As Jamie points out, Trinity College Juggling Society will be meeting again from this Tuesday. The UCD club has been meeting for the last three weeks too, although we’ve been juggling outside due to some room-booking clashes. Once the two clubs are back on form I’ll have two nights a week of three hours’ juggling per night.
Six hours a week is about as much as I did at the best of times during the summer, so I’ll be hoping to make some decent progress. I’m not going to try to enumerate my goals because every time I do that I end up either deciding that I don’t want to learn a particular trick or finding out that I haven’t a hope of learning it any time soon.
Having said that, I do have a single short-term goal to compete in the chin-balance (ie. club balanced on chin) endurance competition at the Tralee convention in November. Okay, so anyone who wants to can compete, but I’d like to be able to at least look like I have a chance of winning. This is phase one of my real plan, which is to win the same competition at the Dublin convention next March. At the Dublin convention this year I wasn’t able to do a chin balance at all, so going from that to winning in a year would be pretty cool.
Apart from that I’m not going to make any plans. I’ll see where whim takes me. Right now I’m working on five balls (I beat 100 catches on Saturday for the first time), six balls (I got 12 catches on Saturday, which technically means I juggled six for the first time), four clubs, and a nifty three ring trick where I throw one ring over my head and blind kick it back into the pattern. That trick drew a few compliments at the UCD meeting yesterday. That’s what I’m doing right now; who knows what I’ll be trying by the end of the year?
As for the title of this post, the joke goes: How do you kill a circus? Go for the juggler.