Flying High

  The picture above is from a couple of weeks ago during rehearsal for my dance. It's what we in the blog business call a "grabber." It's so that when people accidentally trip across my page, they say, "Tall guy doing cartwheels? What's THAT about?" And thus my audience is grown.
  So, now to the present. I've moved on from flipping myself end over end to letting other people do it. We've done a bunch of trust work lately, which has included climbing several feet off the ground and then freefalling backwards into a catch group. This week, the group picked each person up off the ground and flipped them head over heels. It was easy with the smaller people, and I'll admit there was a fair amount of hesitation from them when it was my turn. Nobody wanted to shoulder up 185 pounds and try to not drop me on my teeth. In the end, I was successfully flipped, and somebody, somewhere, got a handful of my men's department in the process. Awkward.
  We also started Stage Combat this week, which I knew I'd love. As soon as the instructor asked for volunteers to come up and fight him (rapier and daggar), my hand shot up. I love swordplay, and we got to do a lot more that first night than I expected. Awesome.
  There's been a ton of reading this week too (pretty much my entire weekend). We're doing "The Duchess of Malfi" in our Jacobean class, and "Margaret of Anjou" (combining Henry VI and Richard III) in our Histories class. Malfi is so dense that it takes about seven minutes or so per page to read/translate, but it's a fantastic play. Also, I'm convinced that our Histories instructor is a certified madman, but he might also be one of the most brilliant directors I've worked with.
Lastly, far be it from me to complain about ANYTHING over here. I love it, and I don't ever want to come back to the US. However, I do get tired of people over here not knowing how to navigate their space. You go to New York, or Los Angeles, or DC and people know how to move in a crowd (we're talking non-tourists here, Times Square doesn't count). Over here, people just do not understand how to get out of the way. I've gotten so tired of it that now I just pretend I'm on the phone when I get in a crowd, and I have a really loud conversation: "Yeah! Can you hear me? Yeah, *COUGH* the doctor says he's pretty sure it's Swine Flu. *COUGH* He's not sure, he thinks *COUGH COUGH* it's a new strain or something." I find that people part for me like the Red Sea.
  Also, all clothing in the UK is made for little people. It is extremely difficult to find anything over here that fits. XL is not big enough, and stores typically don't carry 2XL. Ridiculous. I'm not THAT big. I feel like the village monster.
  But you know, it's worth it.