I Always Got Bad Grades for Talking Too Much

I thought school was a party from 1st Grade.

No, not in the sense that people think now, like a party animal, or a drinking, drugging fool.

I thought it was so great to have kids my size, sort of, around all the time.

So, to me, the worst part of first grade was nap time. I loved my cute yellow blanket and my soft pillow that we were told to have on hand at our desks, but the most uncomfortable part was that we could not talk during that time.

What a waste!

Thirty minutes of silence when all these kids and a teacher, whom I loved, were all there to be partied with and talked to? Because I was in such a small town, I just thought that this was the ONLY school in my town, otherwise, I would have requested a transfer to a more lively school that had RULES against napping!

Lots of things changed during my time in school all the way up to graduation except for ONE thing.

You guessed it. My “Conduct” grades.

Totally an “A” student my whole career, but what always brought my grade average down was the big “U-” for unsatisfactory minus: “talks too much.

Don’t get me wrong, though. I lived a great life during school and was all kinds of leader, musician, achiever, written up all the time in the news, etc. but it wasn’t until a huge failure in 12th grade that shut me up and shut me down for a huge transformation which has affected me and my life ever since.

So, I’ve had to dance on this interesting stage my whole life, torn between “I’ve got to talk,” vs. “I better shut up, like they told me,” with all kinds of confusing interludes.

I mean, come on.

If you watch a play, doesn’t the lead character have to talk? Of course.

So, with that, the confusion, the suppression, the naysayers telling me I talk too much became trecherous for me.

PLUS, everyone knows you have to listen to your friends, and apparently I did enough of that, because I made it alright through life with super awesome friends loving me and helping me along.

AND, now I stand on my “new stage” many decades later, living from the philosophy that I learned from my beauty school instructor-genius, who said, “Everything you need to know, you’ll learn in the beauty shop. All you got to do is talk, talk, talk and listen, listen, listen and before long you’ll have a master’s degree in living.”

Since the early 80’s, I’ve fine tuned that philosophy, proved her right and taken it to the next level.

You know what I’m talking about, but how do you really do it?

When you talk, you want to talk, right? And even when you are listening, don’t you find that you’re trying to figure out what you are going to say when the other person shuts up??!! LOL!

Well, from here, there are so many stories to tell about how I overcame those “U-” marks and how I catapulted myself in spite of them.

But for now, let’s just say that bad grades can be a good thing….eventually!