Relatively Useless Skills

It’s been a week full of the stuff of life around here. Pretty exhausting stuff. I’d love to be transforming the many things in my head into fantastically entertaining posts, but the demands on my brain have been elsewhere. As you can plainly see, I have not even attempted to come up with a more clever title for this post. Too. Hard.

However.

A list of ten random things I can do? Ten things that in the larger scheme of things are relatively useless skills? That I can handle. Here they are:

1. I can squirt a stream of water from between two cupped hands. This is a fascinating trick. My uncles used to do it to all of us cousins when we were paddling around in our Grandparents’ swimming pool. “Come here, I want to show you something,” they’d say. So we’d swim over to see what they had in their hands…a fish? a bug? SQUIIIIIIIRT! Nope, water in the face. Every time. After about the hundredth time one of them sprayed me, I vowed I would learn how and exact my revenge. Haven’t had the occasion to get one of the uncles, yet, but I’m teaching Kidzilla how to do it. Stealth weapon.

2. I can chop wood with my bare hands. Seriously. I hold (nearly) a second degree black belt in Karate and I know how to do the wood-breaking thing. It’s not like I’m called upon to do this very often. OK, never. But if I ever have to split some boards? I know how.

3. I can make my Sister crack up simply by picking up a particular well-loved stuffed bear. Why? Because if I do, it will be only a matter of seconds until that bear starts talking. He is a funny little bear and we spent many an hour entertaining Super Sister when she was a little girl.

4. I can raise my right eyebrow without raising the left. It’s a very handy and often very effective communication tool. Sometimes you just can’t say what you’d like to in a meeting, but the eyebrow works. It is also possible to render a teenager immobile or at least make him or her reconsider the action they were just considering in the hallway between classes.

5. I can wiggle my ears. Better yet, I can wiggle my left ear all by its lonely little self. This is a much weirder and less useful skill. Good for starting conversation and entertaining young children, but otherwise fairly useless.

6. I can recite things like the preamble to the United States Constitution, random sections of the Declaration of Independence, and the Gettysburg Address on demand. I can not remember what I had for lunch most days, but if it’s United States historical documents you want, I’m your girl.

7. I can sing the lyrics to a ridiculous number of songs from a wide spread of decades without much thought. I grew up listening to music of all eras and styles and I guess once they’re in my brain, they are there forever.

8. I can also recognize most songs in very few notes. Remember the old game show “Name that Tune”? If they ever bring that back, I’m auditioning. This, along with the previous random skill, often causes me to get a song stuck in my head without much prompting.

9. I can sleep through an English literature class without being detected. Well, at least I could in high school. I don’t know if I can still do this. I think it might be a bad idea to try it. At the very least, I suspect it’s much more difficult to do when you are on the other side of the podium. I do know that I can still make use of this skill in meetings, seminars, and workshops without trying too hard.

10. I can find a way to insert a quote from the movie Steel Magnolias into just about any situation or conversation. Somehow, a quote from this gem of a film (the original, please, not the recent Lifetime TV remake) is always appropriate.

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