A Day In The Life Of A Peanut Butter Cup

Listen Up!
To make sense of the title, I think i figured out where all my tiredness, business, and stuff is coming from this semester, and that's the fact that I have a 9AM class 2 days out of the week. I've struggled to get through that class so much and deal with the sleep schedule that it's absolutely ridiculous. I'm NEVER going to take another class that starts before noon again, simply because I just can't deal with the screwing up it causes to my schedule, productivity, and everything...
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My college life seems to be doing good, I've dropped the problem class and the remaining three are in good standing. All my assignments are being kept up with and they're usually coming in with good marks on them, so unless I'm miscalculating, I think this semester will be another good one.
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TechMCC is in a weird space, basically we're getting work done on the pinball machine in leaps and bounds, and it looks like we might indeed be getting it done by the end of the semester, but the problem is the "we" means me and Jon, the only other member that's basically shown up to the meetings this semester.
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As for work, I've finally started training at the new Meadowlands Stadium, and so far, it's good. Mostly common sense stuff about using common sense in customer service, but there are a few things to pay attention to that are specific and you wouldn't think about until you were in this job. I'm glad we're getting paid for the training for sure, and the fact they are giving us free sandwiches is just as good there at the sessions. Right now I've got two more to go to before we start working on May 9th.
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Now, for my OTHER job, I GOT my bartending certification :D I am certified to work as a bartender anywhere in the United States from here on out, and it was absolutely amazing that i passed I think. I didn't actually expect to make it until my 3rd or 4th time through the test, especially considering how many low-ball drinks (my weak spot) the instructor quizzed me with this time around, but I got them and learned my shots, and now I'm going around looking at all the bars that are hiring this weekend. If all goes well I'll have the money coming in real oon that I need to go to the WJF again!
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Daily Life: Rant about Schedules
I absolutely hate how busy I've been recently, I think I've had one day this past two or three weeks when I can truly say I didn't have SOMETHING that I needed to do and SOMEWHERE I needed to go. Plain and simple, the reasons are college, job training at the Meadowlands, job training in bartending, looking for a bartending job now, running errands to help out with the household stuff, and most importantly, trying to find the time to do stuff before going to sleep each night, especially on Sunday, Tuesday, and Wednesday nights, because I need to go to sleep around midnight in order to wake up by 8AM and go to class or wherever I need to go. I've ALWAYS liked to do work late at night when I know I'm alone without the possibility of being interrupted, and when I can be most productive. Not to mention that late at night is usually when my memory will work and the rememberance will pop into my head of something I wanted to get done, like this blog post which I've delayed for WAYYYY too long.

I'm a night person, always have been and always will be, and I hate that the world is so intent on making everyone conform with "get up at sunrise and sleep at sunset" type of schedule. It's so inefficient! This is a rant I make almost every damned time I walk from the back of the packed college parking lot to class because I'm so pissed off at the idea of a schedule I've been forced into, along with everyone else! Think about this for a second. What if we simply took everyone out of their schedules and distributed them evenly, so that half the population is always asleep while the other half is always awake, and that state is pretty much constant throughout the day, so that at 9AM there's people who are just clocking into work, just clocking out of work, and midway through their day.

There would be no such thing as rush hour! No such thing as not finding a parking space somewhere! No such thing as "peak hours"! No such thing as "Closing Time"! It would completely solve so many problems I think! But nope, Middlesex County College only offers the classes I needed to take this semester at 9AM and Noon. The bastards....

Juggle This:
So Juggle This the NYC convention came and went, and now it's time to reflect on it and tell the story! So I started off getting up on Saturday at around 11 to get on the bus, and it was weird because I would have normally drove in, but I couldn't get the car to drive in, and noone was going with me, so I took the 116 Bus into Port Authority terminal, and from there too the A train down into Brooklyn, where I switched to the G train and then walked 2 blocks to get to Pratt. Oddly, it actually took about the same amount of time as if I'd have dealt with the traffic on the Staten Island driving route!

So I get there, and it looked like a pretty good turnout, I immediately went over and greeted my good friend Michael Karas, and was a little shocked to see Joe Showers pop in out of nowhere along with Ross, so that was great! And from there I did some chatting with them and showing off some of the new things I was working on and performing later like my Ring In Mouth routine, tennis ball and racket tricks, and some shaker-cup moves I'd just started playing with a few days before, and as I was expecting it was a little mixed reaction, but mostly good stuff and it made me confident about performing at Renegade with the ringmouth bit. So I leave them be to continue saying hi to everyone, when suddenly the host of the stage show comes up to me, which is awesome by itself, but then he asks me to do Muffin Clutches in the stage show! AWESOME! I mean, I wasn't going to do Muffin Clutches because I'd already performed it at 2 renegade shows and it's a year old act on that very day, but to do it on the main show would be way too good to resist, so I eagerly said yes and then spent a little time practicing it because I hadn't done it in ages.

Once that was overwith though, I basically spent the next few hours catching up with everyone, including Jason, which is always a pleasure to do when I don't have to travel across the country for, and juggling a few different hard ring tricks I hadn't practiced in way too long thanks to my busy college and training schedule. I made a 5 ring 97531 on the 4th attempt! Which I was absolutely and obviously astounded with, and it made me think that eventually I may get good enough to do it at WJF6, and that thought alone filled me with enough joy to last an hour. But then as that hour ended, something else replaced it, and that was the WJF New Combat games!

Now, it took a bit of thought to understand all the rules, but I got them all down and helped everyone out pretty quickly during the games, my team did sort of suck, or perhaps it was just Team 4's extreme pwnage of everyone else that made it seem that way, lol. Then again, having Joe Showers, Casey Rentmeester, and Josh Horton on a combat team together, no matter WHO the other two are, is a little unbalanced I think XD. Talking about the individual games though, Zombie Combat was an interesting idea, and Kill The King Combat is absolutely a GREAT strategy version once you get a team that thinks cohesively, but where things REALLY shined, especially for me, was SUMO Combat! Basically a circle drwan on the floor, and you played combat inside the circle, and the first to either drop or step out loses, and pushing is allowed and encouraged, and the teams switch out members round-robin style in a time limit. It was tough getting used to it, but once I did, holy damn did I have an awesome run! I took out at least 5 other players before finally getting knocked out during our team's round.

So that was awesome, and as that ended, it was time for the shows to begin, which i'd completely forgotten to buy a ticket for until at the door of the show, which was embarrassing and made me feel like a dunce. The first big surprise of the show was after Coney Island Chris started off slow and awkward, he came back three times on stage and smashed two out of the park. The diobolo duo was always awesome every time they came on, and then of course there was me. I knew Muffin Clutches was an awesome routine, but as I listened to the audience reaction after I finished I guess I was reminded just how good XD. After the show for the rest of the night and the next day, every juggler who didn't know me from online came up and complimented me on the routine, it was quite humbling actually, one of the things that definitely made the weekend worth it!

After that high point and the end of the stage show, things went down a notch for me, though I must say the first half of the Renegade show was ABSOLUTELY the BEST series of acts I've seen in AGES, from Robin doing Diabolo, to the team passers, to the whip act, they were all just so good right after another! And then came my routine after a little while. I wasn't really going up to be impressive, because I knew the two or three things I was showing were completely experimental and I hadn't even tried to see how they work for an audience, and that's kind of what I use Renegade shows for at the weekend conventions like Juggle This and such. So the first thing i performed was a quick routine I'd come up with after having an inspirational idea bounced off of Karas back at Carmine St one week, which was how could I juggle through a stable ring just held somewhere, and then I thought to hold the ring in my mouth, and this routine was born a little while later. It got a moderate applause, as I expected it may, it's more of a filler routine than anything. So next came my second ever tr at making a routine out of a tennis ball and racket, and a few tricks got some decent applause, though the routine for the most part was again, another filler like routine. I was pretty much fine with that, as I'd had my big ovation for the night doing muffin clutches in the stage show.

But after that show ended, I was going to go over and stay at a friends house over in Manhattan, unfortunately, he ditched me because I was going to be coming in "too late" (it was about 1:30AM) and he essentially left me stranded in NYC with noplace to sleep and no way to get home because the last bus went out at midnight and I wasn't taking a train back home for ten dollars. So I basically found a quiet corner of Penn Station after doing some subway hopping, slept there for a few hours, got woken up and then took the subway back to near the Pratt Institute, where I slept through a black catholic church mass until the Pratt institute opened their doors again to the gym. Needless to say, it was the low point of the convention for me, especially considering how much time I spent walking around and on my feet during the night, so by the time I was in the gym on sunday, I couldn't stand up for more than 20 minutes I was so sore.

That said, Sunday wasn't bad, I learned how to get a lasso going as well as some knot throwing during the workshop and participate in a couple of the games, which is always fun, and I just overall didn't mind so much about my sore feet thanks to the fact that it was still the juggling con and that I was having a blast at it. I said my farewells a little early thanks to my feet not being able to hold me up any longer, and took the subway back to the Port Authority, where I rode the bus home and just slept for the next ten hours it seemed, happy to have had a good time but absolutely exhausted.


A Day In The Life Of A Peanut Butter Cup ~ Reeses2150