Wednesday Writing Assignment: Thursday Edition
Most of spend a good bit of our time trying to disguise or distract from what we think are our personal flaws. We'll wear this instead of that, if it emphasizes (or deemphasizes) this or that; we'll put this on our faces to cover that up; we won't watch a basketball game with a new friend who loves basketball if we ourselves know nothing about the game; we'll change the subject if German opera comes up, if our lack of knowledge of German opera embarrasses. But sometimes it's just unavoidable; sometimes you're in a situation where, like it or not, you have to be some not-great version of yourself in front of other people. Describe such a recent time, and tell how you handled it and whether it proved as humiliating as you feared.
posted by Eric @ 10:42 AM
2 Comments:
A couple of weeks ago I was on vacation with a friend. We were in a park, and my friend brought a football. This concerned me, since, you see, I kind of throw like a girl.
(I mean that somewhat ironically, as my friend is herself a girl, and she throws extremely well. One might say she throws like a boy.)
For various reasons I was loath to embarrass myself by throwing, or even attempting to catch, said ball, but I was kind of in a bind. She threw me the ball. If I didn't try to catch it, it would be fourth grade all over again, when my strategy at such moments was to watch the ball fly through the air and then run away.
So I tried to catch it, and wouldn't you know, I turned out to be pretty good at catching a football. But throwing it was a different situation altogether, and sure enough I wasn't so hot at that part. But she gave me pointers, and after a few minutes (okay, a half hour), I was getting a nice spiral on the thing and it wasn't too bad.
I still think she lost a little respect for me, but now if someone asks, I can answer truthfully that I can throw a football, that I throw like a girl who's really good at throwing.
Okay, you dug it out of me: I can't ride a bike. I never learned. I never learned because, as we discussed in last week's writing assignment, I hit puberty at an ungodly young age, and so I was too heavy for training wheels by the time my parents decided to teach me.
To this day, well-meaning friends offer to teach me after I've declined their invitation to some bicycle-riding event or another. I'd rather canoe.
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