Things At Which I Suck

Lately I've been thinking a lot about writing and feeling grateful for the fact that I'm comfortable as a writer.  I know that lots of people feel utterly frustrated and inept when they write, and I'm happy that I feel more...um...ept in that arena.


However, thinking about what I'm good at doing has also gotten me thinking about the many ways in which I totally fail at life, such as:


1.  Bowling

This is what doesn't happen when I bowl.

I hate bowling.  In my experience, bowling alleys are loud, stuffy, smelly, and full of pale, puffy people.  But mostly I hate bowling because I am so very bad at it.  I'm the only person I've ever heard of who managed to throw a ball into the gutter while the gutter bumpers were up.  I also don't know how to release the ball properly, so I frequently disengage my fingers too late (causing my fingernails to bend backwards) and throw the ball up in the air, which inevitably (eff you, gravity) causes said ball to come crashing down on the floor with a loud BANG!  [Cue angry stares from the pale, puffy hoards.]


On the rare occasion when I am bowling and people tell me it's my turn, I boo.  I hate my turn.


I even suck at Wii bowling.  The first and last time I Wii bowled, I accidentally punched a dog in the face with my controller.  Honestly.  Who does that?


2.  Thinking In Three Dimensions


The inability to think in three dimensions has all sort of fun repercussions, like the possession of laughable drawing skills and no sense of direction whatsoever.  Let's examine these topics individually.

• Laughable Drawing Skills

I could never draw something this good.

Two memories stick out for me when I think about this particular failure.  One is from high school physics class.  My lab partner and I were writing notes back and forth, and in one of them I tried to draw a picture of a classmate - in stick figure form - running.  I don't remember why.  What I do remember is the look of utter befuddlement on my lab partner's face when she saw the picture.  She responded with:


He's sitting and sweating?


To which I replied:  No - he's running!


And she wrote back:  He's...running?  WHAT?


She then took about 2.5 seconds to demonstrate the simple process for drawing a running stick figure, which made perfect sense to me after I saw it.  However, having no 3D thinking inhibits the ability to do those sorts of simple tasks!  Now I know how to draw a running stick figure.  I also know how to draw a smiley face wearing a little hat.  And that is the extent of my drawing repertoire.


Also in high school, I was playing Pictionary with a group of friends, and my task was to draw a frog.  Easy, right?  Well...not so much for poor Al.  I wish I still had the picture I drew.  I don't know what the hell it looked like, but it certainly didn't look anything like this:

Apparently it looked more like this:

or this:

because my poor Pictionary partner guessed both "wolverine" and "wildebeest" based on my stellar drawing, but never mentioned anything about a frog.

• No Sense of Direction

Until my maternal grandmother was in her 80s, she thought that North meant:  "Up, out of the ground, towards the sky."  It is now my honor to carry on her proud legacy when it comes to directional abilities.  What that means is this:  I lack cognitive maps.  My brain has no sense of how things exist physically in relation to other things, which creates a complete inability to maneuver from one place to another.  Suffice it to say that if you plunked me down in the center of my hometown and asked me to lead us to my family home, where I lived for 15 years, we'd end up in Canada.

This is how I feel in a restaurant, trying to get from the bathroom back to my table.

When I was in my early-20s, my mother tried to give me verbal directions somewhere, and about halfway through the process, she stopped.  She said, "Usually I think of you as a very intelligent person, but when I try to give you directions, I swear I can see into your eyes, straight through your head, and all the way to the back of your skull."  It's true.  When people try to tell me directions, I think my brain takes a field trip into my butt.

She gets it.  She would never try to give me directions.

There are many, many, many other things at which I suck, but I think I'll just briefly tackle one more, which is:


3.  Listening To People Talk About Their Corporate Jobs

Please don't tell me what you do.

Small talk is difficult enough without having to endure listening to some rando explain the bullshit minutia of his or her corporate job.  If your answer to, "And what do you do?" is something like:  "I do PR for a marketing firm," or, "I do marketing for a PR firm, " or can be translated as:  "I move money between (uber-giant corporation(s)/wealthy people) and (uber-giant corporation(s)/wealthy people)," please, folks - spare me the excruciating details.  Just say, "I'm a suit," and go get me a drink.  I'm already on the verge of slipping into a fucking coma.