In which I finally join the circus!

I have been threatening to run away and join the circus for many years. The write-up in my high school yearbook will inform you that I had envisioned myself growing up to be a lion tamer. This is in stark contrast to when I began my high school career and wanted to be a pro wrestling manager. Ah, memories.

My friends Jack and Jerrold were in London, and so I took the five hour trek to visit them with great glee. I've known Jack for about 12 years now, since the good old days when we worked together at GM Place. We went out for dinner and to see this truly bizarre show called "The Blue Man Group". I'm not quite sure how to describe it - it's more performance art than show, and really visceral. There is a point where one of the men (painted blue from head to toe) catches balls of paint in his mouth and then proceeds to spit them onto canvas, thus creating a (somewhat questionable) work of art.

It was fabulous to see them - hooray for friends in town! And Jack brought me toothpaste and the new issue of Glamour, which is the way to this girl's heart! Here are J and J at dinner, with Jerrold on the left and Jack on the right.



Now - on to stories of the big top! There's a circus training school in central London that trains acrobats and stuff for circuses around Europe (www.thecircusspace.co.uk) , and I'd come across it when I lived in London last time in an article about weird things to do in England. I was instantly sold on it, and had actually registered and paid, but didn't get to go when I had to move back to Canada so abruptly. But this time, I vowed, my circus training would not be foiled!

You learn 8 activities: juggling, the diabolo (weird hourglass shaped thing that you balance with sticks), group acrobatics, tumbling, tightrope, trapeze, stilt-walking, and, of course, the almighty flying trapeze!

Our group hadn't really been introduced when we began climbing on one another..you can learn a lot about someone by how they react when you inadvertently stand on their head!



Some things I had more of a knack for than others...it's sad, but I will never be a juggler. On the other hand, my trapeze-y skills progressed nicely, in both standing and upside down configurations:





Lunch was massive and yummy...and would have remained a contented moment had we not had tumbling immediately afterwards. Let me assure you that eating a massive lunch and following it up by doing six somersaults in a row is not a wise choice for continued digestive success. Just in case you ever find yourself in that situation, of course...

Finally, the moment we'd all been waiting for...and the long climb up the ladder to the flying trapeze. It's a long ways up - probably about 30 or 40 feet at least - and you get on to the trapeze by stepping off the edge of the platform. Onto thin air. Which seems even thinner when you're up there looking down!

Here I am, taking a deep breath and about to jump. While you can't see it, my lips are moving and I'm repeating the mantra that served The Little Engine That Could - "I think I can, I think I can!"



And the resulting swing, accompanied by successful Tarzan (or Jane, depending on who you prefer) war cry!



It was a fabulous day, and one of those things on my weird and wonderful Things to Do list ticked off. The pain of the following day is something I'm still dealing with...I've been walking like an octogenarian from strained muscles ever since!

Snow, Valentine's and dystopias.

Yes, there was snow in Liverpool. A few centimetres was all it took to send the city into a flurry of panic. (Did you get it? Snow causing a flurry - funny!) I attach photographic proof of me spending quality time enjoying the weather:



Now, look more closely at the photo and you'll notice (if you can get past my very yellow jacket, that is) that there is so little snow that you can still see the grass. That's still too much for the Liverpudlians, and with flakes still lazily drifting down, school was cancelled, roads were closed, and I was sent home from my temporary job "in reaction to the unusual weather conditions". It made me laugh.

Valentine's Day this year was quite possibly the best ever - Jon spoiled me completely and it was fab. Sadly, the whole trans-Atlantic issue left me without a date, so a bunch of us went to see 'Casablanca' on the big screen in a special Valentine's Day showing. It was really well done, and has left me inclined towards seeing more black and white movies than I have thus far in my cinematic career.

You can read the IMDB review (and the trivia, which is the best part) here:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0034583/

In other news, I've been working lots (at a rather unfortunate job involving telephone surveys) and this combined with my reading about dystopias (Swastika Night, 1984 and We, among others) has left me little time to wreak my usual amount of havok. Luckily, I'm done my telephonic stint at harassing the masses tonight, and am off Friday to see my friends Jack and Jerrold who are passing through London for the weekend. Great theatrical experiences shall follow, and bizarrely, it's March in a week - eek! (Yes, the rhyme was intentional. My poetic senses needed soothing).

Hope everyone had a fabulous warm fuzzy Valentine's Day, and I bid you a temporary adieu.

Returning to my Liverpudlian life.

Greetings, guys and gals. No real scandal over in these parts...second semester is trundling along with 800 pages of HG Wells between now and Wednesday. As per usual, our class times and places have been changed once already, despite being only a few weeks in. So Utopias and Dystopias is now Wednesday, and Ursula Le Guin is now Monday.

I managed to demonize myself in my first Ursula class by not liking the Earthsea trilogy. Even a little bit. The characters just seemed really wooden and two dimensional, and the whole thing was kind of hackneyed. Part of the problem is that Le Guin wrote Earthsea back in the late 60s and early 70s, and so a lot of her ideas have been reused frequently in modern fantasy. I've read the modern but not hers, so it was a case of rolling my eyes and saying 'not that cliche again!'. Sadly, our instructor asked what I thought of it, and neither Jason nor Christian were being particularly communicative that day...so I told him the truth. Sigh. I am redeeming myself (at least in my own eyes!) by really enjoying her science fiction novels, so there is that.

Found really cheap art supplies, and in an attempt to keep myself amused in a fairly frugal fashion, have taken up painting pictures that look much like Ronna's babies might do. Here is my first picture in acrylics:



Yes, I know I could sell it on E-Bay for millions of dollars. However, at this point in my career as an arTEEST (pronounced as written), I am unwilling to bend to commercialism. Or so I say.

We all went on a grand tour of Sefton Park on Friday,, which was lots of fun. My tree quota for the week hadn't been filled, so I decided to get up close and personal with the wilderness:



In the centre of Sefton Park is the Palm House, a huge glass structure full of rare plants and surrounded by statues. It's rented out for weddings, at the bargain price of £2000-3000/event. So my plan to rent it out for a few days and have a BBQ appears to be foiled. Unless I give in and sell one of my great artistic masterpieces..hmmm.



And Peter Pan and I will choose this moment to bid you all adieu and wish you a happy belated Groundhog Day, as I leave to buckle under a pile of dystopic reading material. 'Bye!