Ladies and gentlemen, I failed ballet in college.
Yep. Failed. Ballet.
This is ridiculous for a few reasons.
First, who fails a college class?! That kind of thing matters. I had never failed anything before.
Also, it was a one-credit elective. To fail a one-credit, elective class you really have to try.
And finally, and probably most notably, until almost that point, I had been training pretty seriously to be a professional ballet dancer.
What?! How did I fail ballet?!
Well, I just didn't go to the class. And, how could I have been expected to?! It was a morning class!! (Well, 9:55, but in college anything before 11 was considered ungodly, especially on mornings after party nights. We'll gloss over the fact that by senior year one could argue that any night was a party night). My body also doesn't perform as well in the morning*.
Plus, I had taken the class twice before when I was a freshman, and I hated the class. It was full of modern dancers. Modern dancers!! (Read that with your most sour, sour face--but jokingly.**) Because of their position in the minor program, they had to be in the advanced ballet class regardless of ballet ability or lack thereof, as was the case. So, let's just say the class had trouble keeping my interest.
The problem was that I needed that one elective credit to graduate.
Oops.
Similarly, as a business minor, I had to take corporate finance. I hated that class too. Hated it. So, sometimes maybe I let myself get more wrapped up in handling sorority business than learning about business business.
And, thus we land on what we might consider one of my crowning life achievements.
Inevitably, I was able to convince my ballet teacher to let me write a couple papers to pass the class and, thus, graduate. They were 3/4 of a page each. About ballet, a particular passion of mine. So, I created for myself a super taxing assignment, you know?
I also persuaded my corporate finance teacher to give me a C. I'm positive I bombed the exam. But, you know what? My final grade still ended up a C. Boom.
The moral of the story is that I got a great education in college in talking my way into things I wanted or needed. And that, my friends, set me up far better for my career in public relations than silly courses like corporate finance (though now that I work with a lot of corporations, I could stand to have some of that knowledge...) and ballet.
You see, kids, I've now made a career out of convincing people to do or think things. I might even say I'm not half bad at it.
Sometimes it pays to slack off. You might discover where your real talents lie.
*- Especially when it's recovering from a hangover.
**- Ballet and modern dancers are not typically friends. There's a longtime, unacknowledged sort of feud between the two art forms. We used to try and convince our modern teachers to allow us to have a "relaxation" class--which was basically just sanctioned napping for an hour--to avoid actually having to do modern dance. It often worked because modern teachers were usually into that mind-body connection, rejuvenation stuff that budding ballerinas were too uptight to appreciate. But I'm sure modern dancers are all lovely people.
