6 reasons to join the circus by Joy X. '29

Reason 1: learn cool physical skills

There are so many things to do in the circus. Handstands! Fire spinning! Juggling! Fire juggling! Trapeze! Silks! Contortion! At some point, my favorite Wikipedia page was this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_circus_skills.

I love learning random skills, and in the circus, there’s always another skill to learn. I learned to juggle three balls over COVID Quarantine, and throughout high school, I would flex my juggling skills by juggling the tennis balls at tennis games rather than hitting them (by doing so  I lost many games⁠01 okay, I didn’t lose because I juggled the balls instead of hitting them, though that would be kind of comical. I was just not very good at tennis in general lol ). Then, in my senior year, I learned that there was more to juggling than three balls. Indeed, beyond three, there exist numbers like 4, 5, even 6, and *gasp* 7?!? And a few more numbers above that, probably, though I haven’t discovered them yet. Suddenly, a whole new world of possibilities opened up to me. Since then, I’ve been obsessed—there’s always something new, something to break up the routine.

If this whole MIT thing doesn’t work out, I know where I’m going next.

Reason 2: Artificial Intelligence can’t replace you

I’ve recently for some reason watched a bunch of AI gymnastics videos on YouTube. And gosh, they’re terrible. Why did his head twist 360 degrees in that front handspring? Why does she have four legs and six knees now? And—oh, she just disappeared into thin air.

sheer cosmic horror… (credit: https://www.creativebloq.com/ai/ai-art/ai-gymnastics-videos-are-captivatingly-horrific)

It’s comforting in a way, knowing that AI companies can claim to have solved the Navier-Stokes, yet something so seemingly intuitive as understanding how human bodies move is so foreign to AI.

It’s also comforting to know that AI still can’t do what I…still can’t do either. But I’m working on it, I promise!

The MIT Gymnastics Club offers beginner gymnastics classes every Tuesday, and I’ve been going on and off since last year (with long periods of “off”, depending on my psets :( ). I’m still scared to try any acrobatics moves that involve my head upside down in midair, so I’ve been working on handstands!

Nowadays, I’m addicted to handstands—I also keep seeing videos online of one armed handstands and handstand pushups. They look so cool! I want to do that someday. I’ve been practicing in my room in between psets, to get the blood rushing back to my brain after my quantum mechanics problems drains it all. In my room, I have an air mattress still inflated from three weeks ago, I hosted someone for Math Prize for Girls ⁠02 A math competition for female identifying high school students . I never bothered to deflate and put it away because I’m lazy :P and it’s fun to lie on and most importantly, it serves as a nice crash pad for when I do handstands away from the wall.

my crash pad!

Reason 3: Shorten your nerve endings

Life is too short. Your nerve endings are not short enough…

There’s a circus center in Somerville, and a week ago, I convinced my friend Grace L. ‘30 to sign up for an Aerial Ropes class there! Aerial Rope, also known as corde lisse, is a smooth rope that people climb up and do cool flowy moves on. 03 search some videos up! There are some really cool tricks that the following pictures don’t do justice lol

It was a lot more…painful than I expected. Watching circus acts in videos really does not do justice to how painful things are—there’s a lot of pressure on sensitive parts of the body, like armpits or the back of knees, and lots of unnatural poses. Here are some quotes from during the class:

“doom and despair”
“circus is like self inflicted torture”
“help i’m dying”
“AHHH”

Now match the quotes to the pictures:

okay i look kind of happy here

grace says i look like i'm having a great nap

ahhhhhh

wheeee

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Having experienced it for myself, it’s a lot more impressive to me now, that professional circus artists can do everything so gracefully. The instructor for our class reassured us that after a while, our nerve endings would get shorter (hmm is this reassuring? I’m not sure…) and we’d be able to feel less of it. 

Reason 4: juggling classes? juggling balls

I cannot express the disappointment that I felt that day, when I was just a wee high schooler reading MIT blogs, when I searched up “juggling” in MIT Blogs, got SO excited when over a hundred results popped up, and then realized that most of the entries were about juggling classes, UROPs, and schedules. Then, I thought I had been clickbaited. Alas, now I realize that such is the reality of MIT. 

I haven’t properly juggled in two months, and I haven’t learned a single new juggling trick in the past year. As a prefrosh, I would have found this repulsive. What?!? No juggling? Had I lost all mischief in my life? 

But with upcoming pset deadlines, scary midterms⁠04 as I write this I am procrastinating on studying for my 8.05 (quantum mechanics ii) midterm. as I post this, the midterm has long passed and the average turned out to be a 59%. skull emoji , UROP meetings, I feel as if every moment I have must be spent doing something productive that contributes to My Future Career—scrambling for internships, obtaining a good GPA—and there is simply no time to pause and throw a couple of balls into the air. 

But perhaps there’s a simple solution—switch My Future Career to the circus…

(i juggled fire last year :) it was so scary)

Reason 4: having an odd number of wheels in your life

This year, I doubled the number of wheels that I commute to class with from a unicycle to a duocycle dicycle tandem unicycle bicycle! And it’s so much more efficient. I’ve gone to all my lectures this semester (barring being sick or having conflicting classes :P) ! I lost track of the amount of times I didn’t go to lecture last year because of how cold it was in the morning and how much I simply didn’t want to step out of my room. Or because of how sleepy I was. Actually, as I’m writing this, I realize that both of these reasons for not going to classes have not disappeared because I now own a bike but because it’s not winter yet, and all my classes start past noon. But my point is, it decreases the activation energy hump by so much. I love my bike :) 

Although more boring, a bike is a lot faster than a unicycle. Double the wheels, double the speed, I suppose. For a week or so last year, unicycling was my primary mode of transportation to my classes, but I soon realized that the speed of a unicycle is in that awkward zone where it’s slightly faster than walking pace, but only slightly—which meant that when I unicycled on the sidewalk⁠05 because a unicycle is also twice as slow as a bike and four times as slow as a car, I was scared of unicycling on the street , passing people took long enough to be slightly awkward. And not to mention that my legs get tired very fast, so I had to pause every twenty seconds to give my thighs a rest. 

My unicycle sat in my room, and then in the Juggling Club storage closet for a long while before I decided to pick it up again to learn some new tricks two weeks ago. 

blurry me with my fancy unicycle gear (aka wrist protectors, shin guards, elbow pads, and knee pads. i don’t wanna break my bones 🥺)

I’ve been inspired by freestyle unicycling, a sport that I’ve never really heard about until two months ago. There are some videos online, and it’s really impressive how people can make riding the unicycle flow so well—it’s almost like ice skating. I can’t say the same about my own unicycling skills: for the life of me, I just can’t figure out how to turn right.⁠06 by the way, i think many people wonder how to turn on a unicycle. you just lean  I can turn left with no problem, but when I try leaning the other way? Nope! 

I’ve realized that it’s actually kind of relaxing⁠07 in the moment...afterwards when i realize my 8.05 psets have not disappeared, it's not anymore to spend two hours learning a new unicycling trick. In the days when I feel like I’m living problem set to problem set (every time I submit one, there’s always another…), it’s nice to spend time on something that is not for any class, any UROP, or any club, and purely for my own enjoyment. Having hobbies is great :) and I wish I had more time for them…

Also, because I now no longer go anywhere without my bike, I also carry my unicycle on my bike. It’s very cursed, but decently stable (only slightly wobbly side to side when I turn sharply). Now it’s a tricycle, I guess?

sometimes i get funny glances when biking down Dorm Row like this. i feel like it must look like a unicorn or something, with an extra wheel sticking out the front like this

But someone else has me beat… on my way to unicycle, I passed by this monster of a “bike”. what the heck. It has like 5 wheels. and a xylophone…

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Reason 6: no midterms or psets

Yeah, I’m a bit burnt out. Could you tell? Perhaps now you’ve seen through the façade, and now realize that the secret second purpose of this blog is to complain about my psets and midterms. I think fall semester of sophomore year is the first semester I’ve felt genuinely overwhelmed about classwork. I’m taking five classes, and sometimes it feels like I’m doing nothing but rush from problem set to problem set, with no time in between to think about them. 

MIT can feel like a bubble sometimes. Sometimes, I feel like I can float forever in that bubble, in a familiar routine, watching the weeks pass by—assignment after assignment, test after test, commitment after commitment. Yet, at other times, that bubble seems to trap me—an endless cycle of routine, motivated by stress—and I think to myself, “why am I doing this?” Is it really worth it, rushing headlong into a career in academia or industry or whatever scientific thing my eventual degree in physics and/or mathematics this leads to? 

Because suppose I really did want to join the circus. Maybe I’ve joked about it so much that it has grown on me, and maybe this is just burnt-out me talking, and maybe it’s a stupid and unfounded dream—and sometimes it sounds like that, in this world where it seems like everyone is looking for the next quant internship or UROP opportunity—but I’ve been thinking…if I continue in this race, in the future, if I have a stable job⁠08 if those even exist then...  will I regret not pursuing my imagination and my whimsy?

But will I have the courage to step off the path that seems like what everyone expects for me, to step back willingly from the cycle of stress and maximizing productivity? We’ll see…