Good Cop/Bad Cop

Alternate title: But I Was a Cheerleader

Alternate alternate title: Bringin’ It On

There have been only a few times in my life where I got an idea in my head and went with it, not giving it too much thought. Usually, it has worked out well for me in the long run. Once it was making up my mind to transfer. One time it was deciding to move to Chicago. Another came before that, in the early years of high school.

Freshman year, I took driver’s ed in the fall. It was the bonus of having an October birthday. As I stayed after school to learn about speed limits, seatbelts, and road signs, a few of the girls I knew vaguely were trying out for cheerleading for the winter sports. As I watched them, talked to them, I decided I would try out that spring for fall of the upcoming year. Try out I did, and I made it.

Throughout my sophomore, junior, and fall of senior year, I cheered basketball and soccer. At our school, soccer was not the lesser squad. Almost all of us chose to cheer for the soccer team because, well they were good. They actually won. Senior year, they went to the state tournament and came in second place—their only loss of the season.

Somehow, during senior year, I was co-captain on the varsity soccer squad. Yes, co-captain of the cheerleading squad; could I sound more all-American? My co-captain was a girl we’ll call “Kelsey.” “Kelsey” was our captain junior year as well, and I believe I became co-captain when our coach said “who’s your other captain,” and no one else volunteered.

Anyhoo, some of the girls took cheerleading very seriously. I wasn’t one too take it too seriously. Hence, Marissa’s and my continued renditions of the Spartan cheerleaders on SNL. Pre-game you were sure to find us doing routines chanting “Bobby Fisher, where is he? I don’t know…I don’t know.” Ooops, I digress.

So anyway there were girls like me and Marissa who were on a nice middle ground. There were ones like our friend “spoons” who approached life in general with a carefree manner, and that applied to cheerleading. And then there was “Kelsey.”

“Kelsey” was so serious about her cheerleading that she would not allow talking during the game. “Kelsey” tried her hardest to enforce her rule that if you talked during the game about anything not related to what cheer we should do next, you were supposed to do a jump—like a herkie or something—and cheer with a “Let’s go!” Spoons and many of the other girls thought it was stupid. So did I. We acquiesced junior year but senior year, I was there.

With each order “Kelsey” gave to jump, which usually was accompanied by a finger snap, I would catch the girl’s eye and silently shake my head to tell her, “No, you don’t have to.” Needless to say, I was listened to on such occasions. It was a complete good cop/bad cop situation. I relished being the good. The one time I played bad cop, I lost.

I like being the good cop better. I think my squad did too. I saved them from looking like idiots, jumping and shouting for no apparent reason during a point of nothingness in the game.

I learned a lot in cheerleading: how to be heard, how to get along with people, how to spell “aggressive,” “victory,” and lots of other words—actually I knew those well before, but still. I learned that wearing a short skirt and being cute won’t always make you popular, but being the good cop sure can.

Porcelain Goddess

My skin is what some might call pale. Best Friend once called in porcelain. True to her words, when I began to use nice, department-store makeup my foundation and concealer colors were, in fact, called “porcelain.” Really, that’s a nice way of saying that I am pale. I’m as pale as the day is long…on June 21…in the Arctic Circle. So pale am I, you can see through me. No really, at my worst, in the dead of winter, you can see little blue veins. Not necessarily cute.

So, in an effort to prepare myself for both the summer and the Caribbean, I recently started tanning at my gym. Herein lies the purpose of this post. For I have a confession to make. I, Cheryl, Ms. Move-Halfway-Across-Country-for-College; the one who picked up and moved to Chicago; bug-killer extraordinaire; she who walks along city streets after dark; survivor of multiple NYC cab rides, am terrified of tanning beds. Commence laughter here.

Tanning beds are the only things that make me feel claustrophobic. I can handle crowds. Hell, I could probably spend a few hours in an actual closet, but as soon as I pull the top of the tanning bed down, my breath catches, my heart speeds up, and I begin to silently and fervently await the ten minutes until the bed turns off, at which point I fling the cover open to breathe.

Is it perhaps the closed-in feeling, or the strange blue lights that literally are frying me? Is it the plethora of warnings imprinted on the machine, the notices on the doors of the tanning place? Could it be the fact that I am fairly certain some horror movie used “trapped in a tanning bed” as one of its overly-elaborate plot devices? Is it the anxiety that my goggles might slip and my retinas could be singed by the death rays of the evil bed? Might it be the uncertainty over whether this bed was, in fact, sanitized before my use? Or maybe it’s the whirring noises of the bed itself. Whatever it is, I wait on pins and needles, silently attempting to keep track of time by the songs playing nearby—four should do it.

While I can’t face a vacation in the tropics with skin untrained for intense sun rays, or a vacation or summer in a new bikini with my sickly pale skin, I find myself wondering if there is a price to high to pay for it all—my nerves. Then I remember, I’ve faced the world in a cheerleading uniform, a plethora of dance costumes, a dutch-girl outfit, and a purple bridesmaid’s dress. What’s a little radioactive glow compared to that?

It Pours

When it rains, they say, it pours. I should be fucking drowning between that and all the tears I’ve cried. Wails, gasping sobs, single drops running a track down my cheek, pools stinging the corners of my eyes. There are different kinds of tears and different ways of producing them. I’ve shed them all lately.

Actions, they say, speak louder than words. Louder still can be the actions behind words. Combinations of the two roar. And sometimes, silence is deafening. It’s been too loud for me lately.

Karma, they say, is a bitch. I wonder if I did something truly heinous to piss my karma off. She’s kicking my ass. As much as I hate the sob story cliché, I sometimes wonder what I did to deserve it.

The straw, they say, breaks the camel’s back. Sometimes what you think is the straw, isn’t. Or it takes more than one. I ask myself, with each new thing, how I will handle that. Not if I can handle it, but how. If is not the question, there is no “if.” Handling is a must. I am stronger than even I know.

Life, they say, is like a box of chocolates. Right now, I’m getting cordial cherries. I hate cordial cherries. I’d rather a coconut crème or toffee. Yet, if I get the cherries out of the way now, the coconut and toffees will be waiting. Calm always follows the storm. Hope is holding to the vision of the calm, the dry land, the quiet, the camel walking tall, the coconut and toffee.