No Beer Here

Beer. I think it’s one thing that could make my social life entirely different.

It’s not that my social life is bad, or difficult. It’s just that beer would be less expensive for one thing. Plus, I wouldn’t be a complete anamoly at sporting events.

When I was in college, my roommate and I stopped into a bar, drank one beer and rushed to the train. As we rounded a corner I bent over and got sick–from one beer. Two more tries with sick feelings and then a near losing it at dinner with a friend’s parents convinced me of one thing–I can’t drink beer. I must be allergic.

Every time we go to the bar, I can’t partake of beer specials. When there are all-you-can-drink specials that are only for beer, I do not benefit. That part makes me sad, but honestly I don’t lament the beer thing because I tend not to miss things that make me feel pukey.

Last night I went with a large group of people to see the Blackhawks lose. As we rounded the arena looking for food and drink and then sat high above the United Center it occurred to me how odd I must be at a sporting event. I don’t drink beer. I don’t eat beef or pork so I won’t have a hot dog or brat. The old sport standby of “dog and a beer” doesn’t apply to me.

It’s true that arenas now have wine and mixed drinks, pizza, tacos. But the traditional food stuff is limited for me. So, bring on the peanuts and crackerjack. And the hard liquor. Those I will partake in and enjoy. Immensely.

I Turn My Camera On

Greetings fellow bloggers! I’m back. Hooray! Now, I have two weeks until classes start up which will give me just enough time to catch up on everything that’s been going on with you.

Since you all held up to your end of the bargain with lots of comments for me to read upon my return, here’s part of my end…pictures!

This is me doing pretty much what I did for a majority of the cruise: lie in the sun. My cruise day typically went something like this; eat, lie in sun, read, eat, lie in sun, get ready for evening: eat and see some shows. Or something to that effect. That’s my mom in the background trying to be inconspicuous.

Cruises have two formal nights, where everyone gets all dressed up in their finest for dinner and evening activities. Our first formal night was Sunday night. This is my mom, me, and my sister in one of the lounges, waiting for our drinks and also waiting for a magician’s show to start. When that show started, guess who was the lovely audience volunteer to come on stage? It was me!

This is my mom and me (with an attempt at curly hair) drinking our first martinis. For my mom it was her first ever, and for me it was my first martini, and vodka for that matter, since the incident that was the Cubs game.

Cruises also have photographers everywhere snapping pictures they try to sell to you. We bought this one, which is the three of us getting off the boat at St. Maarten. It was definitely my favorite of our stops. St. Thomas was too American for my taste. Which just goes to show…I am zero for two in things named St. Thomas (see college #1).

This is me in front of a little church in St. Maarten. I liked the look of the church, very islandy. See how tan I am getting?

Princess Cruiselines, which we were riding, does a champagne waterfall. There are 725 champagne glasses in that configuration. I have no idea how many bottles of champagne it took to fill them all, but this is my contribution. They have a “champagne and bubbles party,” but after a dinner with extra lobster tails, thanks to our waiter, we were stuffed and somehow the champagne missed us.

True to form, this is me laying in the sun. This time on the beach in the Bahamas, which was Friday. The best thing about the Caribbean is how quickly the rain goes away. That morning we woke up and it was cloudy. As we were eating breakfast, it started storming. Seeing a thunderstorm on the sea was ineresting. Yet within two hours, I was on the beach, and as you can see, it’s quite sunny. Barely a cloud in the sky. I wish it’d do that in Chicago.

Well all, that’s it for now. I must go and do all the not-so-fun, post-vacation things like unpack and do laundry. Sigh. Vacations are just too short. I’d love to be back there already.

"I" Statements

I am: a lover, not a fighter; a writer; a woman; a thinker; an investigator; a pop-culture enthusiast; much more positive than I used to be; a friend; a sister; a daughter; creative; a brunette; a Libra with a Capricorn rising and Taurus moon; spiritual; a questioner; indecisive; unique.

I said: way too many things I shouldn’t have; “I love you” and they were the last words my dad heard from me; “I can.”

I want: to be happy; to make others happy; to see the world; to succeed as a person; to write; to be read; to learn; to fall in love; to have a family.

I wish: I knew what to say at the right time; I didn’t worry so much; I could give her hope; I had answers.

I strongly dislike: red meat; beets; prejudice; fake-ness; big egos; stupidity/chosen ignorance; throwing up; bigots; suffering; cantaloupe; feeling stupid; the first college I went to; wind (I picked the wrong city, I’m aware); potty humor, my stomach.

I miss: naps; not having a care in the world.

I fear: knives; centipedes; snakes; that I won’t find someone.

I hear: conversations; music; keyboards clicking.

I wonder: what I should be doing in my life; what will happen to me in the next year.

I regret: that I pushed my dad away when he tried to reach out to me the summer before he died.

I am not: fake; weak; dependent; judgmental; always confident.

I dance: like I mean it.

I sing: in the shower; in my car; when I’m alone; with my friends.

I cry: when I’m sad; when I am frustrated; at movies and TV shows and sometimes even Hallmark commercials; too much.

I am not always: certain; active; attractive (inside or out)

I made: good decisions; peace with my father; strides in forgiving myself.

I write: because I have to.

I confuse: alligators and crocodiles; “lie” and “lay;” my friends when I say or do things really out of character.

I need: to trust more; to become financially secure; laughter; chocolate; food; air; water; love.

I should: get back to work; get more sleep; watch less TV.

I start: every day with bleary eyes; writing things but don’t finish; lists constantly.

I finish: most of the books I start; my day with reflection; all my desserts.

I tag: whoever wants to do this.

PS>I got this from a year in the life.

I’ve Got to Be Movin’ On

It’s done. I’m a mixture of emotions. Excited. Nervous. Happy. Anxious. Optimistic. Uncertain. They’re all bubbling down deep. The time has come for a major change.

I just turned in my two-week notice. My last day of work will be the 26th. Unlike most people who leave a job for another, my change is going to be an even-bigger transition. I’m finally going to grad school, full-time this summer. While it is exciting and wonderful, it’s a little bit scary.

Gone are the days of steady income, workplace commeraderie, and staff meetings. Also gone are the frustrating days we all have that mimic the commercial of a man in an office with a bunch of monkeys. Here, instead, come days of classes, homework, tight budgets, and dream pursuits. It’s exciting; it’s scary. Because this is what I know, what is coming is new territory. And while it would be easy to stay, it’s time to move on.

“Have you ever seen stagnant water?” I asked my sister last week. “It’s smelly and gross.” We don’t necessarily want to change, but life does and we have to move along with it. This chapter is coming to a close, the next one is uncharted–it’s one I can’t wait to discover.

Fishy Business

Or, Why I Don’t Like the Little Mermaid

So, it seems you all were actually interested in finding out what I have against the Little Mermaid. I wasn’t sure if it’d be well received originally. I guess you could say in my last post I was fishing for a response.…Fishing! Get it? Anyway, moving on…

I saw the Little Mermaid with a friend and her family. She was a few years younger and they took us and her little sister to see the movie. If the movie came out in 1989 (which according to the IMDB, it did) then I was 10 years old, as I believe it was around Christmas time. Being 10 years old, I didn’t give much thought to the movie beyond bright colors, comedy, fun songs, and the Disney-fied oh-so-happy ending. I liked the movie when it came out. I even had my mom buy me the movie on VHS. Then, it happened.

It’s not so much that I don’t like the movie The Little Mermaid so much as I don’t like the little mermaid. I really can’t stand Ariel. There, I’ve said it. She annoys the crap out of me. She’s whiny and selfish. There’s a whole damn song where all she says is “I want…I want…I want.”

She knowingly goes to a witch for help and puts multiple lives in danger because, once again, she’s selfish and she only cares about what she wants. I think she’s kind of ditzy too. Oh, and she falls in love with someone before she even meets him? Before she talks to him? Gets to know him? And because of that, she goes to said witch for help in her selfish pursuits. Whatever!

I realize that the original story may be to blame. Although in the original story, the mermaid ends up pretty pathetic and sad. Here she is rewarded for that whiny, selfish behavior. Oh, and also? I haven’t read the Hans Christian Anderson story.

When the Disney boom happened in the 90’s, I partook. I enjoyed. But for some reason, Ariel just started to grate on my nerves. I think she’s a horrible role model. I’ve always liked Belle from Beauty and the Beast better. She reads and thinks for herself. She falls in love with the Beast despite his appearance and does it once she knows him. She was willing to make a sacrifice for someone else. A much better role model, yet still flawed of course.

Generally speaking, I think Disney movies have some real problems. Of late, the general problem is that they look really bad and the sequel thing, please Disney animators, have an original thought. The only thing Disney had going for it in regard to its animated movies was associating itself with Pixar and that appears to be over. I think Disney’s heyday is over.

So there you have it. I don’t like the little mermaid. She bugs me. The only reason I care if she has her happy ending is so it will shut her up. Feel free to disagree. But know this, I have strongly disliked her for about 10 years. I probably won’t change my mind now. Because in addition to not caring for whiny selfish cartoon characters, I’m also pretty stubborn.

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.

On Being

The beautifully eloquent Sass, in a moment that could echo some of my own, said it. “I have split seconds that mean more than my whole days.” Tonight, while I was headed to my yoga class in relative silence, I had a split second that meant more than my day, more than my week. It was a brief moment of realization. One that Mr. S, the omni-present English teacher, might be proud of. Though I don’t know that Mr. S got proud. So, maybe it’d just be enough for a momentary lapse of coffee-cup flinging.

Way back in Mr. S’s infamous (well to the more recent alumnus of SHS, infamous) junior year English class, we read this short story called “The Metamorphosis” by Franz Kafka, where this guy turns into a bug. Well, the point Mr. S. wanted us to get from that story, and a few others was the idea of being versus becoming. Gregor just was a bug; her never tried to become anything else. Being is simply that, existing as you are, never trying to be more. Becoming is striving and achieving to be more, to be the most you can be, to reach your full potential.

Lately I have filled this blog with thoughts on trying to get things in my life aligned, and how I have been struggling to do so. I’ve felt lost when in comes to companionship and love, faith, my future. I’ve felt like I’ve been running into a wall, something was keeping me back. I was getting frustrated that things weren’t changing. Then, tonight as I turned a corner it was like the proverbial light bulb came on. Things aren’t changing because I am not trying to get them to change. I’ve simply been “being” and not becoming. Without trying to become more, I simply stay.

I can’t put all the responsibility for finding my way on the Universe or God or whatever you want to call it. It’s not like I get to sit back while it does the navigating and driving and all the work. I have to put in some effort too; it’s a two-person job and I have been slacking on my end, wanting someone else to it all for me. And that isn’t me. I’m independent; I am self-sufficient. Why have I not been taking care of me in this way? Why have I just simply been being?

I don’t have answers to why, other than it was easy and less scary. Really, why isn’t important. Because the thing is, no one likes things that are stagnant. Eventually it’s time to move. For me, it’s time to become. Wish me luck.

Bread and Roses

Memories just kind of rest somewhere in our minds and then somehow, some day they surface. It’s almost like you forgot about it, but really you just haven’t thought about it. Where it has been exactly is a mystery. The human mind fascinates me.

Today I took a day off work for the purpose of devoting some time to my writing. I have an essay due for class. I submitted a query, wrote a piece that now needs editing, worked on another new piece, did some research, and enjoyed the peace and quiet of home. I also went to the gym and when I came back began doing laundry. Suddenly I was reminded of my college years. Coming back from class, throwing laundry into a machine and letting it swish around the machine while I did some work, similar to my day.

Did I miss that life? To some extent. And memories of college (the good one, not the bad one) started to come. Bryn Mawr, as I have said before, is like a giant sorority. The school hymn is in Greek, as is a special cheer we have. The school is steeped in traditions that I can’t explain, partly because it’s hard to explain to people who don’t experience it (sort of like blogging) and partly because I literally can’t.

Our traditions involve singing a lot. It’s something I sure was started in the 1800’s and continued through the years. It’s still done. Among our many songs was “Bread and Roses” written at the turn of the century during textile worker strikes. I never gave the song too much thought until today. So I looked it up, just to remember the words.

“Hearts starve as well as bodies. Give us bread, but give us roses.” A reminder that for all the logical things we need and strive for, we also need beauty. For all the practical things we work towards—shelter, food, clothes—we also need to provide for our souls—beauty, truth, love. Could it be that I was supposed to remember this today, for some reason? Whether it was by chance or something greater, I will take it with me and remember to feed all the aspects of my life to truly make it full.