East Eaton-Reevaluation life ambitions, dealing with more ambiguous circus business people & Christianity in this crazy place
The week: My melancholiness & life choices
Looking back
over this week, it’s hard to tell whether it’s had more ups or downs. At times
it feels like negatives outweigh the positives, I miss home, I miss my family
and I often feel like I'm wasting my time. But at other times I look around and
am incredibly grateful to be here. I'm getting a unique experience. I get to practice my Spanish.
I get to train and learn from people. I get to see England pretty cheaply, and
I get to spend time with people I like in a space that is my own.
On the positive
side, this was the first week since I have been here that I actually caught a
slight glimpse of summer. It was
amazing! One day it was actually warm enough to sit outside in shorts. Another
huge positive about this location is that we are right next to a gym/rec
center, to which I got a week free trial and can go work out whenever I want! I
also got to try swinging from a top catcher this week-one of the most awesome
yet terrifying experiences of my life.
No matter how comfortable you seem to think you are, when you get up 40
feet above the ground and someone tells you to hang on to them and jump up and
backwards off of a 2 inch wide bar, your brain really doesn’t like it. Even so, I am excited to try more
tricks from up there; it is a completely different experience to flying.
Another huge positive of this week is that Alistair caught his first ever
double layout and his first 2.5 to legs!
Hopefully they can get them in the show in the next week.
On the downside,
I finally got paid and it ended up being half of what I expected (and half of
what the minimum wage is if I calculated it out). That was pretty
disappointing, but at least I learned a lesson from it-when dealing with circus people always ask what you're getting paid before you put the hours in. I have also decided
that if I don’t have a job here and don’t really have obligations, I
should use this time to explore all of my future options, as well as looking
into graduate programs and current opportunities to train, teach or perform in
Europe. This got me realizing that
a desperately need to put an act and a demo reel together, something I have
neglected and put off doing for the past year. So I guess the next few weeks will consist mostly of me
videoing, and editing a million moves on silks and the ground. So if anyone has
any suggestions, or connections to circus people in Europe, please let me know!
Another discovery of this week (to my utmost
dismay) our freezer is not cold enough to store ice cream! Noooooooooooooo !!
Circus parents:
Something else I saw this week which I haven’t
seen as much of before, is the parents coaching their children, teaching them different circus skills. One of the parents is the Cuban man who does a slack
rope/acrobatics act. The other is a
Russian aerialist (who absolutely fits the stereotypes of a Russian dancer. Watching the
contrast between the two and the ways in which the children respond is
fascinating. Sometimes it seems as
if the kids hate it, but other times it’s evident that they really do enjoy
it. Though watching the
mom push her girls into crazy oversplits makes me reevaluate my future role as
a parent. I am all for pushing
your kids and challenging them from a young age, but I also don’t want to
permanently damage their bodies by straining every ligament possible.
Christianity + Circus:
An odd thing that happened this week, which I didn’t quite know how to react to, was waking up to Jahova’s witnesses knocking on our caravan. When we
showed up for training there were several running jokes about religion and Christianity
going on. For the past year, I
have primarily been around non-christians and especially in circus the
atmosphere is one of counter culture and anti-religion, so I have gotten used
to people talking bad about it. The general impression being that no
intelligent person could possibly be a believer, religion is just a way to be
hypocritical, spite people and judge, and that it is just an old tradition for
people who need a crutch. As accustomed as I have become to this view point, it
still hurts me to know that this is what people see and what their impression
is of the faith that I believe in.
I know that many times this is because of all the
people who misrepresent it, but I wish it were not the case. A pastor I love-Erwin McManus-talked
one day about how much he hated saying he was a Christian when people asked
him. I entirely relate to that;
not because I am ashamed of what I believe or my relationship with God, but because
of what the idea of Christianity has become and all of the things it is
associated with: from ignorant racist radicals, to child molesters, to
manipulating hate mongers, to people who scream shame on others in the
street. None of it has ANYTHING to do with the faith that I know and that was
intended in the Bible. McManus
made a good point. He said that it
is because of those people that we don’t want to put ourselves under the label
of Christians, but that is also why so few people have good experiences with Christians,
because they aren’t aware that those good people are Christians, it’s only the
crazy ones who cling to and adamantly proclaim that title. There are tons of perfectly normal,
decent, loving people out there who are amazing Christians, but who don’t wear
their faith on their sleeve because they don’t want people to dismiss them as
being a bad stereotype of a religious person. This idea pushes me in that I want to be more bold in my
faith. I want to pray at meals
again and though I don't need to shout my beliefs out, I also should not hide it or avoid it.
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