Life's Great Disappointments

April 22, 2008

In which I lament about the things I’d like to be good at but am not, or those things that I do which I should not.

I don’t write very well. For all my reading and my bitching about language, you’d think I’d have a Hemingway-esque wrassle hold on the English language. Not as such. I use a lot of words, but they don’t go together. Someone also said that about the features of my face. They don’t mix. Apparently.
I can’t draw a likeness. O! O! How I would love to be able to draw. When I was in college, I was a graphic design major. This made it necessary to take fine art classes. My drawing class was three hours long, three times a week, and started at 8 a.m. It was also during the winter. I also lived in Hillsboro at the time (yes! yes! It’s true!) and had to take the train in which meant general freezing-ass, darkness and earliness. I got a C- in the class, which is far and away the worst grade I’ve ever gotten in anything that I tried in. It was a bad time.
I’m not Native American. Go ahead and make fun of me. It’s not that I want to fly my dream-catcher flag high, it just seems innately like something I should be. Native. Granted, multiple branches of my family go back to well before the American Revolution. There was a blissful eight-hour window a few weeks ago when I thought I was a direct descendant of Princess Corn Flower, a Cherokee princess from the early 19th century. But then I realized I’d plugged the wrong Troxell ancestor into Ancestry.com and it was all an illusion.
I’m afraid of flying. This is just awful.
I’m woefully undereducated in math and science. The math part I’m doing something about currently but I have a sinking apathy for things like chemistry.
I’m lazy.
I’m awkward. I can feel myself being lame around people, and, omigod, I care so much that they think I’m an idiot. I hear the things that come out of my mouth and I’m horrified. It’s a curse

Anyone else want to confess?

7 Comments

tODD says:

Given how grumpy I am right now, discussing the things that feed my grump seems like a great idea. Let’s see …

I can’t draw as well as I want to, or as well as I once felt I could. This bleeds over into a general feeling that I’m not as good at creating (Web) designs as I’d like to be. Mostly I play with color, shapes, and a few overt references to the main concept. Meh.

I’m not as up as I’d like to be on pretty much any computer technology I can think of. I usually only know as much as I’ve thus far needed to know, and no more. This keeps me in a constant state of fear about the latest new technology, or, really, the not-so-recent. I still haven’t learned Python or XML-RPC/SOAP, etc.

I’m not as well read on anything else, either. I just don’t make time for books like I want to. I’d love to (re?)read all the humanities books I was supposed to have read in college. Plus a huge heaping helping of history. And, you know, some quality literature.

I’m stubborn, selfish, and jealous of my friends’ great qualities. I tend to be more exacting than loving, though I expect the opposite when I’m the one who’s fallen short.
Brett says:

I never took a lick of chemistry in my life, and I don’t feel bad about it at all.
Aileen says:

I somehow made it through 17 years of schooling without taking much in the way of modern history. I remember taking a few American history classes but we never made it past the Civil War. Then college was nothing but art and architectural history. So there are embarrassingly large gaps in my knowledge, like oh, WW1.

Also, not good with things that require hand-eye coordination, which makes activities like team sports and, um, walking down stairs a challenge. Curiously, I have excellent balance.

What else? I have terrible taste in music. I go for days at a time in the winter without shaving my legs. I call these lapses in personal grooming “hygiene hiatuses”. I tend to forget birthdays.
Lyza Gardner says:

I used to have fantastic balance, believe it or not. I did a lot of gymnastics as a kid. But then I had a head injury when I was eight that involved a tire swing, my friend Julia, and concrete. After then I would have weird dreamy dizzy spells and I never had good balance again. I’m not super-tilty, but I am just a bit stumbly sometimes.

Curiously, this head injury also timed itself EXACTLY when I started being afraid of flying and nervous about other forms of travel (I’m not super fond of boats, either). One of the many experts I have seen for the flying fiasco was piqued because there is some correlation/studies that show that inner ear/balance problems can cause fear responses to g-force and motion changes. Interesting, no?
Robin says:

Don’t feel bad. I can’t successfully get, or keep, a job.
autumn says:

also lazy. also lack hand-eye coordination.

terrible at sharing. & being fake-nice.

cannot seem to make physics go inside my head. bad at memorizing anything that doesn’t have a tune behind it (which lead me to recite my anatomy lessons to “you are my sunshine”). cannot take quality photos. am incapable of any graphic, potted, sculpted, mechanical, art. well, any art. cannot speak another language. am embarrassingly un-well-traveled.
Sister says:

wait, I thought Pearl’s mom was part Cherokee?