This morning I went to the dentist, and discovered that I’m still 100% cavity-free. Completely unimportant (and, to be honest, probably more related to good teeth genes than anything else), yet I get a small amount of irrational pride from it.
Another one: I’m female, and I still haven’t gotten my ears pierced. I don’t wear jewelry much, so it was just something that never seemed to be important enough to go out of my way to do; nowadays, getting them pierced would feel like I was . . . breaking a streak, somehow.
Anyway, I’m sure other people have plenty of these things. Show us your inner narcissist!
Same here! I’m 42, and in spite of my slapdash approach to dental hygiene and my having grown up without drinking much fluoridated water, I have never had a cavity. By rights, my mouth should resemble a handful of pea gravel. But I’m proud of my unearned good fortune, and I will be sad if I ever have to get any dental work done.
I tend to pay a lot of attention to directions and landmarks when I have to navigate somewhere for the first time (which I’ve been doing a lot of since I moved to a new city a few months ago). I always take an unreasonable amount of pride in being able to get back to that place the next time without having to look up directions.
I’m with Asimovian. I am blessed with a naturally good sense of direction. I don’t get lost or turned around. And that was even before I moved to Denver where I have the mountains to guide me.
For no reason I can imagine, I can almost always make myself understood AND almost always make sense of what someone is trying to tell me, even when we don’t speak the same language at all.
To my mind, this is much more useful than having a second language!
I’m athletically gifted. I take an inordinate amount of pride in hearing “Are you sure you’ve never [golfed/skiied/your sport of choice here] before??” the first time I try something. It’s not anything I’m doing, it’s just genetics, but still.
I’m very, very good at reading subtext and seeing the underlying motivations and issues behind people’s actions. I pat myself on the back for it, but it does make me feel a bit like an observant zookeeper sometimes.
I have really beautiful eyes. Again, I did nothing to get them, aside from having the right parents, but I’m proud of them regardless.
I’m not an academic, not a researcher, not a mathematician, so it has absolutely no bearing or benefit in my life, but my Erdos number is 3. I blundered into it in college. 100% undeserved, yet there it is.
I can balance a broom, bristle-side up, on my hand.
And then I can toss it to my other hand.
And then I can balance it on my nose.
And sometimes I can balance a yardstick on one hand, throw it in the air so it spins end over end, and catch it balancing on the other end.
There’s a fraction where you put the amount of work you’ve put into developing a skill on top, and the utility of the skill on bottom. My value with the broom trick is through the goddamned roof.
I haven’t cut my hair for 16 years (half my life), and I get compliments on it regularly, despite paying it no attention greater than washing and brushing.
Somewhat similarly, I’ve never used a GPS. Not that I am “Luddite-proud” of that fact; it’s just that all I seem to need to do is to look at a map before I leave, and I can remember turns and streets and whatnot, in order to get where I’m going.
Like Asimovian, I do take note of landmarks, and use them. In the early part of our relationship, it freaked my ex-wife out a little when we were driving someplace I hadn’t been for years, to hear me say something like, “You want some coffee? In a couple of blocks, there’s a gas station, where we can turn right; then, about three blocks down, there’s a Tim Hortons.” She got used to it eventually, and trusted me, but in those early days of our relationship, she was, “How do you remember this?”
In a humor site’s photoshop/macro contest a few months back, I didn’t win…but in the comments section, one surprised reader not only said that the subject of my entry, The Black Cauldron from 1985, was a Disney movie they’d never heard of before, and had promptly ordered, but that they were going to start reading Lloyd Alexander’s The Chronicles of Prydain, the book series the movie was adapted from, since it sounded so intriguing (and especially, as other commenters noted, they were notably better than what ended up on film).
Someone—that I’d never even met—read a book, that they might never have even encountered otherwise, because of me. And it sounded like they might really enjoy it, too.
It was one of the most oddly proudest moments of this bookworm’s life.
I’m proud of my google fu. I don’t do anything I think is too remarkable, but I seem to find some obscure stuff for people, on the SDMB and beyond, quite quickly.
I can back up a trailer (gooseneck or bumper pull) like nobody’s business. Well, 99% of the time I can. Every once in a while (and it seems it’s always when someone’s watching) something goes horribly wrong and it takes me 257 tries to get it where it needs to be.
I can spell almost anything. I can’t reliably add 2+2 without a calculator, and I don’t type well, but I can spell!
I’m the fastest stocker in my store, despite being a manager. Like, grab a box with one hand, flip it in one motion, one-handed, to the correct position while walking to the item’s location, microseconds eyeballing the “home” to see if it’ll fit, open the box bare-handed, items on the shelf in a couple of seconds, punch and flatten the box, and move on. When I was a stocker, I could do 20 hours’ worth of freight in 5. Last night I did 15 hours while monitoring my supercenter, straightening every feature in the store, ran register for three hours, and got all overstock binned in both general-merchandise and grocery areas. I know the location of every item in the store, and don’t need to open a box to figure out what’s inside. I’m really, really good in retail. (Funny thing, since I’m trained in pure mathematics and really don’t like retail.)
I do enjoy it when people who know retail see me going and comment. Last night, a couple of grocery stockers were near me, and commented when I passed by: “you stock like you’re Neo in The Matrix.”
Oh, and I love lording it over my much younger fellow manager the women whom I date. He’s a handsome small-town fellow who is at sea in dating in his new home, the “big city” (or to me, the medium-sized metro of Indianapolis). I look like a cross between Sheldon and Leonard. Then he meets my flings, and gets really ticked off.
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