Fun To Be Had

From dancing on tables to reading a good book, from walking aimlessly on a sunny day to carefully planned journeys, from teaching a child how to write to taking pleasure in others’ misfortune or even causing it, from being high on life to getting high to bear life, there certainly is fun to be had out there. Now, now… let’s not be too judgemental. After all, much like sorrow, “fun” is a terribly subjective concept. What hurts me, might not touch you – but that won’t diminish my pain. What you find extremely entertaining might not appeal to me, or might even be beyond my power of comprehension, yet it doesn’t mean you’re not having fun.

How many of us can honestly say they’ve never had fun in a less than moral, socially acceptable way? I’m not saying such people don’t exist, but they probably have much more meaningful, laudable things to do right now. I know I’m not always above trivial, even selfish fun. I also know people (more of them than I’d like) who thoroughly enjoy others’ misery… so much so, that they can’t really have a good time, unless they’re the only ones in their little circle having a good time. And they are willing and able to make that happen for themselves. I also know people whose idea of fun means being pitied by everybody, living in a constant state of self-victimization in order to be the centre of attention. But I also know people whose idea of fun is making others happy…

Fun takes different shapes for different people.

So many ways to have fun… and I won’t even go into the taboo ones, although how fun would that be! I remember childish fun with numbers. I loved mathematics and I was very good at it when I was in school. It just made sense, I could see everything fall into place and it was a mystery to me why many of my classmates were puzzled by it. I remember my best friend and I often competed over who was the fastest at solving equations. Victory was at least as much fun as mathematical challenges. I still have an old book from my math teacher, somewhere…

That was middle school… High school, however, meant that I had to make a choice, and I opted to focus on languages. Girls were not properly equipped to deal with logical aspects regarding sciences, a physics teacher informed us in high school, right after he tried to explain the gravitational force by asking one of my shyest classmates to jump out the window. The girl started crying when he started yelling, and it immediately became clear he was as big a bully as he was rumoured to be. For a grown man and a teacher, no less, that kind of fun was pathetic and unacceptable, I quickly decided. I was going to have my own fun, and not because I was a defender of the weak, but because he deserved to be put down by one he thought he was able and entitled to put down. I got up on my high heels and walked towards the crying girl without a word; I solved the problem on the blackboard and smiled disdainfully – “Is that all you’ve got?” I had to solve several other problems, but fortunately his expectations were so low, that they presented no real challenge. Showing him I was a lot more than a pair of legs in a short skirt, as he initially called me, was a whole different kind of fun with numbers. For the months he was our teacher, I made it my purpose to rudely antagonize him from “hello” to “goodbye”. There’s fun to be had when you don’t give a damn, and confidence in my skills often made me an obnoxious pupil. But he deserved it more than any other teacher. He eventually had to leave our school quietly, but without being officially reprimanded in any way, in spite of all the complaints… It was only a small victory, but I had my fun confronting him with the error of his ways on a weekly basis.

On to more demurred ways of having fun, and back to the present…

Fun is driving a friend’s tiny new work car and joking about it. I’m not passionate about cars, but sometimes they can be so much fun – from speeding on a deserted beach, raising a cloud of sand, to simply learning to appreciate your own average vehicle merely by means of comparison. And I won’t even mention how fun dancing on the hood of a car can be (that’s a story from another time, for another time).

Then there’s photographic fun… while I may not be too talented in this department, I always had a great time taking photos. Even banal outings, not to mention special trips, are somehow enhanced, once immortalized this way. Having grown up with film cameras, having saved money to have the films developed, I can fully appreciate the comfort and luxury of a nice smartphone with a good camera. So I splurge, I take hundreds and hundreds of terrible shots, many of which I later delete, but as far as fun goes, this is certainly a harmless hobby. After all, when you see something like this, don’t you want to share it with somebody? Or perhaps laugh over it at a later time?

Buying and developing films used to be costly, especially for a child, I remember. So I had to think twice before every shot; and I remember having gone on trips with no more than a roll of film. Oh, how did we survive?… Now, I take a half a day drive in a rural area and I come back home with a couple of hundred shots, and there’s no point regretting the failed ones. Fun times we get to witness…

Have a fun week, all of you! Thank you, Patti, for inspiring this post!