January 19, 2020 – First of all, can the year please be 20120? I really need that extra “1”. I can’t stop typing it. My brain knows it’s 2020, but I’m so used to typing the 1, I just can’t stop. Okay, now on to my story.

I’ve been driving my new car this week. Yes, 2004 is new. The gas mileage is about double what my Rover gets, although on Friday, I did drive my Rover to the junk yard hoping to get seats from the newly-admitted junk yard Rover. But no luck on the seats. As usual. They are hard to find now, especially in the tan color that mine are. I like driving the car; it’s peppy, comfortable and steers well. The problem with my car though is that the radio is where you see it in the photo: on the dining table. Oh and don’t judge the finish on my table; it’s a very old table, and I haven’t gotten around to sanding it.

I’m a radio person. The radio keeps me company. And it’s where I get inspiration for my stories. Usually. Every time I get in the car, I find myself reaching for the radio area; that’s a habit that’s been hard to kick. Although, I think it was Friday morning, the day I stopped doing that. Oh and the funny part, even when I got into the Rover on Friday afternoon, a vehicle with a perfectly good radio, I didn’t reach to turn it on. I think life in the quiet has become normal now.

I have to say, I really don’t miss the same old songs. I don’t miss being annoyed by commercials or by trying to find a song that doesn’t have a hip hop element to it; so many do now. But I really am not getting my normal input. Which leaves TV.

This week, I watched a six-part documentary on an elite cheerleading team, appropriately called Cheer. It’s on Netlix, and I highly recommend it. I know what you’re thinking go team go isn’t your cup of tea, but it’s really a story of hard work, of practice, of team-building, of finding one’s strength, of using one’s strength. The show features a handful of young college athletes, yes elite cheer is a sport, showing their beginnings, their past training, and their work on this team. And it’s based at a junior college located in a town that is 50 miles south of Dallas, with everything of that world, culturally, things that will always and forever be in me. I’ll give you an example that would make my haters cringe, but hey that’s fun. Here you go: the girls wore gigantic sparkly bows with their uniforms. Big half-pony tail hair too. The show even showed how the hair-do is done. Not that I need to know that. I felt a sense of warm and fuzziness knowing that some things never change. The show reminded me of my high school life, even saying at least half a dozen times how there is not this in the real world, that the experience is the end of road.

I often say to my brother that I peaked in high school. That was a phrase in a past commercial for something, I can’t remember what; Rob Lowe was in it. Every time I saw that commercial, I would say, me! Really loudly too. Me! Sure, in my adult life, I’ve been known to put on a sparkly headband, but not even that comes close to an entire outfit of sparkles from my high school days, the costume its own reward hours and hours of work and years and years of training, for something that … ends.

Perhaps though, perhaps music is a substitute. Perhaps playing music, no not listening to it, but playing it, comes close to that old feeling of deserving sparkles. Heck, it’s probably not just close, but all the way there, if you’re David Lee Roth. Seriously, I feel like giving him another shout out because my last story that mentioned his outfit – the sparkly jacket, the Harley Quinn pants, might have sounded too flippant. But you don’t understand. Nobody can, nobody is entitled to, nobody in their right mind should ever put on sparkles unless they have done the many, many hours in practice outfits, preceded by the years and years of training, that justify the sparkles. And he clearly did. He has a post on his Twitter saying how he’s a Marvel character, Thor to be exact. He says Thor is almost Roth, spelled backwards. Okay, sure, yes, I can see Thor, but the sparkles are special to me. And so are Harley Quinn pants. They are the best. And he deserves them. My last story was a very big compliment. So Week Two of sparkles? Yes. Honestly, I want to be good enough … at everything, to deserve, and I mean truly deserve, sparkles. So hell yes! With a giant sparkly bow, yes!

Last night, I suppose as a by-product of the week of radio silence, and perhaps even more as a by-product of my feelings after watching Cheer, I sat down to read. Reading is quiet. I spent countless hours doing that as a young girl and a teen. But I didn’t ever just sit. I sat in a stretch formation, while reading. For hours. And hours. And hours. So, for the first time in I can’t tell you when, last night, that’s what I did. The tedium of stretching, just two positions, both using the wall as a support, for two hours, split-up actually, because my dad called in the middle, stretching while reading.

When my dad called, I told him I was reading and stretching. We talked about that show, Cheer. He told me about a movie he watched where a woman played two characters and had two different horses; he emphasized the horses, how well the horses were trained in particular. He said I would like it, but he couldn’t recall the name. I told him I got accepted to a junior college here – Pierce College, told him I’m going to take equine science (horse training) and welding. He said I would enjoy that; he meant both, the horse training and the welding. He talked about how hard I worked at my stuff when I was a girl; his words, “twirling is really hard, all that acrobatics you did.”

As I sit here, nowhere like I once was, doing my stretches, having watched six hours of elite 19 year olds, I wonder if it’s possible to get into that kind of shape again. I realize it has no purpose in adult life, to be able to hit these positions, and I know there are no sparkles that will go with it. In adult life, women don’t pouf up their half pony tail and put in a sparkly bow the size of their head. But I don’t know, maybe there is a place, even in adult life for sparkles. I think sparkles might go well with guitar playing, and I’m getting more and more confident at that each and every day. It’s in fashion with rock stars, DLR. So why not make this the year I deserve sparkles! Even if I never wear actually them again.

So here’s to quiet time. And to making good use of it. Reading, stretching, practicing. All until that radio actually makes its way into the car, whenever that will be. Then, perhaps I can hang something sparkly from the rear-view mirror. If I deserve them. Only if I deserve them.