Cheer New World

     Recently, I went out of town. While a bulk of the week was spent at a conference, during the weekend I spent some time with my family, including my step-brother and step-sister-in-law (henceforward all “steps” will be dropped). My sister-in-law coaches a co-ed, internationally successful cheerleading team, and this weekend also happened to be the same weekend as the World Cheerleading finals.

     This event. Wow. My parents and I got to the venue early to be sure to get seats, and O.M.G. My cheer knowledge and research has been limited to the original Bring It On movie. Not even the sequels, sadly, but only the original. I can say that this portrayal is super accurate. As my mother and I waited for my step-dad to ask directions to the right cheertorium, we were swept up in a tide of fabulocity that cannot be ignored or avoided.

Leaning into my mom’s ear, I said, “Mom, don’t ever worry about going to a gay bar, this is all you would ever need.”

Important Elements of a Gay Bar: Cheer Edition:

1.       Built, hot, homosexuals. These were errrrywhere. You couldn’t turn your head without seeing a guy who looks like he walked out of GQ or…Hot Man Monthly (Is that a thing?). Surprisingly, a lot of these guys are straight, but they also are shameless and wander around shirtless, so you might as well be at a shower party.

2.       Drag. Whilst drag is not about men dressing as women, there are a lot of teenage and early-twenties females wearing enough make-up to supply Iran for a good decade. The Simpsons has an excellent illustration:

3.       Drag II: The Cheer Moms. Cheer moms are all did. Up. While most of my sporting experience has been limited to rowing in college and small-town basketball and track, the moms of cheer are a different beast. While my mother would wear a sweatshirt, glasses, and mom jeans to a track meet, these moms looked like they were going to dinner with P.Diddy (Diddy? P? Swag? …I’m so behind the times.) and then the club. Don’t get me wrong, these women are beautiful, but when juxtaposed to the 60% of cheer mom and dads who look they were up at 6 a.m. to see their kids cheer and ARE wearing mom and dad-jeans and sweatshirts, they might as well be wearing 3-foot high hair and fake breasts.

4.       Club music. In five minutes in the main cheer-stage, they played “Call Me, Maybe,” Adam Lambert, and Gloria Estefan.

5.       Twerqing. Everyone twerqing. All. The. Time. Boys, girls, my five-year-old niece. Twerq. Twerq. Twerq.

   Cheer world is basically the best thing ever. I have a group of really close gay and straight friends that have a Facebook group and the whole time I was watching the cheer menagerie saunter by, I wished they were there. We would have had so much fun.

     I also didn’t really know what to expect from the actual cheertations. We knew that my sister-in-law’s group was up at 9:11, so I assumed the show would be made up of about 10 minutes of cheering.

     No. Each group has 2 minutes and 30 seconds. This is super-duper intense. Imagine someone throwing glitter in your face, knocking you down to the ground, and then twerqing over your sprawled body. It’s kind of like that. People are jumping, spinning, being hurled in the air, twerqing (always, always, the twerq), diving, rolling, tumbling, freewheeling, etc. It’s a delightful 2:30 assault of all senses. Even the audio is erratic and switches between roughly 200 songs in 2:30. (Chicago peeps: imagine the DJ from Scarlet. Just like that, the song changes every time you blink.)

     We only saw about five groups before we were shuffled back to meet my sister-in-law’s team. Truth be told, I could have stayed and watched a few more hours. It’s really pretty cool, and I feel like I watch the same group do the same routine fifteen times and see something new with each performance.

     My sister’s team was good, but I would give the World MVP to GetIt Gurl, who came on with the second group. Imagine your very best overweight girlfriend. Then imagine her doing five flips and six cartwheels across the stage, killing her landing, then shaking her exposed gut in a brief display of triumph.

You would give her the MVP, too.

     Usually when I experience events like this I think to myself, “Man, Tedd, wouldn’t this be awesome? You could be a cheerleader!” But that was absolutely untrue in this particular instance. There are certain personalities that make great cheerleaders. They are talkative and supportive and bubbly. These are the people you are drawn to at parties and who are friends with everyone. I am not them.

      As part of my conference I actually took this personality test which stated that my two main personality types are Rebellion and Mystique. Unless the cheerleading competition involved a subdued, veiled Arabian fan dancing portion, I think I would be very ill suited for the rah-rah-shish-kum-bah of the cheer life.

     This was made even clearer at the cheer party after. The kids were aged 15-22, and they were all bubbly and bouncing around the team’s house they had rented for the event. Most of them participated in a reenactment of the entire cheerformance in the backyard for all the parents. At this point in the day, I could barely stay awake to lift the beer to my lips, and these kids were all running around with their barely-clothed, perfect bodies and still hurling each other into the air.

“Hey, Coach, who’s that creepy blonde guy drinking Miller Lite alone in the backyard?”

“That’s my brother-in-law… Don’t make direct eye contact.”

     Actually, I wasn’t that creepy. Much more awkward than creepy. I occupied an age group between the late teens of the cheerleaders and the mid-thirties of my brother, sister, and co, so I just sort of sat there and listened to people talk and drank a few Miller Lites.*

*See… Not a cheerleader type.

     Two things of major importance happened at the cheer party. The first was that I met the team’s Big Red. Yes, just as Bring It On spoke, it is so. All teams have a Big Red. During the course of the party, however, I wasn’t able to ascertain whether this girl was nicknamed Big Red because her hair was a beautiful, dark red; or, whether she had been sedated, forcibly had her hair dyed, and then been branded with the title of “Big Red” in order to keep the scriptures of Bring It On. Because it is cheer world, both possibilities are very likely.

     The second important thing is that there were two or three gay boys on the cheer squad. One of them was this adorable high school kid who is super attractive and has an A+ body. I was in the yard for thirty seconds before he had his shirt off and was standing within a foot of me talking to someone close to me; as far as I could tell there was no reason for him to be in my vicinity. Inside my head I was absolutely dying with laughter. He sensed another gay and had to come over and be like, “Yup. I’m hot. Check it out.” I was wondering whether I should remove my shirt and we could cluck around in a circle and show our plumage to each other.

     Later that night my sister-in-law said to me, “Felix, right? You wish he was in his twenties.” And I had to say, “No,” because in some third-world countries I could have been his father.

     But what was awesome about Felix is the fact that he was sixteen and out. That in his world he can take off his shirt parade around his back yard and talk to another gay guy. He can talk to his friends about his boyfriend, about hot guys, and his Would You Rather Game could consist of Ryan Gosling and Ryan Reynolds. At a later point in the night when he put on his skintight swim trunks, his proud poppa laughed and said, “Classic Felix. He’s working at a pool this summer; it’s the perfect job for him.” And in Felix’s world, this is all normal and great.

On my drive home I couldn’t help but be sad myself thinking about the decade I spent in the closet. In my world even if you had the looks of Felix, you would have had to have been dating a girl, you couldn’t kiss your boyfriend before practice, and wearing tight swimtrunks would have raised eyebrows up to heaven.

     But times they are a-changing, and Felix has a magnificent running start into the rest of his life. In truth, he and GetIt Gurl are far out in front of me. They are twerqing and clucking far into the horizon. I suppose the cheer road isn’t for all of us, though. We veiled fan dancers have to make our own, more circuitous way.  In a lot of ways this is much appreciated; I like DJs to finish their entire songs, and I can’t do a cartwheel to save my life. But I have to say I’m epically grateful to be a part of the LGBT(PZTLYSX?...I’m so behind the times…) community that is seeing the changes wrought by generations of gay men and women who were at the front lines of battle for rights and recognition. We should all be grateful to them for all their work. When Felix saunters around in his short-shorts, it is aesthetically pleasing, but its beauty runs much deeper than that. Because of what others did, he can be who he is. And that, I suppose, is one thing I would be happy to cheer about.

The Bizniss

Dental Care! …. Lisa Needs Braces!

I'm not one of those people who hate dentists. I actually, nerdy as it is, enjoy knowing that my teeth are the cleanest they can get. I may also get some joy out of people telling me how nice my teeth are.

“You're teeth are beautiful!”

“Teehee, right?”

My last dentist, though, was the worst. I normally wouldn't name a company, but this place was so awful that I feel it is an obligation to warn anyone living in Chicago to never, ever, ever get back together with Wrigleyville Dental. They will take all your money and break your teeth.

The first time I went in they told me that my whole mouth was on the verge of being sucked into a black hole of a cavity that would tear a hole in the space-time continuum and cause a zombie apocalypse. Needless to say I freaked out, and three meetings later and 1200 dollars lighter, I had a crown.

I didn't really think anything of this until I went back in for a cleaning. I mean... Cleanings aren't supposed to be that much, especially if you have insurance. So I went in and the lady proceeded to take roughly 3700 X-rays.

“Okay, move this here” ~X-ray~ “And here” ~X-ray~ “And here” ~X-ray~ “And here and here and here and here” ~Sound of Tedd getting cancer~

After soaking up enough radiation to turn into the Incredible Hulk, the dentist came in. He looked at the new wall mural of X-rays and deduced that I need two fillings and, for good measure, they should tear out an old filling... Because?... So, I think to myself, “Well, fillings with insurance are like...what?...$75 bucks?”

I get up to the front and the receptionist is smiling. “Let's get you scheduled for your fillings.” She smiled brightly and pulled out an invoice. “These are the estimates!”

My eyebrows almost busted through the roof. 1200 dollars... For three fillings. “And with insurance... The lady said, you'll save about $500.”

I could barely see straight. “$700?!” I asked. The lady nodded. At this point I still believed that she had some parts of her that were still human, so I said, “Well, let's schedule the two I need and then do the refill later.”

It's hard to believe, but it was like all of a sudden the lights dimmed and the walls started bleeding. The sweet lady in front of me transformed into a vampire-like creature. “ALL OF THESE ARE NECESSARY! YOU SHOULD SCHEDULE THEM AAAAALLLLLL!!!”

Suddenly the lights flickered back on and the tiny Asian woman was back to her normal form.

Needless to say I never went back there. The vampire still calls though... Wanting her toothy tribute.

Today, though, I went to a new dentist.

The head doctor could easily be a bond villain. She's got a thick accent and could probably bench press a mid-sized sedan. After the hygienist had taken 16 X-Rays – I counted...it was literally 16 – she came in and sat down.

“Hello, my darling. How are you?”

“Good.”

“Good, great, good.”

She then proceeded to recklessly and mercilessly clean my teeth. 10 minutes. That was the length of the cleaning. Then she picked up my X-rays and said, “Let's keep an eye on this one, my pet. Be careful brushing. Take your time.”

She then wheeled out of the room and disappeared.

The total cost of this visit was $0. Somewhere, five miles south in Wrigley, I heard the bray of a vampire mourning the loss of a regular cleaning that they would have gotten $200 for.

Bizniss

My new job has me working graduate admissions at a business school. I mean, you hear a lot of jokes about how corporate people discuss things, but you really can't even imagine it until you see it in action.

One afternoon my boss and I went to a meeting. My boss asked one of the people in the meeting, “So, did you figure out the online chat stuff?”

Her response: “Well, I'm meeting with Dr. Jones this week, and Wednesday Julie and I are meeting to discuss the content for the slides. Then we'll connect with Jack to see about whether we should include the additional content about registration. Sometime next week we'll sit down with Dr. Johnson to figure out his participation, then we can set up a meeting for Tuesday to discuss the full proposal.”

In my head I couldn't help but count the number of “reach outs,” “meetings,” and “discussions” this whole process was taking. Couldn't it be covered in an email? I mean, I know it's not cool, but can you pick up a telephone? Or Facetime on an iPad? Is that cooler? I mean, I don't know, I don't use my work iPad for anything other than reading free books on. I hear it does other stuff.

The online chat for new students was slowly, and through about 47 meetings, finally set up. We finally set up a practice meeting to run through the slides. My coworker in admissions and I kept messaging each other, because, inevitably, what was supposed to be a practice chat evolved into... what else? A meeting.

We totes got businessed – I typed in the messenger.

At two points I guffawed sitting at home on my computer. One was when, for the third time, the discussion of who would click the slides to move along the presentation came up.

“I mean, I just really thing we should discuss who should move the slides.”

Five minutes later: “Can we get back to talking about who is going to click the slides.”

Then finally, someone who hadn't said anything during the whole web conference, put on the mic and is like, “I'm sorry, I think we should discuss the slides and who will move them.”

Giant laugh 1.

The second was when one of the people at the business school put on the webcam to test it out. In theory, it seems like a good idea to have the face-to-face interaction. It makes Tedd laugh so hard he starts crying, though, when you see that the person in question is awkwardly sitting in their bedroom talking about a business program. What would people think?

“We are a reputable program, oh, and that is my wife sleeping to the left of your screen.”

Oh, work! You're just... Just...

I'm Bad at Therapy

This next story is short, but it made feel really terrible about myself.

I started seeing a counselor about two months ago. <= Girl's got some issues.

Anyway, the other day, we got to the end of a session and my counselor looked at the clock. “Oh wow,” he said, “that actually went fast this time.”

I couldn't help but think that if I were really neurotic, this would have destroyed some or all of self-confidence. The subtext is obviously, “Gawd, your sessions are so drawn out. Why can't you be crazier and more interesting?”

Whatever. We can set up a meeting to discuss it later, then reach out to discuss it with Tiffany and Jerry on Tuesday. As long as we know who's moving the slides everything else will work out.

Derivatives of Douche Used Frequently in This Post

Gym Misanthrope

I’m not one of those people who likes other human beings. Nowhere is this exacerbated worse than the gym.  Usually, I go about 6 in the morning to avoid the big rushes, but this time of day tends to also bring out the weirdos, who do odd enough things, that make them want to go to the gym when no one else is there, i.e. misanthropic people who don’t like other people who go to the gym early to avoid other weird people in the gym.

In the morning the cast of characters include:

Pirouette Lesbian:

There is really no need to clarify that she is a lesbian because EVERYONE that goes to my gym is gay. Everyone. Even the mice that roam the halls at night like mice of their same gender.

PL is one of those variety of gym creatures who somehow manages to be everywhere at once. This includes her “lunge” activities that involve the following gym items.

1. Dumbbells – uses 1 set, but does not take a step back from the rack, so, by default, she makes it impossible to use 30% of all dumbbells.
2. 2 flat benches; because what good is stepping up on one when you can step up on one, spin, and jump over to the other?
3. The necessary other flat bench, not in use, but totally invaluable in its ability to set the 8 x 4 inch towel on that she will not need until she gets done jumping between two flat benches six inches away from the entire dumbbell rack.

When this woman goes up to the dumbbell rack there is a collective sigh because everyone KNOWS that, essentially, 1/3 of the entire gym will come to a screeching halt.

To be fair, however, there might have been a complaint, because, in my own observation, the most egregious pirouetting has been abandoned. This may have been because of the complaint, or, because jumping between flat benches whilst spinning and twirling dumbbells probably caused her painful, prolonged back injuries.

Sunglassed GUY!!!:

Why talk like a normal human being when you can shout while wearing Oakleys? This is the question that a man at my gym asked himself one morning and evidently found the answer to be, “I should stop talking like a normal human being! It’s so dull!”

This man shows up in the afternoons with his personal trainer and grunts and groans loud enough for all to hear. This is annoying enough in and of itself, but tack on his need to bellow things like, “HOW WAS YOUR WEEKEND?” and “I LOVE WATCHING THE NEWS.” And he basically becomes one of the most obnoxious people on the planet. The icing on the douche-cake, so to speak, is his pair of Oakleys that NEVER COME OFF. I have seen this man on the train, on his commute, and he is still wearing his Oakley sunglasses that he wears in the gym. He wears these in the dark, in the day, in the gym, on the train. He likes these sunglasses, Sam I Am. He likes them likes them – and should shut the f$&k up when he’s in the gym.

Gropy Asian:

The Gropy Asian is repulsive. I have seen him in the gym a few times. He is a general gym type, not specific to my gym. While I’m honored to have the eccentric PL and OAKLEY GUY, Gropy Asian is a dime a dozen dbag available at most (gay and straight) gyms on the planet.

He has dragon tattoos up and down his chest, all clearly visible, because over his obscene muscles he wears a scrap of cloth loosely able to be called a tank top. He lifts lots of weight and is one of those roll-your-eyes-Tom-Cruise-objectively-hot-kind-of-guys.

One day he was taking up two machines in the gym. Normally I wouldn’t just jump on one when I see this happening, but he felt the need to lift at one machine, lift at the other, then walk to the closest mirror and grope his muscles and flex for himself. I was waiting for him to get off his machine and saw this display and decided that I didn’t have time for this.

I walked over to one of his machines, changed the weight, and started to go to town. I got the bar about halfway down, when he comes stomping over.

“Hey,” he said, trying not to sound gay. “I’m using that.”

“Oh,” I said. “Well, I’m going to work in one. K thanks.”

And proceeded to finish. I knew I could take him in a fight in there – he’d be too busy checking himself out to throw a clean punch.

How to Fail in Business Without Really Trying

I’m still kind of new to my job, which means there are large chunks of time when I do things that I don’t really know what I’m doing. The most recent event was at a meeting last week. It was for marketing staff and the web designers, but my boss thought it would be good to sit in so I can find out more about the marketing in my specific school.

We were all introduced and sat down. In a weird turn of events, I was positioned at the end of the table with the marketing team, separated from my boss and the other people I knew in my department.

Throughout the meeting the marketing staff made occasional comments like, “Yeah, we should ask Ed to fix it.” “That tab should say, call Ed!” And generally comments that my boss said, like, “Ed is going to take a look at this later.” Led to heads being turned in my direction and nods.

During all of this commentary, I kept a blank stare on my face and reacted to nothing. No smile, no shrugs, no nods, no nothing. At one point when the one marketing guy said, “That tab should say, call Ed!” I felt uncomfortable when people turned to me and immediately turned my head to look at the projected video screen.

At the end of the meeting one of the marketing guys shook my hand and said, “Your last name is Bott?” “No,” I said. “It’s Hawks.” “Yeah,” he said, “ebott is your sign on name. It’s funny because there use to be another ebott.”

This led to my most confused expression of the day and this, wonderfully snappy business comeback: “Uhhhhhhhh…”

“See ya, Ed!”

It was at that moment that I realized that during the entire meeting, the marketing staff had thought I was Ed Bott the technical writer for our department. Now they still think that I am Ed Bott, and also a terrible douchebag. Thinking back to the meeting, I couldn’t help but think of all the jokes they made about Ed that turned into me staring at them blankly. This juxtaposed to when my boss told some jokes and I laughed heartily, probably made me look like the biggest suck-up, bitch-douche in the whole department.

When Ed comes into the office next week, I kind of feel obligated to tell him that

1. Everyone thinks he is terrible person.
2. Everyone also thinks he is too dumb to know his own name.

You’re welcome, Ed Bott – please don’t return the favor.

There is a god (and he is made of glitter and rides a unicorn)

Facebook is great for many reasons; the most important being updates like Ke$ha is playing at the Illinois State Fair. Yes, single blog reader and Mr. Fluffer, she is coming to the middle of Illinois, to the State Fair, where all other headliners are country singers. Why? There is no reason. There is none other than that this event was specifically planned for my friends and I to attend.

For a long time I have been planning to take a bunch of my friends to my hometown. It’s just kind of fun because I can show them my high school, which is legit in the middle of a cornfield, show them the Lincoln home, and take them to White Oaks Mall. For some reason this idea/dream has always been linked to me renting a 15-passenger van and driving down. It’s like a church field trip only… Well, we’re renting a van.

The last time I saw Ke$ha live – well, let me tell you everything I remember:

Anyway, it seemed like a great time to get together a bunch of friends, go to Springfield and rent a 15-passenger van.

Essentially, this in real life.

  

If I’ve never cornered you at a party and told you why I think Ke$ha is great, then you’re very lucky. The explanation shall remain unblogged until such a time when I can find you at a party and fill you in – or you can just follow the van to Springfield.