Monday, May 25, 2009

Overheated

Being driven back from the Netherlands at the weekend, I passed a couple of cars on the hard shoulder that had become too hot in a traffic jam, and needed a break to cool down again. This is how I feel today. I am tired and sunburnt, and my face feels like it wants to shrivel up and pull my eyes closed.

I was in the Netherlands for the Dutch juggling convention, and spent too much time drinking, juggling and standing in the sun, and not enough time sleeping. I'm trying to change my life so that I catch myself when I'm getting carried away, and stop before I tire myself completely, but I didn't manage this at the weekend. On Friday night thoughts of time, tiredness and limits just weren't in my head. I was thinking only about music, games, laughter and juggling.

So I need to sleep, stay out of the sun, rest and get back to looking for a job. I will recover soon enough, and can look at the good parts of the weekend:I have met lots of new people, appeared in some nice photos, and learned how to flick up a football with my heel.

Thursday, May 07, 2009

Dance if you wanna dance.

My professor in Erlangen spent several years persuading me to get out of the laboratory more and take dancing classes. At the time I was too fascinated by the beauty of quantum states to bother with things like music, rhythm, movement and women. Two nervous breakdowns later, I decided to give it a try.

Because of a previous juggling performance for the culture office of the university, I got 20% off. But because I'm not a student, I had to pay 50% extra. I spent several minutes debating with the culture office whether I should pay 30% more (the obvious answer) or 20% more (the correct answer). You don't just get a reduction on the original price, you get a reduction on the increase!

If you don't believe this, ask for a 50% pay rise this month, then a 50% pay cut next month, and see what happens. I have a copy of "How to Lie With Statistics" by Darrell Huff on my lap, which explains this better than I can. I can thoroughly recommend it. It was a good read and may well have saved me 4 Euros.

Back to the dancing, I found an Italian Erasmus student as a dance partner, and have decided that the Salsa arm movements are the same as a juggling cascade, but with a pause after every third throw.