takes about 5 minutes to learn if you can juggle them not on fire. Honestly, as long as you respect the flame, you aren’t going to hurt yourself. I sometimes catch the wrong end of the torch on purpose. It takes more work to make yourself throw it back up into the pattern than it does to let your body do what it wants and just let go of the fire. Sometimes I get a little singed hair. That’s really the worst thing that I’ve done to myself juggling fire (that time I burned myself eating fire doesn’t count).
I’ve been juggling fire a lot at parties in the past week. If I’m at a party and I’m not juggling fire, I normally find myself a quiet corner to hide in. The fire thing gets me invited to more parties than the corner thing. While juggling fire isn’t as hard as it looks, it’s certainly harder than juggling them when they’re not on fire. You’d think with all the light the torches provide you would be able to see great. The problem is that all you really see is the flame and your eyes tend to fade everything else out, including the handle part that isn’t on fire that you should be catching. It’s not like it totally disappears, but you mostly see the flame. The wind is also kind of a pain in the ass. You do have to make sure you’re positioned so that the flames aren’t blowing into your face. While reflexes will cause you to move your head involuntarily out of harms way, you may still burn off some hair. Otherwise… totally safe.
First… I just found www.googlebattle.com because a bunch of jugglers were comparing juggling-geek things (pattern names, famous jugglers, whatever) and posting them on the usenet. Apparently John Lennon beats Paul McCartney. I’m glad at least one of my candidates won this year.
I slept in this morning. This doesn’t happen often (but certainly more now that I’m unemployed). I got up a half-hour before noon and headed to the park for juggling club. I was the only person there for an hour. Then Erik, who I met just before I went to Colombia, showed up. He knows a lot of obscure passing patterns, which are giving my mind a good workout lately. Things in seven clubs that I had known existed but didn’t want to put the effort into learning. A lot of his patterns involve left-handed passes, which I’ve never really worked on much before. I stayed out three hours.
When the sun went down I headed to the U of A and met up with the SPIA people who did that show last week. The group is mostly women. Michael is the founder of the whole thing, and also acts as the local merchant for fire stuff. I had met Michael a year or two ago… maybe longer. He showed up on the one and only day when everyone came out to my juggling club (I’ve never seen this many people before or after). Four people who I juggled with in college were visiting from out of town, another one from the generation of U of A jugglers prior to them showed up out of the blue, and Angelo (my life-long juggling partner) showed up with his daughter, and then there was Michael and I think someone was with him. I didn’t get to juggle with him much, if at all that day.