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.

Let's Do This

I've decided to write a book.


If you Google "write a book," what you will discover is that all humans and their grandmothers' hairdressers are planning to write, or are in the processing of writing, a fucking book. It's like blogging. There are something like 12 trillion blogs being written right now, which means that every person on the planet is writing approximately 1700 blogs. That's a lot of blogging! And it's also discouraging, because I see blogs like: "Hi! This blog is about my cat Roofikins Squashpants and his adventures in the backyard!" and they have over 100,000 views. My blog has like 6 views per day. And now I'm planning to write a book. Sheesh.


I've felt compelled to write for as long as I can remember and created my first story before I had mastered the physical act of writing. I had to utilize the writing skills of older people like my mother, sister, and grandmother, who graciously took dictation for  me. The first story I "wrote" in this fashion was called The Ugly Duckling (not to be confused with the famous children's story of the same name). It was about a duckling who was so ugly that he decorated a colorful box and wore it over his head. This made it difficult for him to see anything and easy for him to be duped by thieves who tricked him into robbing a bank for them. He thought they wanted him to be their friend. Sad story. I didn't finish it.

I cannot believe I just found this picture.

Throughout my childhood, I started several books. Every single one began with the line: "Hi!  My name is..." What each of my stories had in common was the same first line (inserted with a different, snazzy protagonist's name), lots of yelling (I have no idea why; there was no yelling in my life outside of these stories), and a length of about five pages before halting abruptly, sometimes mid-sentence.


I wrote throughout my youth and into college - short stories; book beginnings; songs; screenplays - avoiding only poetry because poetry blows (or maybe I just don't get it). I clung to the idea that I wanted to be a professional fiction writer, despite being discouraged from that path on a regular basis by most anyone who had my best interests in mind. Finally, during my senior year of college, I decided to speak to a career counselor about becoming a writer. I sat with a woman in the counseling center and poured out my soul to her, explaining how I'd been creating stories since before I could write, loved nothing more than developing characters and their lives, and felt like being a writer was my one true destiny.


The counselor listened patiently to my thorough disclosure and then informed me that being a fiction writer would be an impossible career path. She suggested that, since I loved writing so much, I try one of the following alternatives:

• writing for an advertising firm
• writing for a management consulting firm
• writing for a venture capital firm

Thanks for the advice, jerk.

At that point, I decided to give up the idea of being a fiction writer. I'd received enough messages clearly informing me that it wouldn't work, so I looked for alternatives. Since I was interested in human beings and the way they function in the world, I studied psychology, which led me into the social service field. This career path has been quite perfect for me. Social service work is consistently interesting and profoundly rewarding, albeit sometimes exhausting and soul-crushingly painful as well. I have been satisfied with this type of work for almost 15 years now, which is a big deal for me. Usually, individual ventures hold my attention for about 2-6 months. Granted, I've worked in seven different settings, but all have been in social services, and it's all been pretty positive.


A few weeks ago, I went back east to visit family and friends. I spent one night with my friend Laura, a woman I've been friends with since we were 8 years old. [Laura is also the friend featured in the post about my most embarrassing moment.] We stayed up late chatting, and at one point during our conversation, she told me her sister-in-law is writing a book. Then she said, "You should write a book. Really. You need to return to your roots."


Old friends are amazing like that. They've watched you age and seen how you have become the person you are. You cannot hide or recreate yourself with old friends; they remember your past and your dreams, and they hold you accountable for all of it. If you still have people in your life who you've known since you were a kid, I recommend you hold onto them.

This will be Laura and me in 50 years.

Laura's advice and encouragement allowed me to take an honest look at the unsettled, frustrated part of me that has been nestled in the back of my consciousness for years. After examining it for a little while, I came to the conclusion that, yes, I do need to write a book, and I'm going to do so.


The most difficult thing about starting the process of writing a book isn't writer's block or a lack of ideas. The most difficult thing is that I wrote a couple of stories in the past, submitted them for publication, and had them rejected.  


OH MY GOD, I HATE BEING REJECTED SO MUCH! IT MAKES ME WANT TO KILL EVERYONE ON EARTH!  


Ahem. Please excuse me. I had a psychotic Leo moment there.

Curse you, pointy finger!  I hate you!

But what I need to remember is this (and you have no idea, unless you are a Leo, how difficult this is for a Leo): rejection is part of being a writer. As in all things in life, some people will like what I do, and other people won't. This is because some people are smart and cool, and others are buttheads.

Okay, so here I go. I'm thinking of starting the book this way:


Hi! My name is Roofikins Squashpants, and this is my story.


Just kidding. I'm sure I'll think of another method of introduction. Somehow.

Here I am, gazing confidently in the direction of my dreams. :)