Crying in Public: Remember the Cheerleaders

So this one time I fell in love with an ex-cheerleader. She was a tall and lanky woman from Wisconsin and had an accent vaguely reminiscent of a goose. She camped out overnight once to get a new N'Sync album the day it released. She told dirty jokes and always had a self-deprecating line at the ready. I didn't think I would have anything to say to her when we met. The first memory I have of her is standing up in front of a group of scrubbed down Peace Corps volunteers in an incongruously posh hotel conference room in downtown Philadelphia and confessing to thirty strangers that she had cried leaving her parents that morning.

When I was twenty-five I spent a year in China teaching English with the Peace Corps before being evacuated during the SARS epidemic. I chose to re-enroll and was sent to Madagascar, which is where I met T. Going back into Peace Corps was a hard thing to do. Choosing to re-enroll was easy. After a dizzy year in China, living like a celebrity on an inflated government stipend while working 14 hours a week was one of the most surreal experiences I've ever had. I wasn't ready for that experience to end so I eagerly dove back into the nostalgic dream of living in a hut somewhere tropical and digging latrines for the world's incapable poor.

The idea was nice, but the reality of being back in Peace Corps in a totally new country and with a completely different group of people was overwhelming. It felt like re-enrolling in high school. Staying in country during my first year in Madagascar, abandoned in some dusty waypoint in the middle of the arid south was one of the hardest things I've ever done. It was the worst kind of d

Comments ( 11 )

Again, another satisfying read...

In the end how she wound up with the square jawed army guy is so typical... That's the way of the world my friend..

I refer you back to my hypothesis in my post 'The Brass Ring'

1) Interesting women want bland guys.

2) Interesting men want interesting women.

3) Bland women want interesting guys.

4) Bland guys want interesting women.

...and 5) those poor bland gals, well nobody wants em'.

zeitgeisty commented on Sep 18 08 at 11:13 am

I guess it's true. We're all caged away in these preconceived types that we think we need. One of the best things about pc is that you can't self-select. You have a pool of 20-30 people from which to choose your friends and lovers. It was a great reminder of how arbitrary all of those types and identities we create for ourselves are. We're really all just minor variations on the same thing. We all want the same things in the end. It's just a matter of being brave enough to share that with another person. A faith more insupportable than air...

amboabe commented on Sep 18 08 at 3:37 pm

You started balling on the plane?

Heh heh.

It's "bawling." The way you spelled it, it means what you wanted to be doing with the cheerleader.

:)

Anonymous commented on Sep 18 08 at 6:18 pm

A few stories about how much masturbating I used to do on planes as a kid almost made it in here.

Sorry for the type-o, late night heart-baring isn't always the most lucid activities :)

amboabe commented on Sep 18 08 at 8:51 pm

Wow... cheerleaders in the Peace Corps! That's the modern equivalent of the hooker with the heart of gold in old westerns.

recycledbrooklyn commented on Sep 18 08 at 10:23 pm

Keep it up look forward to your blog everyday, it's a bright spot!

zeitgeisty commented on Sep 18 08 at 10:43 pm

Until Clint Eastwood films.

xcalibur86 commented on Sep 18 08 at 10:51 pm

This story is like every story that an emotional unavailable jerk rattles off to make my heart melt. Then when he does the inevitable and keeps me an arms length I can be like "well, at least I know somebody broke his heart before he broke mine" Guys never learn empathy from heartbreak.

aghmprettyok commented on Sep 19 08 at 12:55 pm

aghmprettyok: what's the point of empathy in dating? the act is already cloudy in so much formality and empty politeness just to make sure the other party is least offended. i don't see how including empathy in the mix speeds along the process in any productive way. we break our own hearts in the end, no?

amboabe commented on Sep 19 08 at 10:24 am

I guess. Maybe I just see a lack of empathy all around. Everything is always geared toward selfishness and I get this feeling that nobody truly cares about others but just "what can I GET out of this person" I guess that part of dating and human behavior just strikes me as tragic.

But you are right, I suppose we all do break our own hearts in the end.

aghmprettyok commented on Sep 20 08 at 6:00 pm

Well, that's a part of it, but when you find someone you genuinely care about, it flips around. At least with me. I start thinking about what I can give to the person, and when that process is reciprocal its love. Dating is just testing the waters to see how much you're comfortable sharing of yourself with a certain person. If it's not that much its a good indicator there's no big reason to move forward unless you're happy just sleeping with someone you know you have no future interest in.

amboabe commented on Sep 20 08 at 7:57 pm

Crying in Public: Remember the Cheerleaders

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