(A) I’m pretty sure that if we search, we can come up with a few threads over the last few years about people who can’t swim and “sinkers”. They always go through the whole series of posts in disbelief. But the concusion eventually is: believe it, it’s REAL. Some people ARE “sinkers”. Some people just cannot be taught to swim by conventional methods. Some people are psychologically immersion-phobic and would need that treated first. It IS so. The method AND attitude of the instructor is what has to be bent to accommodate the subject. For example the people at Transpersonal Swimming Institute focus first on dealing with getting the person over water phobias, THEN moves on to the mechanics.
(B) Skills I never acquired:
Handstands/Cartwheels
Finger whistles
Modulated, controlled cheek-whistling. All I can do is blow out one tone until I run outta breath.
Singing in tune
Heck, anything involving musical pitch or rhythm, am an atrocious dancer.
When I got my first NAUI certification, one of the open water skills we had to do was to freedive & retrieve an object from the bottom.
Don’t even get me started about that damn lift-bag skill for the advanced cert…
Oh, and I can’t ride a bike either. Or drive a stick shift.
I can swim, sort of. Not well. Doomed if I’m actually ever in a boating accident without a life vest.
I’m skinny, pretty much. I think that’s a good part of it. The best way I can float - mostly - is on my back, gulping in a large amount of air. I must keep my lungs full of air or else, well, my mouth and nose get close enough to the water that it’s not fun. Anyhow, ScubaSteve, if you just want to get a little more confident in not always hanging on to the side of the pool, try gulping in lots more air and then floating on your back. You still need to kick your legs some.
Yes, it’s all got it’s own problems and yes, it probably takes more practice than I give it. Ah, if I haven’t made this clear, I am not a swim instructor.
I’ve never learned to whistle either, but my girlfriend seems pleased enough in bed. Hey, I find ways to have fun in life, swimming, whistling, or no.
I am constitutionally incapable of serving a volleyball, shuffling cards, doing cartwheels, raising just one eyebrow, driving a car with manual transmission, curling up my tongue in that one weird way (like a hot-dog bun!), touching my nose to my tongue, licking my elbow, and fitting my whole fist into my mouth. (I really did once know a guy who could do the latter two things…it was bizarre, I tells ya. )
Helpful advice about viewing those Magic Eye pictures: unfocus your eyes. Have you ever been looking straight into someone’s face with your eyes so unfocused that the person looks as though they have a third eye in between the usual two? Getting my eyes into that exact state is the only thing that has ever enabled me to view those confounded Magic Eye things.
I can swim, whistle, roll my r’s and burp. I make excellent grilled cheese sammiches and these ogdamn Magic Eye pictures (and hula hoops) are the bane of my pathetic existance.
I can’t “see” them unless they are covered by glass or some facsimile thereof. If I focus on the reflection on the glass, I can easily see the picture. Therefore, I can’t, no matter how hard I try, see the pictures when flipping through a book or on the back of a cereal box or whatever.
Funny. I learned how to swim early enough that it really boggles my mind that people don’t know how to swim. I mean, it’s easy.
Then I read through the rest of the thread and see other mundane things that I can’t do…
I can’t do a cartwheel (hell, I can barely handle a somersault)
I can’t do the Magic Eye thing, either
I can’t whistle. With or without my fingers. Just kinda comes out like a hiss
The last one really has me curious though. My Dad is a world-class whistler (seriously - he’s had people say he should be recorded). How can I not do anything whistle-wise except hiss and spew saliva?
Our primary school gave us swimming lessons every year that I was there, so that’s about 7 years worth of swimming lessons I think. In addition, my parents put my brother and I through private swimming lessons for several years. Despite all this, I can barely swim. I can sort-of tread water, I can dogpaddle a bit, I can float on my back (so I guess I’m probably ok to survive in the water for a little while) but I’m absolutely useless at actually swimming.
I was PADI certified in 1986 and I’m fairly sure it was longer too. First off, I lapped everybody. I was in HS and on the swim team at the time, but to lap everybody in eight lengths, even men? No way, I wasn’t that good.
I cannot do right-handed cartwheels, though I am right-handed. I also cannot snap with my right hand.
Here’s a weird one-I cannot file my nails to save my life. I try to round them off, and I end up sawing them into weird angles, or else I make them weak so they break off.
So I end up just cutting them. I hate it, because I want pretty long nails.
OK, I did some research (Doper style!) on the Web and found out that a human body with all it’s air exhaled is .99-21.07. Here’s a link to confirm. (Look under “flesh, human”.)
The specific gravity of water is 1.0 (it’s the standard by which the specific gravity of other substances is measured. What does this mean? It means that if you go into a pool of water and exhale every bit of air out of your lungs, you will … very slowly … sink, unless you are one of the rare people whose body density is .99, in which case, you can’t sink even then.
If you have air in your lungs, your specific gravity runs from .92 to .98, which means you float, even if you’re one of those 1.07 types. So if you do as most people do when they sink into water, and hold your breath, you will float.
You have to WORK to sink in water. Most people who have problems with staying afloat in water have problem because they panic and flail about and don’t relax and hold their breath, which is all you need to float. Most of teaching people to swim is teaching them that floating and holding their head above water is easy, not hard, and that all you have to do is relax and float, mostly.
Now, being Dopers you will look at the numbers on the chart I have provided and come to the rational conclusion that if you do not expel all the air from your lungs when you are in water, you will float, and therefore you will be relaxed, and swim easily.
I don’t want to have to tell any of you this again.
I can swim, but just barely. I used to sink like a stone; when I was younger we lived at a lake and I’d swim out with my life jacket on–because, y’know, I’d sink without it–then I’d take my life jacket off when I got on the floating dock. Unfortunately, some jerks would usually show up and I frequently got thrown in without my jacket. My brother would have to come get me off the bottom of the lake. This turned out to be a double-edged sword. Once he knew that I would sink, to punish me for perceived (maybe some real) transgressions he would get me out in the middle of the lake in his canoe and capsize it. As I flailed around and eventually sank, he’d let me know what I’d done to piss him off. Then he’d come get me. I don’t much care for the water anymore, and now I don’t swim at all because I have panic attacks. hmmmm…
I can’t do my own hair, so I keep it long. I have problems doing things in mirrors–I always want to move the opposite way and end up poking myself in the eye and whatnot.
I can’t do the two-finger whistle even though I’ve always wanted to.
I can parallel park, but not consistently–I need lots of extra room. I hit a parked car in driver’s ed in high school attempting it, failed it the first time on my driver’s test (amongst other things), and on the second try I just told the tester that I couldn’t parallel park so he could just mark that off as I wasn’t going to hit any parked cars just so he could laugh about it later. (At our local DMV they now have a special place set up for the parking part of the test–I wonder how many parked cars were hit before they came up with that.)
Scuba/Swimming: Actually, as long as nothing goes wrong with your equipment, you don’t need to be able to swim to be able to Scuba.
I don’t understand. They had all their gear, and were unable to snorkel back to the boat? With their vest, mask, snorkel, and fins, all they’d have to do is lie on their stomachs and kick. Gravy: I’m a very limited cook, but I can make a good poultry gravy. Very simple.
Place pan, with juices from the bird, on the stove. Scrape as much of that burnt, black bird fat/skin as possible off the rack and into the pan. Assuming you don’t have enough pan juices (which is likely), add 1-2 cans of broth. Dice up the giblets and add them (exclusing the liver, perhaps). Turn the stove on to medium/low heat. Dissolve some quantity of flour (depending on desired thickness) into cold water; I just eyeball it, so I don’t know the right measurement (1.5 cups, give or take? Very unsure.). Stir the mixture into the pan. Season as desired (I highly recommend lots of MSG – Áccent, commercially – but salt and a little pepper will do just fine). Continually stir and deglaze until the gravy is done (15-20 minutes, probably).
I can’t drive a manual car (after a year of intensive lessons).
Can’t say the word ‘toilet’ without making people laugh at me.
Cannot spell the word tounge. Or is it tongue?
I’m also absolutely unable take a shot of hard liquor without having to do a frantic ‘shake-out’ lap of the room afterwards. Either that, or I have to pull a very, very unattractive face. Babies have cried after seeing it.
No, EC, after doing all that they will NOT be able to “swim easily”, they’ll be able to swim after having made a deliberate effort to get it right.
And you WILL have to tell this all over again next time the whole “oh, how can anyone not swim?” issue is raised (approximately yearly) because the reality IS that there are many people out there for whom learnign to swim is extremely difficult to the point of giving up. Insisting that it’s “easy” is actually counterproductive as it only creates frustration and multiplies self-doubt (as in “What the hell’s wrong with me that I can’t do something everyone says is so easy? I’d better not even try, I must have some undetected disability…”)
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