What Are You Bad At?

I was just reminded of the time I took a ballroom dancing class and booooommmmmmbed because I am very bad at making my body do things that someone else tells me to do with my body. It would've been mortifying if I cared what anyone thought of my box step.

So what are you bad at?

Singing. I am absolutely atrocious and have no idea how to even try to improve. Whatever the innate talents/skills people have for singing, I have the exact opposite. I can't match pitch, can't sing in tune, can't hold a note. Just awful/

Drawing. I'll even fuck up a stick figure.

math

I'm multitalentless

Meeting new people
Talking while being recorded
Career planning

anything with a ball including kicking one, throwing one or catching one. If kids in the park ask me to kick the ball back for them I feign deafness so I don't nervously deliberate and kick it 40 yards in the wrong direction.

Playing drums. Just can't make my limbs work independently of each other and I drag a beat worse than Nick Mason.

Drawing.
DIY.
Gardening (though thats more down to laziness to be fair, that, and the fact that the garden was BHs domain .. )

Singing, cleaning, crafts, math, reading music, essentially everything that doesn't involve computers, drumming, or reading/writing.

posting

sportsball

Dancing, especially partner dancing. And those Zumba-type exercise classes where you follow the instructor's moves are a nightmare for me as well. I find it virtually impossible to follow other people's movements and replicate them, and I consistently go the exact opposite of the way I'm supposed to be going.

A couple of years ago my housemates convinced me to take a Lindy class, and I found that doable because I didn't have to imitate or mirror anyone, I just had to memorize a sequence of steps on my own and then learn the signals for when to execute them.

I'm also hopeless at team sports, though not individual ones. I can't seem to retain/understand the rules or follow the complex web of communication that's going on within the team.

same. at my gym you can see the entirety of any class going on and i look at it and i'm like "how?" also bad at team sports, especially volleyball.

i am bad at yoga

I am a well-below average driver.

I probably could learn to drive and a pass a driving test if they could cut me some slack by suspending all other vehicles from the roads while I do it.

Oh they get off the road voluntarily when they see my car coming

I particularly suck at baking, gardening and tying knots.

I don't know if I'm a bad driver exactly, but I may as well be because I'm scared of it. I can learn a particular route and be comfortable driving it, but add a new route/destination and it's like I'm back to being a student driver: hesitation, second-guessing, and a general sense of brain overload.

And when I'm driving in a city I need someone in the car with me to teach me a new route, which is maddening. It's so annoying to have to be like, "Yes, I know I've had my driver's license for twenty years, but I think I'll have to drive on the highway to get to my new job, so can you please babysit me as I do a trial run so I can learn how to get there?"

Cornhole. I apparently can’t throw a beanbag underhand and have it go anywhere near straight. Even my parents were kicking my ass. Incredibly embarrassing!

It really had me questioning what the hell is wrong with me, not being able to do this very basic thing!

Ditto x10 on career planning (so twenty times, I guess). Also:

-Making decisions of almost any kind whatsoever
-Executive functioning in general
-Sense of direction, reading maps
-Asking people for help
-Dating/romance/love/sex/intimacy
-For that matter, forging and sustaining meaningful relationships of any kind

- tying knots
- sailing (obv)
- cooking fish

basically i blame growing up in a landlocked state

Anything relating to the actual making of music. Can't sing, can't play any instrument worth a shit, can barely program a drum machine, get bored if asked to play the same sequence of sounds on a keyboard more than twice in a row.

Man, I can't dance, I can't sing, I can't draw, I can't comprehend statistics. But there are a lot of things I used to "can't" that I've since become pretty good at. Plumbing and repair stuff, math (helping the kids), cooking/baking, playing guitar (I can play drums, though), gardening. I've become a pretty good beer drinker and cocktail mixer.

organizing
cleaning
yard work

managing my emotions

caring about work

I was in scouting for something like 7 years and still don't know any knots. I've also avoided driving my entire life.

Things I'm pretty okay at: drawing, reading, getting obsessed with art/music/etc, not much else.

Drawing, concentrating

Sleeping

-Dating/romance/love/sex/intimacy
-For that matter, forging and sustaining meaningful relationships of any kind

― eatandoph (Neue Jesse Schule), Wednesday, August 11, 2021 6:32 PM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

I don't remember posting this. Related: making small talk of the sort that feeds relationships when you don't have something "important" to say.

In a similar vein: asking personal questions. I have an intense aversion to asking people about themselves directly, which is mainly a form of shyness I think but probably comes across as rudeness and/or lack of interest.

being lady sovereign

well random

Things I am bad at because I fucking hate doing them: cooking, math, team sports, the hypercapitalist rat race.

Things I am inherently bad at: singing, dancing, playing instruments, drawing.

I trust all these claims of being inherently bad at something only come after a decent amount of tuition and/or deliberate practice.

My dad can play 12 instruments. I can play 0
My mum can program in maybe 8-10 languages, I used to know basic and pascal but have forgotten both

By 'inherently' I mean: 'there's room for improvement, but the ceiling is bound to remain low'.

I had a private tutor for A-level maths, still managed to get 5% in the end of term mechanics exam, despite many hours of her patiently trying to get me to understand what differentiation is. Certainly felt like I was missing some important part of my brain as far as maths was concerned.

Yeah, for me I know I'm bad at something if I'm in a class with other people and they are clearly grasping it all much much quicker than I am, and I am producing results that seem like a five-year-old made them. I am bad at drawing, playing any musical instrument, sewing clothes, baking cakes. Which is a bit odd, because my handwriting is very neat, I can sing a bit, and I'm good at quilting and baking bread. Also terrible at maths and languages.

Parallel parking
Drawing

Yeah, for me I know I'm bad at something if I'm in a class with other people and they are clearly grasping it all much much quicker than I am

Yeah this seems a good working measure for me also

Now imagining someone taking a sleeping class and making slow progress compared to the others.

Never been the talker at a sleepover eh

cooking, pretty much any avenue of it. hopeless. and I live on my own. so it's an issue. yeah.

PUBG too, terrible at it. Tried playing duo's with my mate, he's shit too though so.

time to boast a little bit here, but when I was a btec textile design student my tutor said I was most naturally talented student he'd ever taught. When we went on a week long plen air drawing trip to Hebden Bridge he was raving on about my sketchbooks to colleagues. But he also said I'd never amount to shit because my personal organisational skills were appalling and I couldn't follow a design brief and develop and progress ideas to a final finished piece and he was completely correct. If I was born a couple of hundred years ago I might have been one of the good impressionists but instead I'm the Mike Yardwood of nothingness!

xp story of my life and so glad I've settled down and (fingers crossed) never have to do dating again.

xp my 6-year-old has been trying to whistle for a year, and after losing his two front teeth, suddenly he can do it.
Not that I'm suggesting you try that.

I couldn't write an eight-legged essay or design a workable brick gothic cathedral. But I can sure down beers and tell people I don't like to go fuck themselves. If only I could get paid for that!

thought that said "drown bears" for a second, where the fuck did I put my glasses?

I would attempt to drown a Bear Grylls just to test his survival skills

Bears glugs "why?" to me

Now jim has me worried i cant do any of those things either

I am bad at dancing too! That’s because I hate dancing, I’m terrified of dancing, and also dancing is dumb and I look dumb if I try to dance. Fuck dancing!

tbrr this is a big part of why I don’t like weddings.

*clears throat* shouldn't it be "At What Are You Bad?"

there is nothing much more grotesque than weddings and funerals

actually funerals are mostly better than weddings

lol I didn't even go to my dad's funeral cos I was watching a playoffs game in the pub

*clears throat* shouldn't it be "At What Are You Bad?"

Ending conversations

harbl knows very well this is pure superstition, based on arrant pedantry, promoted by petty grammarians who idolized Cicero

drawing
continuing with things I have no immediate aptitude for
learning languages (see above)
haggling/demanding things from people

Directions
Mental arithmetic (especially simple subtractions)

For many years, I've organized my life around avoiding things that I (or someone else) judged I did badly, and now I don't know the difference between not wanting to do something and not being good at doing something.

actually funerals are mostly better than weddings

― calzino

Because there's less dancing at funerals?

And you're not spoiling the day by going round with a big miserable face on you.

xp

I've never been to a good wedding and I think every one I've been to has ended in divorce. And grieving and sadness>>>nausea and boredom.

Id not chooae between a good wedding and a good funeral, a bad wedding is better than a bad funeral mind

worst wedding I ever went to was when my auntie married this guy known as Yellow Eddie (he worked in a dye factory and looked like a yellow corpse) and I can't remember which stupid religion she'd converted to but the strongest drink there was appletiser.

lmao @ yellow eddie

Eddie Yeller, worst pearl jam cover bandember ever

yellow edbetter

I’m bad at a lot of things but the one that’s most annoying is:
Telling any kind of story

The worst part is that I constantly forget this, try to tell a story (a thing that happened, an interesting article I read, a great movie I watched) and either get flustered bc my timeline is off or confused bc I forget all the relevant details (even tho I think I know the details when I start off). Basically I have a shit memory. It makes me a terrible conversationalist.

If I may, is it really a memory thing, or a social anxiety thing?

Bad at:
Most sports
Most visual arts and crafts
No good at couples/ballroom dancing

Will chime in and echo the point that there really is no such thing as "bad at yoga". It's something you practice and you do what's right for your own body. There's no prize for being super flexible.

can’t really draw, apparently i showed aptitude for it when i was young but i got really discouraged by a bad elementary school art teacher. plus i got a slight tremor in my hand so everything comes out gnarled

can’t cook but i’m working on it

good at pretty much everything else j/k not really

also bad at being aware of when i’m suppressing my own needs

re: cooking, i have a lot of lingering trauma centered around fucking up in the kitchen, so every time i cook it is like a really intense therapy session, with all the good and bad that implies

I'm exactly the same. I still do it, but I hate it oh so much.

I can't stay in tune when I sing.
I am bad at making small talk for more than two minutes.
I am bad at home repair types of tasks.
I am bad at dressing up for any special occasion.
I am bad at observing the social niceties, like sending thank you notes.

I had a bad elementary school music teacher who convinced me I'd never be able to sing and there was no point in trying. The result is that I can't sing in front of anyone without going way off pitch from nervousness, though I can carry a tune when I'm by myself.

Xps to james

I’d say it’s 75% shit memory 25% social anxiety. It’s def worse with ppl I don’t know well but also I’ll read a super interesting article about something, be really excited to tell my husband about it, forget every important part of the story, and then just end up sending him the link

Thanks to Singstar which shows you how in tune you are (and scores accordingly) I know I can sing in tune, but still at Karaoke or when trying to play guitar & sing I can be utterly clueless as to whether I'm in the right key or not.

I am bad at writing interesting or insightful things about books & music I love.

I am bad at knowing if I've met people before, so I often don't introduce myself as it would be weird and rude to do it to people I've already met - of course if I haven't met them then they probably think me rude for not doing so, plus I never learn who they are. Happens a lot with my wife's large family, any random subset of which may be at a given social event.

Xp
I used to sing constantly as a lil kid, it was my favorite thing in the world, but my family relentlessly made fun of how bad and annoying it was so by the time I was maybe 8-10yo I wouldn’t (and still won’t) even sing happy birthday. What makes me mad is that if I’d joined a choir a something and gotten a little bit of vocal training from a young age I could’ve had a perfectly adequate singing voice, and I would’ve gotten a lot of years of joy out of it. Rationally, I know my voice isn’t horrific (it’s not *good* but it’s not ear splitting) but irrationally, I’m deeply self conscious about it and can only sing in front of my husband.

xp how are you with dancing about architecture though?

Maintaining my composure while observing cheating from refs

I am bad at knowing if I've met people before, so I often don't introduce myself as it would be weird and rude to do it to people I've already met - of course if I haven't met them then they probably think me rude for not doing so, plus I never learn who they are.

hello, me!

Yeah, I have this too… I have a very strong memory on certain areas, but I’m crap at recognising faces and remembering names of people I don’t know well, and err on the side of caution, preferring to avoid embarrassment over causing offence.

Also, if moving one's toes independently of one another is a thing, I'm bad at that too

Is this really something most people can do? I've never given any thought to it but I can only move the big toe separately; the others move as a unit. I'm sometimes able to use my toes to grasp and lift something I dropped, which is pretty much all I ask of my toes.

oh yeah i’m very bad at remembering names or associating them with faces. even friends i’ve known for close to a decade, their name will suddenly disappear from my mind

Taking a compliment

I thought you were very good at that!

BOO

Going to sleep at a decent hour

*clears throat* shouldn't it be "At What Are You Bad?"

― criminally negligible (harbl), Thursday, August 12, 2021 6:16 PM (two days ago) bookmarkflaglink

That is the sort of pedantry up with which I will not put.