Bohemian Musings

Andy and I made the paper up here. :) The two images are below.

Along with children, there were parents, grandparents and couples. Andrew Kerr, 24, and Emma Loggins, 25, were making slow loops around center of the rink. They had no trouble identifying the better skater.

“Emma is world-class, and I can barely keep myself upright,” Kerr said.

Loggins, who learned to skate in Atlanta, has competed in figure skating before and said she plans to do it again. As for advice, she suggested tying on skates tightly, keeping laces from dragging on the ice and “If you fall, don’t put your hands out.”

That’s to avoid skate blades, she said.

Well the holiday weekend has finally come to a close, and I must say I’ve had a splendid time with my last weekend before school starts back. Friday night, the crew hung out, got some Mexican food, and played Mario Kart on the Game Cube. Saturday, Andy, Agnes, Sara, Joe, my parents, and myself went up to the Duluth rink to watch some of the skating competition and skate the public session. It made me miss my old skating competition days. It was the first time I had skated since last February, so needless to say I was more than thrilled. I miss skating so much… I can’t put it into words. I had a few minutes where it was just me on the ice, and it was like the old days with the Morrow rink…. just me and my ipod. I skated so hard in the first 15 minutes that my lungs were burning. That was a rather unpleasant feeling.

I should note that all of my friends are exceptionally good at ice skating. They all have great balance, even Andy who made considerable progress since last November’s outing which involved him saying that he hated the sport and never wanted to do it again. Now he actually wants to go back in the near future. And I should also note that his trademark “swan” move was quite lovely… or entertaining. However you want to classify it. :) We also saw Rob there, he’s a pretty cool guy, he is in the Georgia Figure Skating Club, and he was on the skating board with my dad for awhile. He does a little pair skating, and showed me a beginner’s pair move… since you know I have trust issues when it comes to other people holding me on the ice. :) It was really cool…. I felt like I was flying, and later, I found myself cursing that I am about 9 inches too tall to be a pair skater. After that, we all went our separate ways, Andy and Agnes came back to my place and we hung out for a bit before Josh, Jen, Sara, Joe, and Todd came over. We all ordered pizza and watched Hot Fuzz. After that we played some Halo, and then went upstairs to my neighbor’s party. I can now say I know someone in my complex, we’re still just acquaintances, but it’s cool none-the-less. I was most entertained by seeing an apartment with a floor plan that was the exact opposite of mine. Sunday, Andy and I were productive and coded literally the whole day minus the hour we played Halo and Boggle that night. And today was much the same. Good times. Good times. :)

Here’s some pics and a video from the skating outing including my awesome pair skating with Rob. I think I’m going to try to seriously start going at least once every two weeks, though once a week would be nice. I could go up and skate a morning session at the Kennesaw rink and have lunch with Sara or something…. Sara you should make sure I do that. :)

Today, well I guess yesterday now, Noah and I went to see Peter Pan at the FOX. Peter Pan was the first thing I ever saw at the FOX back when I was a child. It was my favorite story as a child. My mom made me a costume, and I got a bottle of pixie dust one Christmas… I used to go running around outside jumping around my tree house, throwing the dust, and jumping off rocks…. I used to lay on my stomach in my swing and pretend I was flying. I would play with some of the neighborhood kids, and we would have sword fights with sticks. Those were the days… I still say if I could have one super power, I would choose the ability to fly. To be free like a bird… be able to go anywhere I want at any second of any day…. Just fly above everything and look down and at all the people who are going about their business. I wonder what the birds think of all the people running around, so busy and tied up in their own little world that they don’t even notice the bird or stop to smell the flowers. I wonder if they feel sorry for us. Perhaps their songs are their effort to get us to stop and notice the fact that we’re all moving too fast. That was a little bit of a tangent.

I’ve recently been thinking a lot about my skating. I made a little video recently of me skating, mostly when I was little, but it has a couple parts in it when I am older. God I miss it… My safe haven was the rink. I started ice skating when I was 8 years old. I skated at Stone Mountain until it closed. I was on a precision team (now called synch teams) that no one would give a home too. We practiced in parking lots, high school gyms, and rinks in other states at 1 and 2 am in the morning. We were all really young, but we loved it. Even without the ice, we still ruled every title that we competed for. We were national and world champs in 1996 in the ISIA division. We were pretty huge. We were on television a couple times, we were in magazines and newspapers, but then after worlds, people started talking about how this was to become an Olympic sport in the 2000’s. The coaches got way too serious, and we all be booked it out. I continued my solo skating at Parkaire and then Duluth, then stopped for a good while, and then started back when I was 16 and the rink opened up here. I coached some and took some lessons. Landed some double jumps, but never any triples… I only wish I could have stuck with it and been really great at it. I think my heart will always lie with skating. On those mornings when I skated and no one was on the ice… no one was watching… those mornings when it was just me and my head phones. Those were the times when I felt like I was truly alive. I was able to express myself, be one with the music, and just skate my heart out. For some reason I could never truly do that with other people watching. My last routine I was learning before I quit was to Moulin Rouge, a combination of “One Day I’ll Fly Away (remixed)”, “El Tango De Roxanne”, “Your Song”, and “Hindi Sad Diamonds” that I cut myself. It was the most beautiful program I had ever skated; it was so dramatic and elegant…. Vladimir let me choreograph myself… I wish I could have competed with that routine… I got lost when I skated it, I didn’t care if anyone was watching… I finally reached that point where I wasn’t self-conscience about it… then the damn rink closed, and I was too busy with college and everything else to drive an hour everyday for practice. They’re going to open two sheets of ice near my house again, but by the time it is up…. I will be in Savannah by then… driving an hour and half every time I want to skate to Charleston, South Carolina.

I got asked to join the top US synch team that trains in Massachusetts. There’s a video of them here. It’s kinda short and doesn’t show too much, but it’s all I could find. If they were in Savannah… I’d do it in a heartbeat. I guess it’s kinda cool that people in the synch skating world still know who our team was and still want us to join other teams.

I miss it. :(