Go Team!

So the Boys and Girls Club has an event called Sports Hero Day. College athletes come and play games with kids: there's a station for every sport, I think you collect tickets as you go, there's free food, good times for all.
The summer I worked for the club there was a slight change of plans: the cheerleaders, who had their own station, approached the organizers and asked if, instead of teaching kids how to cheer, they might split up and cheer on the other athletes. How could they refuse? So there was a roving herd (collective for cheerleaders? A pom?) of college cheerleaders jumping and dancing for everyone. It was sort of perfect.

Something you may not know about me: I was once verry girly. When someone asked me, before I started school, what I wanted to be when I grew up, I told them I wanted to be a cheerleader. The thing that recommended kindergarten above anything else was that my teacher had cheered for BYU. I'm not exaggerating.


A compliment that I keep in a mirrored box and take out when I need a chuck on the chin was paid to me by a favorite professor. He said that I'd be interesting in the classroom, that I'd be a good professor. I've been thinking about this lately in the weighing of life plans, and what this really means.

Because I'm excited by everything and nothing which makes the career of specialized research I'm staring down sort of daunting.

Because I'm much better at wasting time than I ever ever knew.

Because when people tell me I'm good at things I think I'm no good at or scary things it makes me want to change my plans. Every time.

Because I want this couple of years to be worthwhile and foundational and productive.

Because I keep having these fantastic intense dense unwieldy conversations with interesting fantastic people and I think: I'm good at this, this is what I love.

And where does that leave me? Swayed by moods and by compliments and by Facebook? Alternately, everyday, bored and exhilarated by this endeavor?


I bought a book called "Life of the Muses" which I still haven't read and which told the story of some half-dozen inspirational women, the Fanny Brauns in the lives of so many Keats. Keatses? I love this idea and love this story, right? Find me a very troubled brilliant man and I will make him less troubled and more brilliant? (Until he gets too much of either and tosses me out.)

Not brilliant.

Ok. I'll get back to work now. :)