Tunesday : Girls Just Wanna Have Fun

Girls Just Wanna Have Fun

(Hazard, R) Performed by Cyndi Lauper

I come home in the morning light
My mother says when you gonna live your life right
Oh mother dear we're not the fortunate ones
And girls they want to have fun
Oh girls just want to have fun

The phone rings in the middle of the night
My father yells what you gonna do with your life
Oh daddy dear you know you're still number one
But girls they want to have fun
Oh girls just want to have

That's all they really want
Some fun
When the working day is done
Oh girls, they want to have fun
Oh girls just want to have fun

Some boys take a beautiful girl
And hide her away from the rest of the world
I want to be the one to walk in the sun
Oh girls they want to have fun
Oh girls just want to have

That's all they really want
Some fun
When the working day is done
Oh girls, they want to have fun
Oh girls just want to have fun(Girls they wanna)
(Wanna have fun)
(Girls wanna have)

They just wanna, they just wanna
(Girls, girls just wanna have fun)
They just wanna, they just wanna have fun
Girls, girls just wanna have fun

(They just wanna, they just wanna)
They just wanna, they just wanna
They just wanna, they just wanna
(Girls, girls just wanna have fun)
Girls, girls just wanna have fun

When the workin'
When the workin' day is done
Oh when the workin' day is done
Oh girls, girls just wanna have fun

They just wanna, they just wanna
They just wanna, they just wanna
Oh girls, girls just wanna have fun
(They just wanna, they just wanna)

When the workin'
(They just wanna, they just wanna)
When the workin' day is done
(Girls, girls just wanna have fun)
When the working day is done
Oh girl, girls just wanna have fun

(They just wanna, they just wanna)
Yeah, yeah, yeah

I don't know what it is about my Lethbridge years that resist episodic storytelling, but since I've now given an overview of my best friends, my boyfriends, the handful of concerts I went to, my jobs, my big brother's delinquency, my evolving personal style, and my cars, I feel like I've told just about all I can remember about high school except for the schooling part, so I guess it's time for that. 

According to our family mythology, I'm the "smart one" -- both of my brothers will still call me that, although it could easily be argued that they've each achieved more, that each of them is smarter than I am at a lot of things -- and while school work always came easy to me, I never tried hard and tended to just coast along. I always assumed that the day would come when I'd need to buckle down, but I could never urge myself to rise to the things that challenged me, and with no one taking an interest in what I was doing at school, I was always lax about homework; rarely studied for tests. This is not "smart". 

I also really like having someone to blame for my flaws, so here I'll remind the reader (someone will read this with interest someday, right?) of that time in grade nine when:

Our first exam in grade nine math was an overview of what we already knew, and I think I got a mark in the 90s, because I remember Dad was pretty proud of the results (but as I remember it, this was just basic functions). When we then began a new unit, I approached the material with my usual "no-homework-no-worries" approach, and for the first time, math was hard. So I stopped caring. On our midterm report, all my other marks were high 80s and 90s, but when my Dad saw that my math mark was in the 70s, he threw down my report with disgust and said, "Well, you'll never be a vet with that math mark. You'll never be anything." (Note: when I was little, it was suggested to me that I should be a veterinarian since I was bright and liked animals. Without any ambitions of my own, I accepted that as a likely plan.) I was so stung -- I was never the academic disappointment in the family -- and I never tried in math ever again, rarely tried in anything; if my marks were going to be lacklustre, at least I would know it wasn't because I wasn't smart enough. I honestly don't remember if my Dad ever looked at one of my report cards again.

In my defensive mind, this was the beginning of my laissez-faire attitude to school, and while I would really like to blame my parents for my academic shortcomings, it's more likely that I was just lazy. As I also wrote before, I was a couple of weeks into the semester when I moved out to Lethbridge and that messed up my course schedule a bit: I had to wait until the first semester of grade eleven to take grade ten math, then grade eleven math the next semester, then grade twelve math came up the first semester of grade twelve. Now, this high school was quite small and I ended up having the same math teacher all three semesters, and for some reason, I decided I hated him, and I don't even remember why. The math teacher my little brother got was a disconnected nerd-type who had no skills for teaching those kids who didn't have a natural gift for math, but my teacher was a normal man that I simply decided to despise. So, after deciding not to care about grade nine math, and having a one year break from the subject, and then taking an immediate dislike to my new math teacher, I didn't try and didn't succeed; yet, without doing homework or studying for the tests, I still squeaked by the first two courses. When I got to grade twelve, I was so tired of math and this particular teacher that I started skipping the class. Eventually, my mother was called in for a meeting with the teacher and the principal, and as mad as she was when she found out I had been skipping, the only lame excuse I could give her was that I hated the class. I was behind by this point, and as I had no fundamentals (because I had refused to learn them), I had little hope of catching up and I proposed that I drop the course and take it in the spring at night school; I honestly thought that a new teacher would address my antipathy. And when I started the night school I had the best of intentions, but...when I applied to and was accepted to the University of Lethbridge and realised that I didn't need math as a prerequisite, I happily dropped out of that class, too. Nothing about this story makes me the "smart" one.

I took all three sciences in grade ten, but while I was totally fascinated by physics and enjoyed the lab setting of chem, I wasn't engaged with biology and didn't take it again. As much as I loved physics,  I was forever behind in the math that I should have been learning concurrently, and I didn't really excel at it. Our chem teacher was a total disconnected nerd-type -- greasy hair, thick glasses, baggy clothes -- and I didn't have it in me to want to please him (which I totally recognise as another failing of my nature; I tried somewhat in those classes where I wanted the teacher to like me) and I often thought of my learning in his class as having very little to do with him and what he was writing on the blackboard. Two things I want to say about Mr. Kireef: he took it upon himself to show our chemistry class a documentary about apartheid in South Africa and I think that was the first I had heard of that disgusting system; and in hindsight, you really have to respect a man who was willing to go off topic like that to make sure we were learning about an issue that must have been important to him. And, nearing the end of grade twelve -- after my marks had started to slip because I couldn't be arsed to memorise the bonds in organic chem -- Mr. Kireef came up to me after class one day, such an introvert that he couldn't quite keep looking me in the eye as he spoke, just to say that he thought I had a natural mind for chemistry and that I would likely succeed in the field if I chose to pursue it in Post-Secondary. This blew my mind -- and not least of all for the effort it seemed to cost Mr. Kireef to have a personal conversation -- and I didn't understand what he was seeing beyond my mediocre marks. Years later, when I began to think what might have been if I had ever really tried at school, it was this exchange that made me think I could have been a Pharmacist. 

I believe I've said before that the French I had taken through grade nine in Ontario was advanced enough to allow me to coast through grade twelve French in Alberta with nineties. I also had an advantage in English because I had already studied Shakespeare and a classic novel in grade nine, so I probably appeared brighter than I actually was when these were introduced to my classmates for the first time in grade ten. Overall, English was never hard for me -- probably because I could retain most of what was read together in class -- and not studying for tests in English didn't really matter. History was the opposite though: I could never connect to the "why" of studying old names and dates, so I refused to. In Ontario, a high school student only needs to take gym once and I was happy to get it over with in grade nine, so I was totally disappointed to learn that in Alberta, a high school student only needs to take gym once -- and I had to do it grade ten. Yet, while I remember feeling screwed over by this, I have absolutely no memory of that grade ten gym class. The only other course I took throughout all of high school was music, and while I did really well in it, as a member of the ensemble, I always assumed that the teacher couldn't really tell how I was performing amongst all the other instruments. My tone on the flute was fine (and probably more than fine in comparison to the other flutes), but I was mediocre at my musicality; I needed to follow along with my friend Cindy whenever we were given a new piece of music (she had taken many years of piano, so the music reading was second nature to her) and while I can sing along to a song on key (so I'm not technically tone deaf), I don't have perfect pitch; I could never do a jazz improv; I remember one time playing a B-flat to tune my flute with an electronic device in preparation for class, and when the bell rang soon after, the teacher asked me, "Do you know what note the bell is in?" When I said I had no idea, he looked shocked and said, "You just played it." Ah. B-flat. Even hearing the two notes seconds apart, I couldn't recognise them as the same; I could never have tuned my flute by ear -- this is terrible musicality. So I was really shocked when I received an invitation from Canmore's Royal Conservatory of Music at the end of grade twelve, asking me to send an audition tape and consider studying there in the fall. My teacher confirmed that he had given the school my name as a likely candidate, and I was flattered enough to briefly consider the option, but I couldn't escape the bare fact that I wasn't musically talented; I didn't understand how the teacher didn't know that by then.

My grade twelve transcripts are totally unimpressive -- good enough at English, French, Religion, and Music, barely scraping by in Math and Sciences -- and while it's true that I never actually tried at any of it, there's nothing to be proud of here; this is not the record of a "smart" person. And yet, my marks were adequate to get into the local university; the place where I thought I would finally be challenged and buckle down. But that didn't really happen either; a story for another day.

The phone rings in the middle of the night
My father yells what you gonna do with your life
Oh daddy dear you know you're still number one
But girls they want to have fun
Oh girls just want to have

I would like to say that, like Cyndi Lauper, I just wanted to have fun in high school and that's why I never prioritised the school work. I would like to think that I was the victim of gender bias; that it was only because I was a girl that no one ever pressured me to choose and work towards a career. And I'd like to say that it was some combination of parental neglect and a chaotic homelife that set me up for mediocrity. I'd love to have something that I could point to and say that's why I -- the smart one for heaven's sake -- never tried and I never learned and I never saw the point and I hated school by the time I graduated, and this despite a safe environment, supportive teachers, good friends, the attention of boys, spending money, a car to bomb around in: I had everything necessary for success and I couldn't muster up the energy to do anything school related. I think, in the end, it comes down to bone-deep apathy: I did fine without doing homework or studying, I did fine without even handing in all of my assignments, and as no one ever commented one way or the other on my fine report cards, fine was good enough. I don't consider any of this "smart".