{"id":23,"date":"2005-05-27T18:48:18","date_gmt":"2005-05-27T08:48:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/?p=23"},"modified":"2007-10-07T21:00:12","modified_gmt":"2007-10-07T11:00:12","slug":"hurt-by-the-hula-part-i","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/2005\/05\/27\/hurt-by-the-hula-part-i\/","title":{"rendered":"Hurt by the Hula, Part I"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/p>\n

Being a single mum is tough – probably tougher than anything I could handle. So no-one objected when my coworker, Sandra, brought her young daughter, Madeline, into work with her one day. Madeline, aged about 7 (or so) brought her new toy – a hula hoop. Sandra called for a department-wide hula-hooping competition.<\/p>\n

I had tried hula-hooping a couple of times before, with varying levels of success. I was disappointed that Mick was the only other person, apart from me, to step up and take on Madeline.<\/p>\n

I hate to be so brutal about the performance of a young child, but Madeline was crap at hula-hooping. She was proud to get about three lousy, unsteady revolutions. It was only that Mick and I were crappier that enabled her to win the competition.<\/p>\n

I mentioned my disappointing performance to my friend Lauri<\/a>, an experienced hula-hoop performer. I quickly learnt that I had been set-up and ripped off. A child’s hula hoop is small and light – a larger, heavier hula-hoop would have been more suitable for us men who were twice Madeline’s height. Lauri kindly donated a hoop and some lessons to get me started on my new life goal; to secretly learn to hula, to challenge Madeline to a re-match, and to make a 7-year old girl cry.<\/p>\n

Unfortunately, while I was working to fill this gap in my life, Mick was working on his own secret plan.<\/p>\n

While I was still perfecting the step-through kick-up to an overhead hand-twirl, Mick snared Sandra and they eloped to New Zealand with Madeline – and hula hoop – in tow.<\/p>\n

Despite my practice, despite my attendance at hula-hooping workshops, I never did manage to make a 7-year old girl cry.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Julian gets beaten by young girl, and vows to get revenge<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_s2mail":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[23,35,37,30,41],"tags":[106,375,120,371],"class_list":["post-23","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-based-on-a-true-story","category-heroic-failures","category-hula-hooping","category-humour","category-story-telling","tag-anecdote","tag-circus-skills","tag-hula","tag-humour"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=23"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=23"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=23"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}