Just wanted to tell u that I totally made the cheerleading team!

I am SO excited!!!! Srsly, words can’t express what this means to me but am gonna try here anyhow. This is my NEW diary on the blogginz for 2010. Not gonna write every day like I did last December but will try to update you at least weekly on practices and stuff like that. The truth is, I’ve really missed this, you and me.

Chris and I were driving upstate today and he was like, This cheerleading thing really came out of the BLUE. He was kinda like, WTF. Ed my trainer said the same thing, What made you want to do that all of a sudden? I know it seems random but, really, I saw some members of the cheerleading crew CHEER NEW YORK practicing out on the pier last fall as CJ and I were running by and it felt like love at first sight.

Raced home and looked at their site and learned that not only are they a rad adult cheerleading crew but they do so to raise money for a variety of charities. You can hire them to perform at events, parties, whatever and all the money they make from their fee is donated to charity. So I hired them to give Sliimy a nice warm welcome when he performed at the store last fall.

They came to our warehouse at like 6am and right away I was so dazzled, had crushes on all of them. And then they started warming up, practicing jumps and stuff, like they’d all jump in the air and touch their toes in unison, and it totally made me cry. It was like the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. There were cheerleaders rocking out in our warehouse! This is my job.

I just was so moved by them. (Can anybody come up with another term other than “moved”? And also “profound”. I hate that one. You say either of those words and they sound so lame when what you’re saying is like, deep.) And then they were so amazing at the Sliimy event, cheering, NYC NYC LET’S STAY CUTE!!! Or like when they’d cheer Sliimy on? WE ARE PROUD OF U, WE ARE PROUD OF U!!! It just was pure joy for me.

And I thought, I want to do that. I want to make people happy like that. I want to cheer. I knew that they sometimes take less experienced folk on their squad but I’d missed the August try-outs. So I waited until this January. I always intended to tryout and just not ever tell anybody, in case I didn’t make it, but in the end I had so many practices and I was stretching and jumping every single day at the gym that I couldn’t really keep it a secret.

So all this to say that, yeah, maybe it looks out of the blue but it’s not at all. Not like I have to explain it anyhow. Just trying to get you up to speed I guess, if you’re new.

I understand why Chris said that, though. Even though I had been thinking about these tryouts, I did kinda out of the blue become OBSESSED with cheerleading. That IS true. It like took possession of ALL my thoughts. We had a few practices before the actual tryouts and I’d go home after it and couldn’t sleep. I’d worry. It would just buzz me insane. My therapist was like, What else is going on besides cheerleading?

It was weird. Not really healthy and I promise promise promise myself – putting it here in writing – that I’m not gonna let myself worry again like that. Next time I feel myself getting all obsessive worried I’m just going to the gym. But it also felt kinda good? I guess that’s why I couldn’t stop? It totally felt like when you first start dating someone you really like and you can’t stop thinking about them, like what are they doing right now? You read their horoscope for clues. Are they thinking about you? You hope so.

It felt kinda cool to just be so excited about something, to really WANT something to happen yet be so scared of it, made me feel like I was in college almost. I was REALLY big on taking risks the one year I went to college. Had just come out and it was so scary and exciting. Got kinda addicted to it. It became like this weird game. I had a little group of girls on my floor in the dorm and one morning we all agreed that, by the end of the day, we’d all do something we were afraid of. We met that night and I remember this one girl had been extra bold and kissed a boy she liked. Just the look on her face and the excitement she had I’ll never forget. Taking risks doesn’t always work out but when it does it’s like flying.

So I went to a few practices and sometimes I’d feel good and then other times I’d be like, OMG I suck. I don’t know if I can do this. The first time we threw someone up in the air, my heart dropped. Scared the shit out of me. That’s definitely the area I need a lot of practice in. It’s called stunting. We had this clinic with a bunch of team members and people trying out and you’d see all these people FLYING all over and I’m there just practicing (and failing most of the time) the most basic lift. I looked around and thought, Why would they ever want a beginner on the team when they have all these pros?

Annie emailed me, How’s the cheerleading going? And I was so negative like, I want to quit. Rah rah retch. She emailed me back like, Just think of all the people that you are going to make happy. So I did. At our tryouts even I wasn’t thinking about doing the steps right or perfect I was honestly pretending that I was cheering Annie up on a bad day, like she had for me.

OMG, let’s talk about the tryout! It was so fun. I was nervous of course but everyone was so AMAZING nice, the team cheering us on. It just felt so supportive, really cool. We had to do a cheer, a dance and then a 60 sec “showcase”. I did a tiny bit of my 5th grade gymnastics routine and then rolled around on the floor and then hulahooped. The team’s colors are red and blue so at the end of my number I held up a red and blue Chris Uphues heart. I love those little guys.

So I got the job. Me. I’m a cheerleader now!

Real quick before I go I want to share with you one of my favorite things I’ve learned so far from cheerleading. I have SO much more to learn and I know I have many challenges ahead so I think this is going to be a rich topic we can explore together. But this one is really simple: Just smile. If you screw up or you fall, who cares. Just keep smiling. This one girl totally fell during tryouts and just kept going. Felipe the coach was like, Thank you for continuing your routine. She just smiled, That’s what we do.

Click to make a donation to CHEER NEW YORK. 

 
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