When I am practicing my juggling (which I can only do conveniently in a public venue- high ceilings and all that) people often ask me if I am in a circus/ want to be in a circus. They say this in the belief that the best jugglers are in circuses, and that to join them is the ultimate goal for anybody who practices juggling. It offends, me, however, that they would think that I would desire to spend my life performing hack tricks to annoying music in a tasteless costume all for the admiration of an audience that knows nothing about the difficulty of tricks that bore them, and the simplicity of the tricks that impress them. Juggling, to anyone who practices it, is a sport- it can be used for performance, and the easiest moves might be used as party tricks, but at the higher levels it becomes brutally difficult. Jugglers work as hard as any athlete, yet when we encounter the public, the assumption is usually that we are clowns or performers, and, understandably enough, no non-juggler really knows what is difficult and what is not; and so any compliments we get are, at best, based on total incomprehension of what I am doing, and at worst are simply insulting. Excuse me, but I have no desire to entertain your child, I am working on my bloody five-ball (6x,4)(4,6x)-to-reverse-cascade transition here.
Rant over. Jugglers are very bitter people, if you can’t tell.