I’d like to be able to do art. Just to draw or paint a picture that doesn’t look like something done by an elementary school student.
I’d also like to be able to play guitar. I can play a number of other musical instruments, I can sing, and I can read music. But for some reason, the guitar eludes me.
Musical ability. Not just as a technician reading music. Being able to create and write music. So I can pick up more chicks.
The ability to be multilingual. I have no natural ability to learn other languages. I would like to know at least one other fluently. So I can pick up more foreign chicks.
I also would love to be able to learn languages readily. I have been living in Montreal for over 43 years, have taken courses in French, have tried to speak it, etc., all to no avail. I still cannot understand a news report on the radio or have a coherent conversation. I took three years of German in college and still cannot speak that language either. Some people learn languages about as easily as I learn math.
Learning languages easily is the one I’d like too.
I am actually fairly good at it, but I’m sure I’d have been a lot better if I’d learnt languages as a young child - I didn’t start till I was 11 and then the lessons were terrible, thanks to a badly-behaved class and a teacher who was off sick most of the time, with cover teachers who didn’t actually speak the language; really I didn’t start till I was 16.
I lack this too, and I think it is actually something physical - a neurological disorder or something. I’ve worked on it a lot and have improved, but I’m still really terrible. Mind you, I’d probably weigh about a stone more if I didn’t always have to walk three times the distance to wherever I go. I build in substantial ‘getting lost’ time to my journeys.
I can do it sometimes, when the planets are lined up exactly right and my brain and mouth are in harmony. But most times, if I have to string six or seven words together, I will flub up somehow. When I listen to people speaking without stammering, mispronouncing, backtracking, and with normal intonation and speed, I am so envious I could die.
My brother-in-law is like that. He can fix anything, make anything, redo his bathroom over a weekend, repair his cars, stuff like that.
He is a very annoying person - he can fix anything, he makes a buttload of money at his job, he is good to my sister, great with his family and mine, and on top of that he is a genuinely nice person. So I can’t even resent him.
Perhaps we can swap. I can draw, and I’m working on learning French*, but I’d like to be able to read and play music. I’d also like to be sociable, able to do that small-talk thing and figure out in the moment what the appropriate social thing to do or not do is.
[sub]*I’m a sucker for a French accent. Of course, I am also a sucker for a Romanian accent, Russian accent, Scottish accent, Australian accent, Hungarian accent…[/sub]
This will sound like a joke answer, but it is true:
I’d like to be more skilled in dealing with the opposite sex.
It’s not a big issue for me now, being long married and not looking around, but, back when, I would have liked to have been better at meeting and interacting with women (in those days I would have said, “girls”). I get along with them fine – in fact, I was (and am) a considerable flirt – but I had no idea how to move beyond that to anything further. I still haven’t any idea.
I’ve had an OK number of relationships in the course of my life, but in almost all cases, I was asked out, rather than being the asker.
I don’t wish to have been a pick-up artist, but there were times when I wished I had at least a little game.
After thinking this over, the non-super ability I’d like is to be good in math. Really good. Fantastically good. Because I’ve always been crap at math and had to struggle with it, and it’s a basic skill these days.