He Jests at Scars That Never Felt a Wound

I have a lot of scars.

I have one on my left arm from spying on boys with Apee on a dirt road. I flipped my bike and went skin scraping across the gravel, leg firmly secured in my bike chain.

I have one on my right hand from lighting fireworks and accidently throwing the lighter instead of the burning ball of physical pain, which I held safely in my small hand until it exploded.

I have one on my right arm from getting an alien spawn removed from just under my skin.

I have one on my forehead from tripping on a blanket, falling down a flight of stairs and bouncing like a ball the size of a small child directly into a table.

I have one on the back of my head from being born (yeah, I’m so awesome that I got a scar before I had fully made my entrance into the world).

The list goes on, but I think you get my point: I have a lot of scars.

Since making my initial scar-covered debut into this world, I have noticed that we all have scars. We may only have a few and they may not be as noticeable as a lightning bolt across our foreheads, but they are there.

Why am I writing about this? Because I’m thinking that if I asked you about your scars (which is actually one of my favorite “get to know you” conversations, and I’ll tell you why in a minute), chances are you’d be able to tell me how you got most of them.

I say “most” here because sometimes a scar happens before we have developed a conscious memory and therefore we would not know how we got that scar unless our parents told us about it (like the one on the back of my head). There is also the occasional drunk and disorderly scar that occurs while our conscious memory is smash-hammered drunk and blacked out while our bodies are still roaming around making asses of ourselves. We cannot be held responsible for the explanation of either of these scars.

However, the cool part about scars (and why I like to have conversations about them) is that they are physical proof of incidents in our lives. I hate to quote Papa Roach here (I really do), but our scars remind us that the past is real; just by looking at them we can relive that experience and even describe many of the details.

Ok, I am sorry. I definitely didn’t mean to get all deep on this blog, and I promise it’s leading to a funny story, but it is kind of interesting, right? Right?

[insert the sound of crickets here]

Ok, ok, moving on.

I also have a scar on my right ear, and here’s how I got it.

I was at cheerleading practice with Mrs. Kelley discussing the hotness of our athletic trainer. We were contemplating ways to ditch practice and go visit him in his office and just stare at him for a while (or, um, whatever).

One of the other cheerleaders had gone in to see him before with a pulled groin or something equally close to her “downstairs” and was bragging about how he applied the topical pain reliever, like Icy Hot, on her to fix it. We were all super jealous, until all of a sudden she started screaming like a cheerleader would if caught on fire, because what she forgot to mention was that the athletic trainer uses super mega ultra Icy Hot because he works with giant football players with brutal footballish injuries, not little old ladies with back pain.

So we were contemplating other methods which would not require intense pain, but would still result in a visit to the hot trainer.

Practice commenced and we were forced to practice a semi-dangerous dismount from a stunt, which we referred to as the Twist Cradle, against the will of our entire stunt group.

So, to lay it out for you, in case you don’t know, there are three of us girls holding up another girl above our heads with our arms fully extended. From there, we toss her further into the air, after which she would normally arch her body and then land all prettily in our open arms (cradle). Instead, we were supposed to toss her into the air, after which she would twist herself around in the air and then land chaotically in our open arms (twist cradle).

Here’s what happens when you force people to do this stunt when they are not comfortable doing it: all hell breaks loose and someone is getting kicked in the face, or dropped, or both. Cheerleading is a dangerous world, my friends. It is! It's actually statistically the most dangerous sport, at least for women. Anyway, so I bet you already guessed what happened next. I got kicked in the face. Now, many girls would bitch and moan and whatever whatever, but my stunt group was tough and we just went on for more forced practicing.

Until I reached up to pull my flyaway hairs away from my face and my hand came back covered in blood. I reached back up and felt that my ear was attempting to go all Van Gogh on me and detach itself from my head.

Mrs. Kelley took an up close look at the damage and diagnosed it as follows:

“Eew, it looks like a bloody vagina!”

Do you have any funny scar stories?