Point A
When I was a kid, like most people, anything an adult said was taken as gospel. Vegetables are good for you? Sure, even though they taste like ass. Babies are brought to mommy and daddy by a flying bird. Sure, seems plausible. A fat man in a red snow suit flies around the entire world with 8 reindeer, dropping off toys via chimneys to every child in the world, all in single night? As long as the presents keep coming, sounds good. I love you mommy and daddy.
And then the horrible truths are revealed, and you find out that Santa doesn't exist - it's really just mommy and daddy spending hundreds and hundreds of their hard-earned dollars on toys and staying up ate to wrap the gifts themselves. Damn you mommy and daddy! How could you do this to me?!? LIARS! And the myth of all adults being omniscient is exposed
Point B
Ahhh, first love. As I mentioned in the last post, I landed my first girlfriend Christy during my junior year . . . and then she dumped me the night before soccer tryouts. It sucked. Who knew the dating world would be tough? But if she wasn't into me, then she wasn't into me. C'est la vie. However, just 2 weeks or so after, she had already landed her next boyfriend, Paul. Christy and I went to different schools (it would have been tough for her to go to my all-guy high school, considering her utter lack of a penis), but Christy and Paul did not. And while their were no rumors of cheating via the friends network, I now certainly had reason to believe she wasn't the most trustworthy of girlfriends over the last month or 2 while we were together.
Being a nice boy that I am, I invited Christy to one of our first soccer games that year. A few minutes into the game, I noticed her sitting in the front row. However, she wasn't alone, and I got my first look at her new boy while I was playing. That . . . sucked. Though one of our very next games was coincidentally against Christy and Paul's school, and Paul just happened to be on the team. We won 2-0, and vengeance was MINE!
Point C
While Christy never actually cheated on me, when I was a sophomore in college, my girlfriend Kim actually did. Or so I've been told. I didn't actually find out about it until months after we broke up, and for the next 6 or so years after, we basically ignored each other. Apparently there was a little bit of a Ross and Rachel episode, as we went on a weekend break in which I thought it meant 48 hours apart, while she thought it meant a chance to put her tongue down someone else's throat (what bitterness?)
I assure you, this will be the only reference to a Friends episodes in this blog's existence. Frankly, I'm ashamed that I brought it up. Those 2 years I actually watched Friends . . . a dark time in my TV viewing life.
11 years later, and now me and Kim are cool. But all it really takes is one good instance of cheating to really drop your faith in the opposite sex. Combine that incident with a 4 year college stretch that included a whole lot of questioning of why I listened to the Catholic church verbatim for so many years (a post in and of itself down the road), and what you get is the swan dive shown in the graph.
Section D
I've slowly regained my overall trust in others since then, and you kind of have to if you ever really want to get close to someone again. I've definitely kept a cynical side, and probably always will, but at least I no longer subscribe to the Stone Cold Steve Austin DTA theory - Don't Trust Anyone. And yes, I feel much better about myself referencing the WWE than I do Friends.
While I may not have needed the relationship trust to take a trapeze class, I definitely needed to show up with a healthy dose of trust in my fellow man. At the start of the class, they keep it pretty simple. Listen to their calls while you're up there. Get your knees on and off the bar when they say so, and kick forward and backwards when they say so. Now get your ass up to the 3rd story of the scaffolding so you can jump off.
Once your up there, your safety belt gets clipped into the harness. When you fall, it obviously helps to slow you down, but you can definitely come down wrong and get hurt.
Once secure, you grab the handle to your left, get your toes on the edge of the platform, get your torso out past the edge, and lean out to grab the bar with your right hand. At this point, it's time to hope you've never pissed off your instructor in a previous life, as the instructor grabs the back of your belt (which you really don't feel at all) and tells you to reach out and grab other side of the bar with your left hand. Now as I mentioned, at this point your entire torso is already over the edge, so as you let go of the handle with your left hand, your entire body is in the the hopefully good hands of the instructor. If he lets go of you, you're falling. And that first time that you finally let go with your left hand is one of the freakiest feelings I've had in a awhile.
Now that you've put your entire weight off the edge of the platform, the instructor says "Ready . . . . HUP!", and you're off ("Hup" is what in the biz use instead of "go" or "jump". Yeah, I'm hip to the industry jargon)
The knee hang, with a backflip finish
For the first hour and a half of the class, we practiced the above. Swing out. Swing back, getting your knees above the bar. Swing out, reaching backwards as if you're going to grab someone. Then get back down to a standard swinging position so you can do a backflip dismount. Pretty cool for our first class, but what was even cooler was the last 2 attempts, in which your trust once again gets put on display. That part where you pretend to reach out and grab someone? Yeah, now you get to.
The knee-hang, with a catch
Now not only do you have to trust that the person will actually be there, you also have to trust their timing, because the catcher is the one giving you the signal to leave. And if you don't leave at the exact moment they say so, or don't get your knees on the bar in a half a swing, you're shit out of luck, and down you go. Lucky for me, I went 2 for 2 on catches.
$75 for a 2 hour class (which took place in a furniture store), and well worth it. Enjoyable enough that my friend Alycia and I spent another $50 and signed up for 2 more.
Also at that location of Jordan's furniture? An IMax, a Fudruckers, a Jelly Belly store, an Ice Cream parlor, and a mini-Bellagio water fountain show. It's f'd up.
Round 2 was this part Thursday, and we had yet another variation on the trust fall. The move basically consisted of getting your ankles to rest on the bar, getting your ass up, and sticking your head in between your knees. A nice and compact ball of blindness. And rather than reaching out while hanging, seeing yourself into the arms of the catcher, and gracefully transitioning into their snare, you instead explode out of your tuck, change your line of sight 270 degrees by going from straight up to straight forward (the long way around), and then hope that you can find the catcher's hands and hold on in about 0.1 seconds. And once again, you're completely reliant on the expert timing of the instructors . . . which wasn't very expert-like on my first catch attempt. A complete whiff as the catcher was already in her backswing as I reached out into the nothingness. Try #2 was better, though it basically ended with us slapping 5's and heading our separate ways. My way was down.
Our 3rd class is in another month, and hopefully I'll get my average back above .500, as I currently sit at 2 for 4 on catches. I've regained yet another smidgen of trust in my fellow man, but sadly, the net and harness are only metaphors in the frustrating world of dating.
(Cheesy ending? . . . cheesy ending)
(Cheesy ending? . . . cheesy ending)
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