Everybody has certain things that they can do for no good reason, but they keep doing it anyway. In some cases, it's physical weirdness, like double-jointed elbows or twisting your tongue into strange positions. For me, it's two useless physical talents: juggling and unicycling.

Juggling came first, so I'll talk about it first. This is truly useless. About the only good things you can do with juggling are annoy people, break things, and lose things. Despite this, I went ahead and learned how to juggle anyway. It helped that I was around a lot of other jugglers at the time, so I could break their equipment, get useful pointers, and have someone to throw objects at. ("passing") If you're considering juggling, a few tips: 1. It's not as hard as it looks. The first step is to throw two balls back and forth. The key word is throw. If you throw one ball, hand the second ball from your second hand to your first, and then catch the first ball, you're doing it wrong. Throw the first ball, and just before you catch it, throw the second ball. After you've got that down, step up to three balls, and practice. You don't have to practice a lot, but if you only try once a year, you're not going to get it. Give it a few hours. You'll be a master in no time. 2. Find someone else who knows what they're doing. Not only will you get useful tips, but you'll have someone to pass with, and you'll have access to all their accumulated equipment, meaning you won't have to build your own collection quite as quickly. 3. Remember that flashy tricks are easy, it's boring stuff like juggling more than three that's hard. After you can do three balls, the correct direction is different objects like clubs and rings and tricks like throwing behind your back, not four balls.

Learning to do all this at college was a good choice. The big thing is that it meant that there were lots of other people around who could juggle. This makes it easy to do all kinds of things, like passing, performing stupid skits, and combat juggling. (So we were kind of stupid. It was still fun.) The rules of combat juggling are simple. Lots of jugglers start juggling at the same time, and the last one juggling wins. Try not to actually injure each other, but aside from that, it's as much about making other people drop as not dropping yourself. Find a group of jugglers and try it.

Believe it or not, unicycling is significantly less useless than juggling. At least unicycling is a legitimate form of transportation. It's faster than walking, easier going uphill than skateboarding, and more convenient than roller blades or a bicycle. I picked it up at Harvey Mudd, where I was a proud member of Gonzo Unicycle Madness, which did fun things like take unreasonably long trips and play games together. Like juggling, it's easier than you might expect, but it does require more practice before you can actually go anywhere. The way to learn is to do it all the time, and if at all possible find excuses to unicycle just for kicks. Unihockey is definitely a great way to learn. First, the stick significantly improves your balance, chasing the puck will improve your speed and turning, and if you haven't already learned to freemount (get on without support), it will provide good incentive to master it. Naturally, having other unics around to play with is pretty necessary, but I've found that a uni can keep up with roller blades, at least at the elementary level, so if you know some casual roller hockey players, you should try to join up with them.

One plus of unicycling and juggling is that you can combine them. You'll look like a lost circus member, but it can be fun, especially if there's another unic around for you to pass with.