Stupid things you ought to know how to do, but don't

Type with more than four fingers.

Juggling seems simple. Can’t.

Can’t dance.

Navigate Usenet. Tried, can’t.

Iron dress shirts.

Use tiny-ass cell phones. Also, can’t text-message for shit.

I can’t cross my eyes. There’s a point at which I stop being able to focus on things (e.g. friends’ fingers, those bastards), so it’s not just that I need to practice.

I can’t blow bubbles (with bubble gum).

It hurts to snap my fingers more than once or twice, and I have to practice a little beforehand every time.

I can’t roll my Rs.

Tying neckties properly.

You’d think that since I have a fetish for neckties, I would know how to do it. ::smackhead::

Can’t dance, can’t ice skate.

Never driven a motorcycle. Too chicken to try and fail.

I can’t swim, despite hours of patient professional instruction and untold hours of not so patient instruction from my father. I can’t whistle with my fingers. I can’t clean house (though this is partly because I don’t seem to be bothered by a messy house). I can’t eat anything remotely messy without leaving a lot of crumbs behind on my plate. I can’t make a decent pie crust, though in general I’m an excellent baker and cook. (I’m very glad that ready-made frozen pie crusts are widely available at reasonable prices.) I have absolutely NO sense of direction, which means that I always have to allow for an extra half-hour to two hours to travel to a new place.

Curling the sides? That’s genetic, so no worries. I can’t do it either.

I cannot:

[ol]
[li]Whistle.[/li][li]Play any musical instrument.[/li][li]Tie a necktie in less than about half an hour with instructions in front of me.[/li][li]Dance.[/li][li]Snap my fingers.[/li][li]Plenty of other things I can’t think of.[/li][/ol]
I also don’t know that freaking days-in-the-months mnemonic.

I can’t swim, despite three years of swimming lessons.

I can’t sew, despite three years of 4-H and two years of Home Ec.

I can’t wink; I try, but I just blink.

I can’t tell right from left without holding my hands out in front of me and seeing which hand makes an L with my thumb and index finger.

I can’t do a cartwheel, despite two years of gymnastics lessons.

I can’t roller-skate, although I’m not bad on ice skates.

I can’t drive a stick-shift, either. I’ve been taught to, dozens of times. Still don’t get it, and still can’t do it.

I can’t whistle like normal people, but I can if I do it breathing in instead of out. No tune, but a whistling sound.

Can’t woo women.
Can’t roll my R’s

I don’t know how to mop. My family uses a Swiffer thingy, so I never had the oppertunity to learn.

Drive a manual car
Open my eyes under water
Care about the outcome of any sporting contest

Tie a shoelace. :o

Seriously, when I was little I learned a totally different way than most people do. My way involves the normal cross-over of the laces, but skips the whole “overunderaroundandthrough” thing people teach. I just make two loops and go from there.

Another non finger snapper here. Never learned how.

I can’t roll my R’s either. Neither can elfbabe. Which is sad for her, as she’s been working on attaining actual fluency in Spanish. For me, it just means I cannot adopt certain outrageous accents, you cheesy lot of second-hand electric donkey bottom biters!

I can’t do the musical instrument thing either, despite all those lessons back in the 4th grade on the bassoon!

I can’t sing either, but I do! :smiley:

I used to be completely unable to roll my R’s. Since my Phonetics class requires me to be able to actually produce most of the sounds on the IPA chart, I was dreading being the only one in the class unable to do it. So with patient instruction from three of my R-rolling classmates and several hours making very odd noises and drawing mid-sagittal diagrams to figure out where my tongue was supposed to go, I managed to learn how to do it.

I still don’t do it well, nor can I voice it properly, but by Og I can roll my R’s for the first time in my life.

I cannot, however, dive. Every attempt to learn has resulted in nothing but painful belly flops and once I damn near threw my back out.

A few random things I cannot do, but know I should:
[ul]
[li] Swimming[/li][li] Wrapping a gift[/li][li] Driving a stick shift[/li][li] Juggling[/li][li] Crossing my eyes[/li][li] Whistling by sticking two fingers in the mouth[/li][li] Performing simple repairs on anything (cars, computers, etc.)[/li][li] Folding a shirt[/li][li] Get a girlfriend and stay with her for more than two months[/li][/ul]

Drive a stick.

Skate or rollerblade (which sucked in middle school because the cool place to hang out at was the skating rink :(. And I was too embarrassed to go there to get lessons.)

Dance. At all. I’ve even had other people tell me that I cant dance.

I have a friend who makes me feel a whole lot better though. Last night she asked me no less than 3 times to help her make tea. I told her that all you did was pour hot water over a tea bag but no, she couldn’t figure out, and she had never made tea before. Oh and she’s 19.

When i was typing it I thought it was called gleeting…then I looked up gleet in the dictionary and I was pretty sure that isn’t what we called it.

Like many others, I can’t drive stick. I know how, and I can drive fine to be honest—but I haven’t had much practice at it. I can’t pull out smoothly, and I have stalled Dad’s truck a total of 8 times trying to pull into a certain driveway, a maneouver I’ve tried twice and never managed. On the other hand, at least I haven’t put his truck in the ditch yet :smack:

I can’t convert Celcuis to Farenheit either. C’mon you 'Merkins, just switch to Celsius already and make it easier on all of us :wink:

Whistle. I can barely get a pitch out, and forget about a tune.

Attract guys I’d actually consider dating, who are actually single. Managed it once, and botched that job.

Also can’t roll my R’s. And it’s time for wre…wuh…row…that Tim Horton’s contest again.

Realise something sounds stupid before I say it. Worst part is, even when I do think before I speak, it isn’t until I actually hear the words that I go ‘D’oh! Stupid thing to say…’

And most annoying of all–hold people’s attention. I feel pretty much invisible most of the time, and I’ve literally sat in a guys field of view (not in his direct line of sight, but he should have seen me sitting down) for five minutes before he noticed me. Weird anecdote: I’m really used to this by now. I hate it, but I’m used to it. Last year, when we were studying for our final exam, I started to explain something. I knew that the person I was talking to was listening, and figured that was good enough and didn’t expect the other people to take notice (They were talking amongst themselves). Well, they did, and I was so surprised at it that I completely forgot what I was saying. “Why are you all looking at me?” “Well, you were talking.”

Snap my fingers with my right hand. I can snap loud and clear with the left. Righty just sorta flails around as though searching for a hope.

Understand the concept of notes. I can (could) read musical notation, play the piano, etc. I can hear the difference between high and low registers. I just don’t understand the concept of Middle Cs and F sharps. I know intellectually they’re different sounds, but I don’t understand it in a deeper sense.

Do any math beyond adding and subtracting. I made it all the way through elementary, through high school, 1 1/2 years of college, without being able to multiply and divide.

On the other hand I can roll my R’s and I can raise both eyebrows independantly of one another, so don’t feel too bad for me. :slight_smile:

Whistle at all. I’ve never managed to make it work. I’m a fairly serious amateur brass player, and I can play the Coke bottle (or even the flute - barely). Countless attempts at whistling have all been dismal failures.

Back up while towing a trailer. Now, this is probably down to practice, as I’ve only had a couple of opportunities. However, the learning curve seemed steeper for me than perhaps it should be - time spent practicing in a parking lot, for example, resulted in no noticeable improvement.

Float on my back. I’m quite comfortable in the water, and can swim just fine. I don’t know if I have buoyancy issues regarding the back float, or what, but my legs just sink, and I wind up flailing.

I seem to recall that we called this lurching, but I’m not sure. Dammit, that’s another thing I never mastered, except the occasional accidental occurence that I could not reproduce at will. :smack: