Here For a Good Time by Chris Parker

Author:Chris Parker [Chris Parker]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Allen & Unwin
Published: 2022-08-25T00:00:00+00:00

How fast you can run is your last concern when you’re 98, so it’s time we scrapped the beep test from high school once and for all, and dragged those teenage boys down to my mother’s flow yoga class at the YMCA.

High school does present the wonderful opportunity of allowing you to select which subject you wish to study in any given year and which subjects you’ve decided to give up on and ‘drop’. It really is one of the first tastes of autonomy you get in academic institutions. Of course schools aren’t totally stupid and know not to give over full freedom to teenagers when it comes to curating their own curriculum. In Years 9 and 10 we were simply allowed to choose a language. I chose Japanese because I was thirteen and liked sushi and heard a rumour you got to go to a Japanese restaurant in the final weeks of the year. It was the right type of bribe that kept me in the subject for a further three years. So, to all my Japanese readers 今日 きょう は 寒 さむ いですね (Today is cold, isn’t it?). It’s the only thing I can remember. I did tap out of Japanese in my final year of high school, as there was the promise of a class trip to Japan, the country itself. Which would obviously be an incredible experience, but I heard a rumour that the class would go visit an onsen, one of the traditional bathing houses, where it is customary to be naked in the water with other men. As an awkward seventeen-year-old who hated everything about his body at the time, the idea of being naked in a hot tub with my fellow classmates was so mortifyingly embarrassing, I swore off the subject, despite being relatively okay at it at the time and enjoying learning about the culture.

The joys of being in our senior years at high school were that we were granted the choice to axe some pretty big-name, star-studded subjects if they didn’t spark joy anymore. Think Science, History, Geography and, thankfully, PE. In Year 11, I chose to ditch Science. I had burned enough magnesium with a Bunsen burner and studied enough of the periodic table to learn that chemistry and physics, while being something I will encounter in my day-to-day life, will never be something I understand. My motto — you don’t have to understand physics, you can just let physics happen to you. I can still feel that uplifting sense of freedom of walking out of the Science Department at the age of fifteen, knowing that I never had to attempt to understand how light travels, or how atoms are formed, ever again. Science is just something I know there is someone out there more qualified than me doing a better job of understanding it than I ever could. So why try? I am more than happy to take one for the team and sit back and let someone else

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