five things you don't know about me

Per a tag from Erin, who I just learned is a competitive, boy-hating hypochondriac who sucks at phys chem, though she always seemed to me like a super nice smarty pants who adored her family and ran marathons.

1) When I was five, I thought it would be really fun to be deaf, like Linda on Sesame Street, or blind, like Mary in the Little House books. My eyesight is getting worse each year, so I’m carefully watching what I wished for.

2) The point at which I most genuinely believed my life was over was when I was 14 and did not make drill team, and my two best friends did. Seriously, this trumped my mom’s death and my breakup with B—not in terms of sadness, but in terms of sheer despair.

3) An embarrassing corollary to the above confession: I wrote my college essay on how my life—when I decided to take jazz dance classes since I couldn’t be on drill team—paralleled the Langston Hughes poem “A Dream Deferred.” Hi, my name is Cheryl and I’m a white girl.

4) In a class on contemporary plays in college, I raised my hand so much that once, the teacher asked a question and looked around the room and said, “Someone other than Cheryl?” I’m not sure what got into me that quarter.

5) I secretly fear that I am Louis in Angels in America, whose guilt-ridden intellectual blathering is a thin mask for his actions, or lack thereof—he’ll practically flagellate himself for dating a Republican, but he leaves his partner to die alone of AIDS. (Okay, AK already knew about this fear, thanks to some recent late-night DVD-watching. Thanks for convincing me I’m not him, babe.)

So apparently “five things you don’t know about me” is inherently “five embarrassing and/or scary things you don’t know about me.” Well, I’m glad that’s over with. I tag—let’s see—Sara and Noel.