The “water bottle flip” is one of the latest forms of fun going around the school yard at the moment. It involves taking a bottle of water thats about a quarter full and flipping it by the neck or lid area and attempting to flip it so it lands back on it’s base.

Deceptively simple.

There’s also the art of “dabbing” that’s keeping people entertained. The dance, which has mixed origin and has a tutorial video that has been viewed over a million times on YouTube, involves dropping the head into the elbow and throwing the other arm out in a gesture that resembles sneezing.

When I first heard and saw the bottle flip and a dab, I thought how ridiculous they were, and how silly it was that anyone could be entertained by such things.

They should do something of merit to entertain themselves, something that is a legitimate hobby. But then I realised that it’s no different to what I was being entertained by at school, and that who am I to say what is and isn’t a legitimate form of fun?

My friends and I would keep ourselves entertained with games of hacky sack with a ball we made from chicken wire and duct tape (just a little dangerous as we used a rock in the center of the ball to give us some weight; that could have done some damage if we had hit ourselves in the head), or seeing which one of us could run up a wall and do a back flip off of it (again a ridiculous way to waste time because once you’ve been able to back flip once, it’s a bit like riding a bike).

Making the ball, playing hacky sack and learning to do a back flip consumed many of our lunch times and probably seemed pointless to the teachers watching us.

A colleague also mentioned how they had a number of words that they would use in high school. “Ningy bud” was one of them, apparently a staple of their vocabulary, most likely replaced with an updated version that is just as ridiculous.

Those activities are just as legitimate and fun as anything I do for fun now and are integral to growing up. They help give us a sense of community with our school peers and act as a sort of rebellion against authority, a way of saying to those in charge that you may try to control us but we’ll entertain ourselves any way we can.

- Matthew Chown