Gamer Girls

Wow. One thousand articles on the GamerGrrlsOfficial blog. I should have bought a cake at the grocery store and had them write “1000” on it in icing.

What better way to celebrate the occasion than talking about my ninth grade gym class?

So this is every memory I can think of from ninth grade physical education.

I’ll start with the shower story.

Before the first day of gym class even began, we all knew that there were mandatory group showers. I don’t know how we knew. There was just a rumour going around the school. People were talking about it.

And people were obviously anxious about it. You have to get naked and shower with your classmates. It’s fucking weird. I didn’t sign up for this. Why wasn’t I told about this?

It also begs the question, were the parents told about this? I’m thinking no. But wouldn’t something like this have to be discussed and agreed to? You’d think so but…no. I mean, today parents would probably have to be informed and agree to this but…I don’t know. I guess in the early 1990s, it was still anything goes. Parents just assumed that schools weren’t going to do anything weird. Like make the students get naked around each other.

And this sort of shit was…done. It was normal. Professional athletes took showers together like this. Probably at the YMCA, there were group showers. And from a quick Google search, professional sports teams and the YMCA still use communal showers.

So it’s normal but…I don’t know. If I’m an adult and want to shower with a bunch of sweaty men after a workout or something, that’s one thing. I have a choice in the matter. I can choose not to shower at all. But forcing a bunch of ninth graders to shower together? It’s weird.

So in English class, right before our first gym class, this one kid was prancing around in a stereotypical homosexual fashion sarcastically talking about how excited he was to, “See my whole class naked.”

I’m still not sure that any of this is going to happen. It’s crazy. Are they really going to make us shower together?

We get to gym class. We do whatever. Then when class is finished, the teacher tells us that we have to take a shower. And he sits there and makes sure that we do it.

He didn’t actively watch. I’ll give him that. He would pretend to grade papers or something. But he made us all take a shower.

I don’t particularly remember the experience so it couldn’t have been that traumatising. I mean, we had towels. You would just get undressed, put a towel on, go to the showers, take the towel off, take a literal three second shower, put the towel on, leave, and then get dressed. It wasn’t that big of a deal. But still odd.

One time, a nerdy kid was standing there fully naked, in the middle of the room, talking to the teacher and some guy said, “God. Put a towel on.” I have no idea why he was just standing there naked talking to this teacher. He was getting off on people looking at his penis, I guess.

That’s another thing, nobody was looking. You went in the shower, you focused on your own business, and you got out of there. You weren’t checking anybody out.

And oddly, there was no bullying of any kind. There were fat kids and whatever. Nobody was making fun of them. You just didn’t want to think about it. You did your own thing and you got out.

For the most part, this gym teacher didn’t enforce the showering. Because I got away without showering loads of times. But once in a while, he’d be out there making sure that everyone showered. Or later, he’d come back and check people’s hair. This happened to me at least once. If your hair wasn’t wet, you had to shower. And now, since everybody else had already showered, you’re doing it in front of everyone. It’s unpleasant.

There was also a middle aged priest who taught swimming. He would sometimes come in and get his fill. He would really watch.

I think those are all of my shower stories. Overall, it wasn’t too terrible. I can understand that this is just how things were done and people wouldn’t question it. You think in the 1940s, 50s, 60s, 70s this is just how people did things. There weren’t so many hang ups about nudity. It wasn’t a sexual thing. It’s just you have a gym class, you’re sweaty, of course you’d take a communal shower. What’s the problem?

But I think my class was the last class to use those showers. Times were changing. They blocked off that shower and even if you wanted to take a shower, you couldn’t. So after gym, you just were sweaty the rest of the day. And it doesn’t really matter. How much sweat are you working up after 30 minutes of light exercise as a kid?

Speaking of changing times, we had uniforms. Just a fucking t-shirt with your last name written on the front and a pair of shorts. And if you forgot your uniform, the teacher would give you a replacement uniform. The replacement uniform had “Fairy” written on it. This was apparently from a kid who had the unfortunate last name of “Fairy”. But the teacher knew what he was doing. It was a joke about homosexuality.

Couldn’t do that today, of course. That teacher would be fired immediately.

I got in trouble for something, I don’t know what, so I had to write a three page paper on a sport. So I chose lumberjack games. It was a stupid topic, of course. ESPN used to show lumberjack games and I watched it. It was the only sporting thing that I watched.

So the teacher gets it and complains about the stupid topic and my handwriting. But whatever. He accepted it and that was that.

Oh, I should probably talk about the actual sports that we played. Probably the worst part of gym.

We played baseball. I had never swung a bat in my life, which put me at a real disadvantage against everyone else. Virtually everybody had Little League experience. It’s just what you did. Only the handful of kids who had completely neglectful parents weren’t in Little League. So yeah, I was in that unfortunate group.

But I guess that we weren’t actually playing baseball. It was using a softball, first of all. And the pitcher wasn’t on the opposing team. He was on your team. So he was trying to give you easy pitches that you could hit.

I always managed to avoid having to bat but one day, I was caught out. So I had to go there. I hit the ball. It was fine. I’m sure that my form could have been improved but whatever. It didn’t instil a lifelong passion for baseball in me.

We played volleyball. I’d serve the ball, it would go over the net, and then I’d just stand there. Way back there where it’s unlikely that the ball is going to come to me.

So the teacher is talking to this priest about this. “He serves the ball, it’s good, it goes over the net, but then he just stand there waiting for the ball to come to him.” And the priest says, “Yeah, he was the same way in swim class.”

I fucking hated gym. I couldn’t have been the first person these guys met who hate gym. It’s very common. I was a slim kid with little experience and no interest in sports. I hated every second of it.

We also ran track. Actually, this wasn’t bad. It’s just running. Who cares?

So we’d run around the track and for some reason, the girls would be playing badminton in the centre area. The girls usually had their own gym but for the days when we ran track, the girls would come to our gym and play badminton.

So it added to the embarrassment. Girls watching you run around. Losing races. Getting winded. Shit like this. Also, just the uniform was embarrassing.

But there was a girl who liked me. It was a Mexican girl. And she would sometimes make a little comment to cheer me on. I never really talked to her and she ended up getting upset about that but what were we going to do? I was in the ninth grade.

I guess that ninth graders go to school dances and maybe…I don’t know…hang out in some capacity. Have their mothers drive them to the movies or something. But I didn’t do any of that shit. So she got upset.

I looked her up on Facebook when I was like 22 and she already had two kids. So…that’s just her life.

It’s fine, of course. I’m not knocking the joys of raising a family. But I don’t know.

Oh, we also had inspections. This was some pretty weird shit now that I think of it. Before class would officially begin, we had to line up and stand up straight like we’re at attention. Like in the military. And this teacher would walk past us and look for things that were wrong with our uniform. Wrong colour socks or whatever. So people would really try to get their uniform right.

But no matter what you did, he would find something. Lint was a common excuse that he would use. If you had a piece of lint on your uniform, he would make you do fifty push ups.

It was just a joke. He made everybody do these push ups. So why people obsessively tried to remove all the lint from their uniform, I have no idea. They were just idiots. They didn’t realise that this was just this guy’s idea of humour.

We played soccer. That sucked dick. And we just used tape on the wall to denote the goals.

Actually, all of the sports that we played were pretty lame and the rules were lax at best. For volleyball, for example, there’s a certain way that you’re allowed to hit the ball. You can’t just do whatever. But he told us to just do whatever. He didn’t teach us the proper technique or anything.

Same with baseball. We weren’t playing proper baseball. Or proper softball. It was just whatever.

Soccer, we didn’t learn anything about positions or strategy. It was just, “Go out there and chase the ball”.

I can’t remember playing basketball but surely we did. Maybe that was during the quarter that I was doing swimming. I know that they also had a weightlifting thing while I was doing swimming. Fortunately, I got out of that.

And then yeah, swimming. The worst part of gym. It was this creepy priest who was the teacher. Our class got divided into four groups based on skill level. And then for one quarter of the year, each group would take swim classes instead of regular gym classes.

I was in the lowest group, of course. I never swam in my life. Again, I had completely negligent parents who didn’t do any parenting.

The swim classes were co-ed. So the worst possible class to be co-ed. You have to be there in your little fucking shorts with a bunch of girls as you struggle to swim.

It was dogshit. This priest was an asshole. He was a creep. But I did learn how to swim. So that’s something, I guess.

Oh, there was also a tenth grader in the class. He joined in the second semester. He failed the second semester the previous year so had to do it again.

He was a little fucking faggot. He tried to bully me. Make fun of me and whatnot. But people didn’t go for it. He would try to get people on board to join in the bullying but…no.

This sort of thing happened a few times in my school life. Somebody unfamiliar with me would start giving me the business. “Oh, look at this weird kid who doesn’t say anything.” And then they’d try to get people to join in and they don’t. “No. What are you doing? He’s a cool guy. Leave him alone.” That sort of shit.

I think that those are all of the stories. Overall, I hated it at the time but it wasn’t a terrible experience. It was bad but nothing traumatic happened. Just playing sports and shit. And that weird showering.

I learned to swim so that’s something. Although, I never swam subsequently.

Could they have done something to better appeal to kids who don’t like sports? I don’t know. I can’t think of anything. I mean, given the nature of the class, you have to play sports. And I was allowed to put minimal effort into this shit. The teacher wasn’t abusive or really looking to humiliate anyone. So whatever. It was fine.