Juggling as a Metaphor for Stuff

Today I've been juggling a lot of things. Literally. Not metaphorically. In fact, I only had one problem sheet to do today, for Functional Programming, so in terms of having to balance a bunch of different things at once, that was not a problem for me today. I mean, it was a HUGE problem, and I spent almost the entire day working on it, but I didn't mean juggling in the metaphorical sense.

I meant juggling in this sense:

That's right, I've taken up juggling.

Why, you may ask? Because I've been so sick the past two weeks that I've been unable to sing. I've already mastered Spanish and it would be too time-consuming to learn Russian. I need new shoes, someone able and available to play with me, and foreplanning before I can play squash. And I get way too engrossed nowadays when I read, so reading's reserved only for days when I have nothing to do (which, at Oxford, is never). So I've needed a new hobby.

I came up with the idea when I saw some oranges in hall. We're allowed two pieces of fruit or one dessert every meal, so the past few days I'd been getting a banana and orange with every meal. Finally, three days ago I had three oranges, so I started to teach myself how to juggle.

And it's been great. I can literally spend as much or as little time as I want doing it, and it's just fantabulous. Two of them have cracked their peels slightly so far, and I've opened those up and eaten them. It's definitely easier than trying to open them with my fingernails (which never works)! I also lost one. I don't know where it is, but I do know that I need to find it some point before I leave for Christmas break, because otherwise I'll come back to a room that smells of rotten mandarin. And I ain't talkin' Iron Man 3.

I'm at the point where I can juggle three oranges, but I need to get into the right rhythm so that I don't end up throwing them too far forward or too close to me and end up dropping them all. Which is a great metaphor for life, isn't it?

Nope.

Well...sometimes.

Just not for me, not right now. I'm very, very focused. Perhaps to my detriment. I'm more like that guy from that joke I heard from a friend of mine last year. I call it "The Makeshift Weaponry." The man is charging into No Man's Land unarmed, with nothing more than hope, determination, and focus on his side. He's like a tank, barreling forward, but without the safety net of actually being in a tank. I like this metaphor better, because with this metaphor, I'm alluding to my own book, which would drive up demand if the book didn't exist entirely within my head, and because when you juggle something, you always drop it, but the focused guy in my joke won the battle. Plus, a battle's much more meaningful than some pieces of fruit flying through the air.

Hopefully yours,

    John Khouri, unlicensed tank driver (shhh!)


P.S. As correction to an earlier blog post, the word "bop" (a dance shindig at the college bar with costumes) is not an "English" term, as a friend of mine informed me this evening. It is actually specific to Oxford, possibly Cambridge as well (although what do they know about having fun).