Took my first poi class last night.

FOr those of you unfamiliar with poi, they are weighted balls, covered in streamers, suspended by cords or chains from the fingertips, and derived from use in Maori dance rituals. They are also sometimes lit on fire, and used for “fire spinning”, a hypnotic display of dancing/weaving circles of flame. Last Halloween, while at a house party, I watched a guy do fire spinning, and said to my friends, “I’d love to learn how to do that”.

So for Christmas, Santa left poi in my stocking, and I (being the safety conscious girl that I am) decided to take a class for beginners out in Camden. Last night was the first lesson.

I’m thinking I may need a wee bit of practice.

I curse my mother and my maternally inherited lack of hand-eye co-ordination. I curse my clumsy, stiff, and unco-operative left wrist which rotates as smoothly as a ballbearing coated in tar and shards of glass. I curse the inventor of nylon streamers.

I am pretty sure I was the only one whose poi were actively trying to strangle her. My poi are sadistic as hell.

And I actually have a poi-related injury – a big ol’swollen and lumpy bruised knuckle, which I have no idea how I got.

It’s fun. But frustrating. More frustrating than snowboarding, because it looks so deceptively simple. At least with snowboarding, there’s the element of danger, and the adrenaline rush in between spectacular crashes. There’s not much adrenaline in hitting yourself repeatedly about the head while streamers are wound around your neck and tangled cords yank out great clumps of hair.

It must be hilarious to watch. I’d pay good money to see a video. My ponytail elastic kept flying across the room. I kept tripping on the streamers (dangerous, with my walking abilities pretty iffy at the best of times, certainly without charmed poi snakes binding my ankles together). Streamers entangled with another girl’s poi streamers. Errant poi sailing wildly into the wall, like a deranged fluorescent comet. Interspersed with huge chunks of time devoted to trying to unravel randomly created master-level nautical knots which have magically fused two poi into one giant nest of string.

However, I am sure that in no time I will soon be weaving and spinning like a pro. And then I graduate to fire!

In the meantime, I should probably invest in a helmet.

Oof

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