Stuff I have little or no talent for

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

Inspired by this, I thought I’d list some things that I’ve tried to do, and found that I have llittle or no talent for.

First, I don’t draw very well. Or at least, not nearly as well as I’d like. Somewhere between my mind’s eye and my pencil point, my vision gets lost. I can visualize lots of stuff, but I can never get it down on paper looking the way I imagine. I’ve taken drawing classes, and I’ve gotten better at certain skills (shading, perspective, and so forth), but I will never make a great artist.

I don’t sing very well at all. I don’t have any training, other than grammar school music lessons. I’d probably improve with some training, but I’d merely go from “painful to listen to” to “slightly less painful”.

I used to be able to play the guitar, viola (the violin’s slightly larger brother, which is held and played like a violin), and piano. I had lessons on all three instruments at one time or another in my life. I was able to sight read somewhat, and I had a little talent, but I didn’t practice nearly enough even when I was actively playing these instruments. Now, of course, I’ve even forgotten how to read the music.

I can’t teach. I can’t teach someone to do any sort of needlework, to read, to do math equations, to do ANYTHING that I can do. And I can do quite a few things. But I can’t teach well at ALL. This is perhaps what I most regret. When my daughter was having problems with her reading lessons, I was unable to help her. I wouldn’t have been much good anyway, as she’s dyslexic and needed a specialized tutor, but it was incredibly frustrating for both of us when I tried to help her learn to read. I can write out instructions for given skills, but I can’t really say them.

I apparently have no housekeeping instinct. My mother and sister both get urges to dust, to rearrange furniture, to disassemble things and clean them. I’m perfectly happy to let dirt pile up. I DO make an effort to keep things semi-clean, however, because I dislike roaches, ants, and flies even more than I dislike housework. But every now and then I have to have someone get everything that I missed. If I could afford it, I would DEFINITELY have a team of maids, and never worry about picking stuff up and putting it in its proper place again.

2

When I was a kid, I took oil painting classes, but it didn’t matter. I can’t translate what I see to canvas. I tried to paint a bowl of lilies. Lilies are white, right? Well, yeah, but you don’t paint white. You have to paint the shadows and the subtle hues that are within the white. Every painting I started in that class was finished by the instructor. It was never what I’d wanted. So I quit, knowing I’d never be an artist.

I can’t keep a jade tree alive. Everyone tells me they’re fool proof. If I get one, it’s terminal. I’ve got other plants that grow out of control. I’ve given up on jades.

I can’t dance. I want to. I feel the need to, but the feelings inside become awkward motions outside. I’m convinced that if I’d had lessons as a child, I’d have been a wonderful dancer. Don’t burst that bubble, please.

I can’t debate - I’m not quick on my feet in conversation. I’m queen of knowing what I should have said 2 days later. That’s why I love message boards - I can think about what I want to say without causing a lull in a conversation or shouting out the obvious comeback long after the moment had passed.

I can’t decorate - I suppose this is tied to the artistic thing. I know what I like, but I can’t look at a room and know how to make it what I’d like. So I let my husband make those decisions, and I do the painting and sewing to make it happen. I refuse to show any photos of the house I decorated before I met him. The velour sofa is just embarrassing.

3

I am the same (or worse). I can barely draw a box without messing it up. And yet my ability to visualize things and my imagination combine to produce some brilliant unreal, other-worldly mental imagery on occasion.

My handwriting is terrible too.

Most (nearly all) of the time I am like this (well I am male so it is probably to be expected) but sometimes I do get the urge to clean. And when I do clean something I am neurotically thorough.

4

Ah, forgot to mention. I don’t know if I have the ability to dance (or lately to have the ability to press the backspace key less often than the others) because I have never really tried. You see, moving my body in time with music (beyond those unavoidable things like tapping of feet) feels immensely idiotic. I can’t do it for more than a second without feeling stupid, naked, wrong. It’s not that I think I am rubbish at it. Even if I was good at it I would feel like a knob.
p.s. if the backspace comment seems out of place it is because at that point in the flow of thought to keyboard my hands decided to have a mind of their own.

5

I can’t draw freehand, but I was pretty good at drafting before CAD took over.

Creative writing is out, but I can do technical documentation or opinion pieces just fine.

I’m so musically untalented that it’s a major event to turn on Winamp.

I despise anything related to finances or running a business. Maybe this doesn’t fit the OP because I can balance a checkbook; just hate to do it…

Like FCM, I can’t do well in an argument because I’m not good at speaking off the cuff.

A day in the life of a technical genius…

6

Unfortunately there are too many things I cannot do.

I can’t sing. I’m not so upset by this. I sing in the car and plan to one day use my lack of vocal abilities to embarass my children.

I can’t paint or draw very well at all.

I can’t dance. I wanted to go to dancing school when I was a kid but my parents couldn’t afford it and then when I could pay my own way they forbade me to go. I doubt they would have ever let me and used the “no money” excuse when I was young because it was easy.

I can’t knit or crochet. I try and try but I end up with so many problems along the way:

1 - I drop or add stitches at random.
2 - The tension is too tight and I can’t get the needles in anymore or too loose and I have something that resembles swiss cheese, colorful and linty swiss cheese.
3 - I can’t follow the pattern at all.
4 - Straight does not describe a single row of anything I have ever tried to knit or crochet. Ever.

I can’t read a map or follow directions while driving. I can have a co-pilot with me telling me when and where to turn and I still can’t do it right. I cannot picture in my hear where I am and how that fits into the grand scheme of where I came from and where I want to go. I can be driving down a road and I don’t have any clue where my turn is until I am right on top of it or sometimes not until after I have passed the turn. Very frustrating.

I know there’s more but that’s plenty eh? :slight_smile:

7

I have exactly the same problem. I cross stitch and sew instead to satisfy my creative urges instead.

I can’t sing, and it’s the one thing I’d love to be able to do.

Can’t draw or paint, or express my self with the written word.

I can totally uncoordinated and therefore am terrible at any sport involving a ball. The only one I was any good at, running, I gave up at puberty due to certain “developments.”

Boy, this isn’t exactly a confidence building post.

8

I’m convinced that most people could be pretty good at anything. We’re too caught up in the fundamental attribution error; i.e. we confuse environmentally elicited behaviors w/ personality traits, etc.

Please don’t confuse the above w/ some sort of up-beat pep speech. Humans are just too smart & malleable for me to believe that someone can be naturally bad at something.

There are disabilities, of course. For example, I would be homeless because of my ADD if I didn’t benefit from the largesse of my family. (One time my sister told me that a good way to handle the mail was to not open it until I was prepared to sit down and process each piece properly. Six months later I had a four-foot stack of unopened mail…)

I spent my whole life until I was 24 learning that I was bad at math and would never get it. Imagine my suprise when I discovered I was wrong.

It’s a skill just like everything else. If you learn the ‘rules’ and practice, the quickness will come naturally.

9

I don’t think I can agree with this. Playing a musical instrument is a skill also, but if you don’t have a musical ear or a sense of rhythm, I don’t think you can become any kind of musician. Same for drawing or painting - I can scratch out a flower that is recognizable as a generic flower, but I have never been able to master the skill of looking at a flower (or a bowl of fruit, or a landscape or a face) and reproducing it on paper. There’s a component of talent, of innate ability, that the greats have and most of us completely lack.

There are skills that can be learned - I eventually learned to make an edible pie crust. But others, like finding the Venus in the hunk of marble, go beyond mere ability.

10

I cant match clothes very well because I dont have an eye for which colours match with which and end up wearing a lot of black with another colour or black on black. If I get adventurous I’d wear a shirt and pants of the same colour. Its gotten so bad that at work if I show up with something other than black on, my boss says “oh your wearing colour, it looks nice on you”. But for the life of me, I cant figure out which colours look good together. I’ve even looked at a colour wheel and it doesnt help.

11

I’m horribly uncoordinated. I have trouble walking if I don’t pay attention. Sports elude me.

I have no sense of direction - In high school, I was voted “Most Likely To Get Lost In Her Own Bathtub.” I swear, I got lost once in the middle of Nebraska and ended up in the middle of Wyoming.

Money doesn’t make sense to me. My mom’s a tax accountant, my husband is an economist and works in a bank, and I am clueless.

12

You’ll notice I said “pretty good.” I’ve suprised myself, and have been suprised by others, enough to think that you could suprise yourself at what you can learn to do.

Whether I think you can tease Venus out of a hunk of marble is for another thread…

13

I don’t do math. ( I’m pretty sure that I have dyscalcula -how ever it is spelled) and I am fine with my disability.

I cannot read instructions for the life of me. Which makes for pretty interesting recipes. Sewing and me are ships sinking in the night.

I suck, just suck at crafts. However, if I think of something on my own and have the kids do it, it turns out really well. If I try to copy from a book/mag, its a disaster.

I have not one bit of urge to do scrapbooking or ever host a home party. ( this makes me a freak in Housewife World.)

14

Not only can I not sing, I probably could make a decent living being paid to not even try. My voice is reminiscent of an old cat with it’s nuts in a vice.

Growing up in the horrible age of disco, I was painfully aware of my inability to dance as well. People actually used to approach me on the floor and ask “Dude, are you okay?”

I can draw and a lot of my work is displayed around our house but I can’t paint worth a darn. Every brush stroke looks like it’s trying to correct the previous one.

What am I least capable of though? Extended shopping. Good for a little while, once I hit the wall forget it. I look like the dog at the end of a leash that doesn’t want to go for a walk.

15

Why would I be hiding in there i the first place? :slight_smile:

I don’t think teasing me would help. :stuck_out_tongue:

I have found that I can do just about anything I put my mind to, I do a ok at whatever it is but I will most likely never master it.

VP (Jack of all trades, master of none.)

16

I could draw fairly well as as kid, but my one weakness has always been with drawing people. I can never get the faces to look right. The arms and legs are always too long or too short, the head is disproportionate to the body, etc. I do better with drawing landscapes, still life, etc.

I don’t sing well, either. I have perfect pitch and I’ve played a few musical instruments, but I just don’t have the right voice for singing.

I don’t dance, but then, I’ve never had a desire to do this, anyway. I don’t go out to places where there is dancing and I’d be too shy to try it.

Cooking? Forget it! If it doesn’t come ready-made in a can whose contents I can empty into a saucepan, or in a box whose contents I can toss into the microwave, it’s beyond my reach. My few meager attempts at preparing a meal have been utterly inedible disasters.

I’m no good with sports. I was discouraged from sports at an early age due to lack of stamina and agility, and when all the other kids made fun of me for it I decided early on that athletics had no place in my life.

I’m no good with fixing anything. For starters, I don’t have the patience for it, and I don’t even have the ability to diagnose the problem. If something is broken it stays that way until I can get a friend to look at it and try his hand at repairing it.

I’m also the world’s worst housekeeper (I’m a guy, for which such dubious recognition could go without saying).

17

You can add me to the ‘can’t sing’ list. I love music, I can play an instrument well, but signing even passably just ain’t gonna happen.

I also suck at math, and at doing things like filling out my timesheet, tax forms, etc. I’ve got about a 50 percent chance of filling out my timesheet correctly, and this is with 20 some years of experience doing it. Last week it took me three tries to get the dates, hours worked, etc. all filled in correctly and in the correct boxes.

Thank Og for Turbo Tax.

18

-Can’t sing (except in the car when I turn into Barbara Streisand)!
-Georgraphy - jesus, for the life of me I simply cannot remember where things are (hubby: want to go to …?
me: uh, where exactly is that on the map?
hubby: sigh, alright, (rustle, rustle of the map), you see if you follow this line…)

I had a Valentines to go to the U.K. - now, apparently they have moved it from Australia where I thought it was…hubby very patiently educated me as to where I could find the U.K. hope the post office is better at it than I am.

Sometimes it’s just downright embarrassing. Thank god my husband has developed this little sideways, you’re kidding glance instead of laughing like he used to.

Other thanthat, I can pretty much do anything if someone teaches me, except anything to do with heights or under water.

19

I can’t draw for shit, which is annoying because my mother and sister have talent in that area. My mom has artwork hanging on her walls that my sister made that looks like it could have come from a museum (at least a museum gift shop), but when I put paint to paper it looks like last place in a kindergarten art contest in a neighborhood with lots of tasty lead paint.

20

lets see, I cant do the following:

Sing, I like too, but no one should be subjected to my screeching.

Dancing, forget it…

Drawing, ha! I can’t even make stick figures look decent.

Cooking, well, lets say that DH has forbidden me from entering the kitchen for anything more than pouring a drink or cleaning.

Hair, makeup, fashion sense? Not at all…

Also, according to DH, I can’t drive either… but then he says that about all women :rolleyes: