I learned to juggle above a Mortician school in San Francisco. My best friend Jeff was attending the school and I was mindlessly wasting time before a four year Air Force stint.
In juggling there are two things to learn. First there's muscle control: learning to toss from one hand to the other without the recipient hand having to chase it. Muscle memory and peripheral vision become study partners. You strive to reach the point of not thinking about where and when your hands are...they'll seemingly do it by themselves.
Next comes rhythm. The steady right left right left tossing pattern. What looks like a jumble of balls is an ordered alternation. Most of the time only a single ball is airborne. You work on this rhythm and you work on fighting the natural instinct to rush and panic. As much about learning as it is unlearning.
You will spend a few moments on step one and then impatiently jump to step two, frustrated and angry when it falls apart. Back to step one, sneak to step two, grumble, repeat, repeat repeating.
Lightweight scarves are good for step two since they fall with less urgency than tennis balls. Unfortunately they do very little to help with step one. Step one consists mostly of dropping and retrieving until mind and muscles surrender. I practiced between two beds, blankets pulled down to block the dreaded space underneath them, pillows piled high to block the open ends. Kneeling in this space, day after day, drop after drop, and not seeming to make any progress.
Somewhere down below echoed the THUMP..Thump...thump of these missed tennis balls. I often wondered if there were people below the room, perhaps a visitor to the Mortuary school. Did they hear it as the sound of a dropped organ or an embalming instrument? THUMP..Thump..thump.
By the time I showed up at the enlistment center I was able to keep three tennis balls airborne for minutes on end. I carried the balls everywhere and practiced each spare moment. Another recruit taught two person routines in between filling out forms and evaluations.
Learning to juggle, I was certain, would be a unique talent. Turns out to there were quite a few jugglers in the Air Force. Years later I discovered even more jugglers working as software engineers. It's as if somewhere between BASIC and Pascal a mental switch flips and you gain the aptitude for juggling.
These days I juggle to loosen up shoulder muscles or mind muscles while programming. When I knock something over I'm often surprised to find that I've caught it in mid-air. It's also a handy skill for killing time. Don't juggle for kids unless you intend to show them how. Without fail they will toss three balls in the air at once. This will happen a few times, everyone will have a good laugh, and then it's on to something new.
Learn to juggle. Realize that it takes some time and effort, just like riding a bike, but then it is with you forever.
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RSS feeds should now be grooving. Seems to work, I tested it successfully with NetNewsWire. The XML file is much easier to generate than I thought it would be. Right now it generates the RSS for the last three days worth of entries. I noticed that some rss feeds use a summary rather than the whole post. Any opinions?
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