Wednesday, March 11, 2020

Challenge: A Skill I Lack

This is part of the weekly Blogging Challenge over at Long and Short Reviews. If you'd like to participate, you can find the prompts here. They also put up a post every Wednesday where you go and link your response -- and see everyone else's. Check out their homepage to find it.

The challenge for this week is One Skill I Wish I Had But Don't.

This is a bit tricky to answer, because one of the things I've always considered valuable is that I generally pick things up fairly quickly. I'm currently covering three major software systems at work, for example, and I'm almost completely self-trained on all three of them. But that, of course, is software.

And then there are skills that I used to have, but I've let lapse. I used to be conversational-bordering-on-fluent in Spanish, for example. (Academic, Castillian Spanish, though, which is not as useful here in Texas as you might think.) I used to be reasonably skilled at martial arts, and I wish I still was -- but of course, that's something I could start learning again, if I was really serious about it.

The ones that I think best qualify are, oddly, skills that I fairly deliberately avoided in my youth: music and dance. I can't do either.

I don't sing; my singing voice is horrible. (No, seriously. Milk sours. Church bells crack. Livestock falls down dead, and crops are blighted. It's bad.) I don't play any instruments, despite my parents' best efforts: I had a year each of piano, guitar, and harmonica. Which is completely absurd, since my father is the most intrinsically musical person you will ever meet in your life. And, of course, I don't dance -- mainly because I'm embarrassingly bad at it, and there's no way to learn how to dance without showing off just how completely unskilled I am at it.

So, I mean, in both cases it would be nice to know how, as long as I didn't have to go through the process of learning it. Does that make any sense, or is it as perfectly ridiculous as it sounds?

5 comments:

  1. I didn't know you used to be (almost) fluent in Spanish. That's so cool!

    My <a href="https://lydiaschoch.com/wednesday-weekly-blogging-challenge-one-skill-i-wish-i-had-but-dont/”>post</a>.

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  2. And I'm impressed by the skills you still have (or haven't used in some time), Michael! :)

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  3. I grew up where dancing was about just doing your own thing. Then disco ruined a good thing. https://pmprescott.blogspot.com/2020/03/wednesday-challenge-031120.html

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  4. Disco ruined a lot of things. But there's no crime in not being able to sing or dance. Some just aren't meant to do it. My grandmother can't carry a tune in a bucket and swears she's a great singer. IMHO it's better to know you can't than to think you can and it's awful. But go you on Spanish. I'm trying to teach tot to speak it so he'll do better at school. So far... it's not great.

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  5. Sounds perfectly understandable to me, Michael! I am very jealous of your computer skills though. Most of us are bad dancers but it doesn't matter. As long as you're having fun then it's all good.

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