Ignore the title of this post. It has very little to do with the actual content of the entry. However, I’m suddenly getting really good at perfecting titles which actually attract random readers to my completely not helpful but hopefully entertaining blog, via Google search terms of desperation.
Sitting at Panera this morning, unsuccessfully attempting to connect to the alleged “Free Wifi,” I overheard a woman behind me saying to another woman, “…well, you’re right. And if you don’t like it you shouldn’t do it, because you’ll never be good at something you don’t like to do.”
At the risk of commenting completely out of context, but because I was afraid to do this in person, to this statement I would like to publicly declare: bullshit.
My first internal reaction was this, “That’s not true. I happen to loathe vacuuming and cleaning the bathroom, yet, I keep my house cleaner than most people I know. And, no one can get my bathrooms as clean as I can, except perhaps my own mother, who also hates cleaning her pristine house.”
But then I sat there thinking (while the Internet failed to connect and my tea was still too hot to drink) and realized this was quite possibly the worst piece of advice I’ve ever overheard. And to prove it, I composed a mental list.
Things I Don’t Particularly Enjoy, But Am Good at Nonetheless:
- Clean my house.
- Teach classrooms full of unruly (and possibly borderline asshole) teenagers the importance of literacy, THEN, actually get them to read books and write complete sentences by themselves.
- My hair. (Some people might argue that this is a stretch, that I have naturally good hair that just doesn’t take much work look good. Admittedly, I would have agreed with this, right up until I had children, and instead of going gray, as they say, I’m going curly. Slowly. Also, I only shower a couple days a week, so trust me, good hair is work, and I manage it with despondency.)
- Be nice to people who I don’t like.
- Run (and anything else remotely “athletic”).
- Cook.
This list might be a work in progress, but for now, this is all I can remember from my half-hearted musings while attempting to keep my cool about the lack of Internet for my two and half hours of scheduled work time away from home this morning. Ah yes, #6: have a morning of actual productivity even when the Internet doesn’t connect.
The UnderToad 