Attitude adjustment

I've taken the plunge and ordered my own fire staff. I still need to manufacture a practice staff that won't fall apart (first effort did just that). I don't want to drop my real staff a ton of times like I'm going to do as I teach myself new tricks.

Flow and velocity. These are my goals.

In other news, I've come to a changepoint. You know how you can plateau in life, in attitude? You find a comfort zone, and just sort of coast there. Expenses and income are more or less balanced (if not, they feel like they ought to). Friends are cool, family is... family. But you're not making any upward progress, spiritually or emotionally. And without that sense of progress, there's no chance of becoming better than you are.

I'm rambling. Okay, what I'm saying is that I've decided that I've suffered enough. I've paid my dues. I've forced myself to give up music, give up being pretty/attractive and almost give up writing, for nigh on ten (or twenty-nine, depending how you're counting) years. It's been ten years since I gave up on finding love. It's been twenty-nine years since I started punishing myself for a crime perpetrated against myself. Couldn't punish anybody else, so it had to be me.

Well, I'm done. Sentence served. Not a parole - a release.

This morning, I went to a yoga class, because I wanted to, gorramit. Tonight, I'm going to practice my music and go to Burn Club. In between, I'm going to work on my novel. Because I want to, and the mental thumbscrews are getting ritually burned.

*whew*

I'll work on the finding love thing next week. *LOL*

Single staff and fear

The bicycle continues to hang in the status of not-quite-finished. *sigh* Hopefully this Monday...

BUT!!! Last night at Burn Club I spun fire for the second time. This time, a single staff - four foot. It was surprisingly comfortable. I'm actually more scared of the unlit staff then I am of the lit staff, which is... a little disturbing. I spun it effectively, too. Two handed-moves to start and then some one-handed moves. It felt good. Didn't quite get the palm-spin over my head, because my hand was sweaty on the metal, but I was able to dance a little and I got words of praise for that. I reiterate: it felt good. Spinning the two staves was a rush, but this was fun.

Must go shopping. I need to rummage in my father's tools, and then I need to acquire some empty paint cans for fuel.

And at some point today, some writing by golly or else I will spontaneously combust.

Bicycle update

Agh, haven't posted in ages. The bike building has been frustrating lately, but I accept (intellectually, at least) that there are skills which develop in time and experience that I don't have, and I shouldn't be frustrated with myself that I don't magically acquire them two seconds after they are demonstrated.

Right, that's out of the way. The bicycle is almost finished, so I could be riding it by next week (schedule permitting).

More later...

Hello, a reader?

It's possible that at this point I may have an audience for this blog. I told someone it exists, and now she's insisting on knowing the address...

Hi! *waves*

More news on the bike. This week was a two-steps-forward, one-step-back kind of thing. I'm not happy with the shifter, mostly because it was chosen for me by someone else, with not very much clear explanation. I don't understand gears. Bah. Also, I will probably have to find a new derailer (and derailer hanger?) if the current derailer proves to be too close to the gears. Part of me want to fix the whole thing in one gear and have done. No derailer necessary then! or a blasted shifter. meh.

But, I'm pushing through my frustration. At least I know *how* to install gears now, even if I don't understand why or how they exist. I re-adjusted the brakes, too, in the process, which gave me more confidence. The third-hand tool is a work of simple genius.

In fire-spinning news, I'm making a proper set of practice batons. Which is to say, I went to Home Depot - a nightmare place of too many options and not enough customer service - and found some 1/2 rods that need to be cut down to three feet. Now I need to attach the appropriate amount of weight to each end and wind some tape around them or something. You can see how much effort has gone into this. I've been desperately procrastinating by reading a tome for work.

Also, haven't worked on my own writing for four days, and the withdrawal is making me twitchy. Hopefully tonight, after the season finales of Glee and Justified, I'll get on that.

How am I going to boil down a thousand pages of fictional medieval history to five pages of summary? Oy, vey. It's not like I haven't done it before, but seriously, it never gets easier. Not really. Just faster. I'm not used to reading about things I'd rather not read, though. I've gotten out of the discipline of just pushing through and vomiting later (and no, that's not a metaphor). I'm taking refuge in this blog, and other forms of procrastination. Bad blogger.

Back to the grindstone.

Back to the Bike!

Skipped a week on the bike, mostly because I got caught up in a writing project and Monday evening slipped away from me.

Tonight I made a lot of progress, I think. It's hard to judge when the bicycle essentially looks the same for a long time. But, I flipped the cranks (they were on the wrong side), put a derailer hanger and a derailer on for the gears, found a shifter and spent a whole hour learning how to tighten and adjust brakes. That was the most satisfying part. Getting the brakes to the point where I could spin the wheels, squeeze the controls and make them stop - JOY! ACCOMPLISHMENT!

Anyway.

Stagnated a bit with the batons. I need to get off my butt and watch some educational videos and get over the whole I-was-never-a-cheerleader-therefore-I-suck thing. Because seriously - I'm having a junior high crisis NOW? At my age? Is this penance for not going to junior high?

I'm looking forward to Burn Club tomorrow, as always. I just want to learn a new trick to show off, darnit. But I have work tomorrow morning.

Also, new laptop to play with! But that's a whole other kettle of fish.

Practice and the Industry

Finally, a post about something Industry related!

So it has come to pass that Starz has hired me as a Reader. Calloo-Callay! It's been more than a couple of months since I've been paid to read anything. I've read a couple of things here and there for free, just to keep that part of my brain in fighting trim, but HBO has been silent as the proverbial graveyard and Miramax/Disney has completely changed over their Development department, so they probably don't even have me on file anymore.

So yay! for Starz! I'm gainfully employed again! Hopefully there will be regular work so that I can start thinking about living on my own again (or with a roommate or two). Gah! What a dry spell!

I enjoy Reading, mostly because it actually puts my expensive analytical brain to use in the way it was trained (mostly - it was trained for analyzing historical texts, but this is close enough). I enjoy the time-to-money equation, because I'm really horrendously fast.

Fingers crossed that the invoice-to-paycheck hang-time is minimal.

Back on the subject of Burn Club - hah! didn't think I'd leave it alone, didja? - I have finally gotten my hands on my own practice staves. Well, I've found a pair of baby cheerleader batons that are half the length of real staves, but they're the right diameter to practice with so I can form the callouses. I can get smooth with them and practice every day, and then I can finally light up when I get my own staves.

It was an EPIC quest to find those batons. Since Toys'r'Us closed its brick-and-mortar doors, it's devilish hard to find certain toys. Hardly anyone carries hula hoops, for instance. And batons! OMG, I must have called seventeen different sporting goods, toy stores, costume shops and party supply outlets before I found them (in an Aahs! costume section, in the High School Musical category). I even called the UCLA costume shop, figuring that they might have something for Marching Band. When I said I was looking for something to fit personal needs, the guy on the phone huffily told me that it "wasn't that kind of store" and hung up on me! I think he thought I was a sex worker.

Oh, the humanity. (hah!)

Well, thank you High School Musical. Thank you for my baby practice batons.

new moves

Somebody set themselves on fire last night. It was an accident, duh, but still kind of shocking. He's fine - stopped and dropped and has a minor burn to show for it. Got right up and worked the same trick again, successfully.

I admit that I froze. I wasn't one of the spotters, so no harm done, but there was a real moment of unreality for me. A disconnect - 'huh, that guy's on fire'. Not sure how that happened. My normal reaction to danger is action. Maybe it was because it was fire. I have some crooked wiring when it comes to people burning to death - secondary trauma, but still valid. I should work on that.

Got into working on my own stuff. Learned three new tricks, which was awesome. I was really sore for the first twenty minutes but I worked through it. I need to get up to practicing every day. I also need to put some serious thought into performance presentation. I'm not some tall skinny chick who can look hot while twirling fire. I'm an average-size, rather round & curvy girl who doesn't want to embarrass herself. Right now I'm feeling white-and-black, maybe old-school harlequin?

I feel stupid and uncool among all the experts, but I'm trying to ignore my inner ninth-grader and just do the work. It's the work that will build the self-respect, and the respect of others.

Got to keep at it.

Limitations and compensations

Burn Club tonight, and I learned something new about myself.

Firstly, I practiced with double staff again and managed to incorporate some dance moves for the first time. It's a performance, after all, not just a demonstration of tricks. Got an eyeful of one of the planet's best fire-spinners (single staff), who was there with a couple of students. No joke, his ordinary practice stuff was Cirque du Soleil, world-class jaw-dropping stuff. Wow.

"Sensei" brought his brand-new "floating" sword, a burn tool in the form of a sword but balanced like a staff at a point in the haft. Very fun to play with. I was trying to balance it on my palm and failing when Sensei pointed out that I had no depth perception. I couldn't tell when the brass pommel was moving toward me, so I couldn't compensate.

Honestly, I had no idea that my depth perception was so minimal. After some discussion, we agreed that my advanced math/physics/spatial relations abilities must have compensated for me in my developmental years, without me thinking about it. Hence, I could play lacrosse no problem (angles, trajectories), but couldn't walk a balance beam (can't see how far the beam is from my foot when one foot is raised).

Kinda explains why I have to curl my toes over the lip of the top stair of the staircase, every time I want to start down. Huh.

Felt despondent for a few minutes, convinced that my mother was right: Anatomy *is* destiny. Contemplate *that* piece of indifferent despair with me, go ahead. Then I figured out that if I watched the reflection of the street lights in the brass pommel, and kept them in the same proportion to the angle of the haft, then the sword would necessarily have to be upright.

Wouldn't you believe it... balance.

TAKE THAT!!

Building a Bike, part one

As an unexpected off-shoot of hanging with Burn Club, I have begun to build my own bicycle, from scratch. Which is not to say that I'm welding steel together on my mother's rooftop. Um, no. I went to the Bicycle Kitchen, a very cool place on a street with a very silly name.

(Heliotrope.)

(Go ahead and laugh; I'll wait.)

The Bicycle Kitchen is a volunteer bicycle education workshop space, where they give access to tools and expertise to them (and their bikes) what need them. They will also price a "project" for you, which means they will accept a donation in exchange for a bike frame and show you how to build an entire bicycle from it and the various spare parts that they have in the shop.

So awesome! I can't even tell you. Well, okay I can. I'm not the building-est of girls. My tomboy phase was brief and confined to Lego and tree-climbing. I helped build a suspension bridge at camp once (don't ask), but that was mostly sawing and measuring.

But this. This is a thing that I'm building, with my own two hands. And it's going to have a purpose and be a part of my life. It's not a gift, like my embroidery shenanigans. It's not art, like my writing or painting. It's not going to be somewhere *else*. It's going to stay, a part of me. I'm building another part of me.

Also, it's wicked fun. I got dirty!

A buck-and-a-quarter-staff is a buck too much

Practiced again with Burn Club last night. Bonked myself in the face with the staff - just the haft, but the haft is made of metal, and whoa! that can kind of hurt. The staff is pretty heavy, and I came to the conclusion that I was scared of it. Scared of being hurt by it. Scared of dropping it. Just a big ol' scaredy-cat, that's me. That made me feel pretty mad and stupid and embarrassed.

So, I sucked it up and asked the Sensei (not his real name - 8^) ) what he thought. He switched me to double-staff, which is two smaller staffs, twirled in synchronicity by both hands. He said that women typically can coordinate both hands easily, because we have larger corpus collosums (sp?). Men have to teach their strong hand, and then teach their off hand the same trick. Sure enough, I was twirling the two staffs in more-or-less perfect sync within 30 seconds. Made me feel better about myself - a whole lot! - right away, too.

I'm so relieved. I'm only five weeks into this new hobby and I was dreading the end of the honeymoon period. I don't know if switching tools means prolonging the honeymoon or if this was a truly progressive step, but either way I had a great time, a good workout - ouchy shoulders this morning! - and gained a sense of accomplishment.

hat status - need a new hat for fire-spinning. Something cotton and close to the head - maybe one of my twenties-style hats would suffice?

A strange new hobby that frightens my mother

Well, that's hardly any procrastination at all, by my standards. It's April! (still, for a little while). And I have a new topic to talk about.

For the last month or so, I've been frequenting a Burn Club weekly meeting. That is to say, I've been paying dues and showing up to a place where amateur and professional folk practice spinning fire on the tips of swords, staffs, "poi" (balls at the end of chain) and other things.

It's fascinating and weirdly calming. Nobody's more zen than somebody holding open flame in their hands and sending it twisting through the night air. Everyone is very focused. I like being around so many really *focused* people. Also, hey, things on fire.

I've been practicing with a staff. Kind of fulfilling my early Robin Hood fantasies and my nascent pyromania, all at once. Not lighting up yet, though.

I'll keep you posted.

Hat status: +1 green straw cowboy hat.