Sunday, October 20, 2013

On the plus side, I'm considerably better at mixing a gimlet with fresh lime juice and homemade simple syrup, so there's that.

Skills You Would Think a Person Would Get Better at Over Time But Which I Am Actually Getting Worse At, as the Years Go By: A Partial List

--Parking: I really hope the people whose house my school drop-off secret ninja parking spot is in front of aren't interested in creating a video that will get six billion hits on YouTube, because damn, a supercut of day after day of me hitting the curb (to find out where it is), pulling forward a bit, reversing, hitting it again (even with the back-up camera in this hi-tone vehicle), leaning out of the passenger-side window to check how close I am, starting over, forward, backward, forward, backward, sideways, up ONto the actual curb, crazy angles, eventually winding up 23 inches from the curb with the front way farther out than the rear end and deciding fuck this, it's good enough for the next fifteen minutes, then hustling my kid out (because we're now late enough to have missed Flag Salute again) ... would be an entertaining entry in the Bad Lady Drivers Being Mocked By Misogynist Dudebros genre.

--Cracking eggs: I've been cracking eggs for thirty-two years now, and I always did an OK job, very rarely got a shell in there, didn't have a problem getting the contents to their intended receptacle and ONLY to their intended receptacle, the waste looked pretty much like two halves of an egg, emptied -- but over the last few years, I've slowly devolved into the agonized, disgusted and hopeless "before" actor in an infomercial for something that ought to get its own post on The Worst Things for Sale.

--Skiing: My richest friend('s parents) took me and four other girls via private jet to New Mexico when we were in fifth grade, and paid for a week of semi-private skiing lessons for all of us. We put in full days on the slopes -- like opening-to-closing hours. I learned, and I loved it, and it was awesome. Over the years, I went a half dozen more times, mostly with church groups (although there was one notable trip with Berwie and her dad, where we spent all our non-skiing time in front of the fire in the cabin, reading Sassy, drinking instant coffee, and trying to figure out how to get guys and/or liquor, with a 0% success rate on my part) -- I got even better, and still loved it. Then there was a gap of about ten years where I didn't get to go at all, for various reasons financial and geographical, but on my first trip to Tahoe after we'd moved to California, I picked it right back up again -- exactly where I left off. Little did I know that that would be the pinnacle, from which I would forever slide, cursing, out of control, unable even to pizza-pie my stupid skis, sweating and glaring and eventually huffing back up with one ski on before falling all the way back down in an ungraceful wet heap.

Labels: , , , , ,

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home