But I'm a Cheerleader

Yesterday's post about my friends from ESL got me thinking about other friends of mine from the ESL class. In particular, it reminded me of Shari and Pari. They were sisters from Iran. Shari was a year older than I was, and Pari was a few years younger. Pari was in junior high when I was in high school, and she seemed so little and cute! A curly-haired little moptop. Her sister Shari was beautiful. Long black hair and eyelashes to match. Shari and I decided one year to try out for the varsity badminton team. Not being the athletic type, I nonetheless thought myself good enough at badminton to make the team. My family had a dime-store badminton set, and every summer we'd set up the badminton net in our backyard. So I'd played the game before. Besides, I reasoned, how hard could it be to make the badminton team? It wasn't one of the "cool" sports, like track, or field hockey, or tennis, right? Who else would be interested?

On the morning of the tryouts, I got up at 5:00 am. My mom and I drove to Shari's house to pick her up so that we could get to school at 6:00 am for the tryouts. Yes, we would make the badminton team, we thought. Until we got there. To our surprise, all of the other girls at tryouts were cheerleaders. Needless to say, neither Shari nor I made the team. We were like two misfits who should have known better than to attempt a foray into the world of the popular, athletic, prom-queen types. The badminton team turned out to be, in effect, the cheerleading squad during the off-season. In the fall, they were cheerleaders. In the spring, they were the badminton team.

After being rejected from the badminton team, I ended up joining the varsity archery team instead (yes, there was such a thing). It didn't have a cute little uniform like the badminton team did, but I enjoyed it. And I didn't have to try out for it. Unlike the badminton team, the archery team was accepting of everybody. Why can't society as a whole be like that? I was no Geena Davis, but I had fun. There was no sense of cut-throat competition like you find with other sports. Sure, each team wanted to win. But each target had members of both teams on it during the game. And there was no hostility between them. In fact, it was very sociable. And being a member of a varsity team meant that I received a varsity letter. Yes, someday my as-yet-unborn future children will think their mother was a high school jock!

My Life is in My Hands

I saw an episode of Seinfeld tonight where George Costanza, who was in between jobs and deciding what to do for a living, said the above pearls of wisdom.

When I was in high school, I made friends with the ESL students, (English as a Second Language). They were students whose families came to America from foreign countries. They had to take the ESL class, in addition to their regular classes, to improve their English. There were a few kids from Japan, Korea, and Hong Kong, and maybe one from Europe. But the largest number of ESL students were those who came to America to escape the turbulence in their home countries. There were several Iranian students whose families had fled Iran because of the revolution a few years previously. When asked where they were from, they would say "France," because that's where they had originally settled after leaving Iran (as many Iranians did after the revolution). They were afraid of being perceived as "the enemy" once they came to America. There were also many students from El Salvador because of that country's civil war of the early 1980s. I used to hang out in the ESL classroom during my studyhall periods, helping the students with their reading, and becoming their friend. I learned as much about their cultures as they learned about mine, plus I got to know them for the people they were, not the way perhaps most people in my school saw them: the kids who couldn't speak the language - you never noticed them, and you didn't even know their names.

One of my friends from ESL was from Hong Kong. Her name was Vivian. Although still in high school, she was already a pro at the ancient art of reading palms. One day in the ESL classroom, she read mine. Her predictions for me, based on the lines in my palm, were as follows:

1. I'll have a lot of trouble with my job.
2. I'll get married.
3. I'll have three kids.
4. I'll be rich.
5. I'll live to be very old.



Twenty-three years later, the only prediction that has come true so far is number one. But boy, was Vivian right on the money with that one! At the time, I took her prediction literally, thinking that, my first job out of college, I'd hate my boss or something, but that I'd get another job and everything would be swell. No such luck. Looking back at my work history, I've had a series of jobs that I either wasn't happy at, didn't do well at, wasn't satisfied with, or was simply frustrated by a lack of progress in. And at the moment I am without a job at all. But that's okay. Like George Costanza, I, too, am in a transition phase. And I hold out hope that, because Vivian was so accurate about my employment situation, her other predictions will come true too. Is there still a chance of me getting married and having kids? That sure would make my mom happy. Will I be rich? That'd be awesome. And will I live a long life? I hope so. That means I still have plenty of time to find my niche in this world.