Oh so many things, but I’ll just reveal the top two on my mind lately…
I’ve been told by many that I’m really good at dealing with children – so good that at least two former girlfriends were very open about wanting to marry me because (among other reasons) they thought I would make an excellent father, so good that when I was teaching karate I started with the kids class (as all new teachers do) and kept getting assigned back to it because parents and kids liked my methods more than the dozens who were assigned the class after me, so good that various people have stated, “It’s a pity you have no kids of your own; you should consider volunteering for Big Brothers!”
No. Really, really, no. I shouldn’t volunteer, I wouldn’t consider it.
I HATE kids.
Yeah, everybody says, “Well, you were once a kid!” but that must have been centuries ago and it certainly only lasted a few minutes at most and I quickly got better. I can’t stand kids. I hate trying to think down to their level. I hate their lack of patience and I really really REALLY hate their whining and screaming and crying when they don’t get what they want and just plain don’t understand why.
So I don’t think down to their level and I don’t put up with their impatience and I never tolerate whining and screaming and crying. And tons of kids who have been able to express themselves decently (and some whom I’ve met years later at times when they had acquired the vocabulary to express themselves properly) have told me some variant of, “Thank you for [whatever times I interacted with him/her]. I think I really did well because you treated me like a person rather than a little kid.”
Yeah, sure. But that doesn’t mean I enjoyed any of those times.:eek:
Apparently I am phenomenal at hanging signs and pictures just right. When I worked at the movie theater, I would set up the letters on the signs over the doors [called a “marquee”) to the screening rooms (each one is called a “house”) and the titles would be perfectly centered. My wife is an artist and likes her abodes to be like galleries, but every time we have moved, she has left the pictures off the walls until I was done with other set-up duties, leaving the picture-hanging task to me. For each picture I’ll measure the space, measure the picture, divide by halves and thirds and remainders and so-on, use levels and laser-levels and story-sticks and calculators and spend hours getting everything to fit just perfectly – perfect height, perfect centering, perfect alignment, perfect balance. My wife and various house guests have repeatedly said, “You could do that professionally!”
No, I couldn’t.
Nobody would pay me to spend two hours hanging one picture. Nobody would pay what I’d charge per-hour for hanging pictures because I’d intentionally charge so much that it would drive away business. Nobody would pay what I’d charge per-job for hanging pictures because they’d watch me and think I was dragging the job out way too long with all my tools and gadgets and calculations. There’s currently (19 October 2017) a thread in Cafe Society about You couldn’t pay me to attend… and, similarly, you couldn’t pay me enough to hang pictures for a living. I’ve done it for my girlfriend (now my wife) because I love her and I consider it one of those honeydo things that a handyman does for his partner. But it’s a tediously detailed and excruciatingly exacting task and even I realize that it really doesn’t have to be so grueling. It’s only a mountainous mission because I can’t get past my own obsessive/compulsive disorder and let things just be; I have to have things balanced – and not just balanced well enough, but truly geometrically mathematically balanced. And, for hanging pictures, that’s exactly what my wife wants, otherwise she would just hang the pictures herself and we would really both treat them as, “Hey, if that’s where you want it, it’s good enough!” and never give them more consideration.
And even she knows I hate doing it – and yet she leaves the task to me because the pictures really do look damned good when I’m done. 
Fortunately, we believe we’re done moving.
—G!