Fail!

Not quite Fail Blog worthy, not everyone is perfect and there are some things I am just spectacularly bad at.

• Basic Math – I am pretty good at basic personal finance, but basic subtraction, division, changing percentages to fractions or vice versa? Really pathetic. I just can’t do it on my head, or make whatever necessary leaps of logic that are required to understand math. Danica McKellar is my hero.
• Avoiding Dog Poop – If there is dog poop on the street (and there often is), I will find it and step in it.
• Cutting Straight Lines - My internship at the AMNH was threatened because of my inability to master this kindergarten-level skill.
• Actual Directions – You learned from my Unexpected Talents that I drive by intuition. This is good, because I can’t read a map for anything. I get it in theory, and them immediately get confused by those pesky cardinal directions. East, southwest – whatever. How does it “feel” when I get out of the subway or off the exit?
• Mimicking Accents - I just can’t do it. With the exception of Yiddish, every accent I try to do comes out as an Australian who has been living in Great Britain too long. It’s awful.
• Telling Time – My grandmother actually calls me an idiot for this. It’s not that I can’t tell time on a watch face (I am fine in digital), it just takes me a little bit longer. Like, I have to start counting by fives, which – if you read my issues with math, you would understand why this stresses me out. So, I can do it – but I would prefer digital. I am hoping that if I actually had a nice wristwatch, it would be practice. What? You want another sad story about my pathetic time keeping abilities? In 7th grade Spanish, you learn how to give the time in Spanish. Cool. I was always pretty good at Spanish, but for some reason on this unit exam, I got a pretty low score. God bless Senorita Weinstein, because she looked at my exam and realized that I got 100% on all the digital clocks, but did poorly on the analogs. She pulled me aside and asked me what time I thought the clocks were saying and realized that my Spanish was fine, it was my brain that was failing. She ended up giving me half credit for the ones I got wrong.

Tagged as: fail, language