I am another with absolutely no sense of direction, and I get lost very easily. Several years ago, I just started including “get lost” time. So if I live 20 minutes away from the place I need to be, instead of leaving 20 minutes before the appointment, I’ll leave 35-40 minutes. Sure, sometimes I get there early and have to wait around, but that’s better than being late. Most of the time (80% at least) I need my built-in get lost time. I’m not exaggerating.
I’m a bit better here in SLC, but only a bit. First, it’s agrid system, and since I can count, that helps a lot. Second, I always know which way is north and which way is east (the capital building and the big mountains). But hell, I just got lost driving to somebody’s house on Thursday, and his address was 1111 S 111 E (not really those numbers). All I had to do was drive west 8 blocks and south 15…
I can’t really cook either. I won’t kill anybody with my food, but it’s certainly not a treat to eat it.
It must be handy having addresses that actually indicate where in the city the house is. Get a British address like “2b Honeysuckle Close”, or even worse “Manor Cottage, The Street” and you’re snookered if you don’t know the locality.
One common skill I do not have is the ability to carry a tune. At all. I don’t mean “I don’t have a great singing voice”, I mean “I cannot reproduce a desired note to within an octave, except by accident”. I’m not tone deaf, by any stretch of the imagination - I can hear the right note in my head, and I can recognise the right note if I do ever stumble upon it by accident, or someone else sings it, but my vocal cords just don’t respond to reproduce the right sound.
Even just trying to produce enough of a tune to tell someone what song I mean is virtually impossible. Just the other day my fiancee and I were discussing wedding music. She looked at a list of possibilities and asked “How does that one go?” I knew the song perfectly and could hear it in my head, but trying to sing it or even hum it to her was never going to work. Very frustrating.
Ooh, I forgot that one. I can’t shuffle either. I don’t actually drop the things, but making two halves of a deck slide into one another may as well be trying to make two halves of a brick do the same, for me. And yes, I’ve tried relaxing my grip and all the rest of it, but to no avail.
As for the whistling, I can whistle a tune but I can’t do the shrill two-finger taxi whistle. My dad tells the story of the young son of a friend of his who was trying to learn how to do this. He kept trying, but couldn’t make any sound. He still kept trying and trying until he started to try it almost unconsciously, out of habit. Well, one day he finally cracked it and let out an ear-piercing whistle. In church.
I have a horrible time with spelling. I love to read and people say I write well but when it comes to spelling its just not pretty. Even words that are spelled right look wrong to me. I once gave a character in an online RPG I payed a speech impediment just so I wouldn’t have to run every sentence through spell check.
That reminds me of another. I cannot fold shirts. Never have been able to. I see people do it in shops in about three seconds, without even a flat surface to lay the shirt on. Magic! I can just about get a half-passable folded shirt after about six attempts, if I can lay it on the bed while I’m doing it, but I still know that by the time I take it out of the suitcase it’ll look it’s been screwed up in a ball and sat on.
I can’t drive a stick. My fiance tried to teach me, but we agreed to forget it for the good of the relationship. (It worked, as we’ve been married 20 years last week.)
I can’t parallel park.
I can’t process verbal directions if they’re multi-step, and if you spell a word to me, I have to write it down to figure it out if it’s more than 3 or 4 letters.
I can’t make a pie. Cake, yes. Cookies, brownies, anything else you could ever want. Pie? No.
I can do almost anything you ask me to, but I cannot wrap presents. I have tried, and tried, and tried to learn. There are things I can’t do because I can’t be bothered (my handwriting’s terrible, but only because I don’t care) or haven’t learned (how to fly fish) but I am confident I could if I tried.
But wrapping presents is like a mental block to me. I can do other, similar tasks. But, for some reason, I cannot wrap a present. It ends up being a tangle of paper and scotch tape with 30% of the present still visible, no matter how hard I try, and I try all the time.
I have a disability I’ve never heard of anyone else having: I can’t switch between gender pronouns midsentence, nor from the pronoun to its possessive form. If I tell a story about a guy and a girl, it’s hopeless. My hes and hers and theirs and its and shes get so tangled up that I just intentionally streamline the characters to one gender: “He went to her house to meet her mother with them.” comes out as “He went to his house to meet his mother with him.” I rely on context to clarify. The error originates in the brain, not the tongue. For some reason, I can’t congitivly tell what idea the, say, third pronoun is supposed to express without stopping to untangle my brain. Hilarity ensues.
