Sep. 1
The past week
has had its ups and downs. I am
getting to fly almost every day, which is great and the other trapeze people
are awesome. Our caravan is now
finally fully functioning (as in, I can shower, cook, and use the toilet)
pretty great. I have taken on a temporary job working
concessions during the show, which I at first found incredibly depressing as I
thought of my college degree hanging on a wall back home, not to mention all of
the other jobs I have had which rank higher in pay and interest. But now I
actually don’t mind it so much. I
have decided to take on new perspectives when thinking about it.
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| Concessions |
The first is that of Christianity-as I worked my first day I
realized that what was making me upset more than anything was my own pride and
ego. The work I was doing wasn’t
hard and the people I worked with were nice, but I had this idea in my head
that I deserved better, that I was smarter, that I should be doing aerial rather than the woman doing the mediocre silks act. Then it struck me how
ridiculous I was being. When
Christ came to the world, He was God incarnate, yet He lived his life in the
ordinary. He never had what we
(even we Christians) would consider earthly success. Though He was educated, He was surrounded by those that
society looked down upon, those that were uneducated, unwanted, and often
rejected. If anyone deserved to
feel slighted by circumstances it was Him, but He never did; instead He chose
an attitude of absolute love and loving those around Him changed the world. So
I have chosen to adopt this attitude, and I think it has helped exponentially. It is easy to forget until you come
across a circumstance such as this that we are meant to take on the role of
serving, just as Christ did. I
pray every morning for God to keep me loving and keep me humble.
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| The View |
The second perspective I have adopted is that this is the
first job I have ever had that
I genuinely do not care about and am not tied to in any way. If all my praying fails, if I end up
with all insanely rude, fat customers all day, if my boss comes up and takes
his anger and incompetence out by yelling at me; I can snap and get fired- the
consequences are pretty insignificant. Obviously the likeliness of this happening is minuscule, but
there’s freedom in knowing that it could.
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| The Crew |
Other positives of working in the front are that I have made
many more friends and gotten to know most of the tent crew. Talking its hard sometimes because
nearly all of them are Romanian or polish, but I am working at it. My coworker Slavik is teaching me some
phrases in Polish and I found out that he used to be a coach in Poland and has
a wife and baby daughter back home. I also found that most of my coworkers are
extremely sassy, which is awesome and often times hilarious; especially when it
comes to Robert, the magician’s flamboyant Irish boyfriend. He and a few of the
other staff decided to go out in Newcastle, which apparently is known in the UK
for having a good night life (I think their standards are lower than those if
the US). It was good to get out
and I maintain the opinion that circus people are the best to dance with because
they have the fewest inhibitions.
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| Newcastle parks |
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| Ali in show makeup |
Sep. 1
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