Greetings, internet! I come to you on this not-so-fine summer day to begin writing what will be a blog about my attempts to get by in the world without skills, or a particular knack for anything useful. Essentially, I am attempting to find and share the things that those of us without talent may nevertheless enjoy, and perhaps use them to decieve our friends and foes into thinking that we may actually be resourceful, functioning members of society after all. And perhaps, after enough practice, we may even fool ourselves.
So, a quick bio. Somehow, in the 13 years of elementary and high school education I recieved, I managed to slip out of the entire field of courses involving practical application. In the first year of high school, a course appropriately called "Life Skills" was offered and actually mandatory for all students, unless the student in question was taking band class, which I, of course, was. Not really an adequate tradeoff. While the other kids were learning to cook and sew and work with tools and computers, I was fumbling around on my bass guitar. Say what you will, I do believe in the greatness of the world's truly talented bassists, but it doesn't take much to be able to pluck your way through high school band. I will say this much for myself: I am not tone-deaf, and I have a decent sense of rhythm. But it stops there. And for what I was given in natural ability, I was disproportionately deprived of in social ability. I plan to address this as well. But moving along, band basically annihilated any opportunity I had to learn something useful because all of the useful courses were, naturally, electives (ZING, school board!), and band ate up 2 of 3 slots, the other occupied by French, which was an elective that was mandatory to take. For reals, that's what they told us. I probably would have taken it anyways, because I've always felt bad that French is an official language of my country and I can barely understand a lick of it, but I suddenly realized on a later trip to France that all 7 years of French class gave me in the BC school system was the ability to order pizza and go to the mall. TANGENT
Anyways, soon enough, high school was over and after another lazy, unskilled summer, I found myself in college, partaking in a smattering of humanities courses that didn't feel very far above the high school level but suddenly cost a lot more. It was about then that I realized that I should probably have some sort of a goal in mind. And it was just shortly after that that I realized achieving said goal would probably involve some measure of success in a given category, which was vastly foreign territory in the landscape of my life. I almost got culture-shock just thinking about it. Even so, I worked my way through two misguided semesters before finally giving up and going the way of the immigrant, finding a full-time job in unskilled-and-not-even-requiring-muscle-mass labour: Housecleaning.
A brief sidenote: The comment about going the way of the immigrant was not meant to be derogatory to immigrants, but rather a bop on the government's head for failing to have in place appropriate transfer certification for skilled workers from other countries. I live in British Columbia, Canada, and while I was cleaning, I worked with, among others, a medically trained woman from ALBERTA who couldn't get certified to work in her field in BC, as well as a man from Thailand who had degrees coming out his ears and years of experience as a general contracter and massage therapist! Weird combo, I know, but the guy did nothing but study on his free time for AGES, and then he came here and had to start from the bottom all over again. It's just sad.
Back on track. I did the cleaning thing for a year before I decided I needed a change of scenery and sailed (in a plane) off to Europe for around 16 months to backpack, live, nanny and totally fail at learning foreign languages. I spent most of my time in Germany so I could probably be quite proficient in German by now if I were not myself, but fortunately the constant repetition has at least drilled a little bit of it into my mind. Even so, my time there was the real, conscious start of my skill-seeking adventures. Goal number one upon arrival to Europe: Learn how to dress. I didn't realize how awful I was until I landed and realized almost immdiately that those European fashionista stereotypes are entirely valid. But I think I may count this now as my first acquired skill. I never quite got the hang of it while I was there, but after I returned to Canada and had a bit of money to invest in some key items, I like to think I'm fairly fashion friendly. Also, I got a full length mirror. I cannot stress how necessary that was. Formerly, it had only been upon the embarrassing revelation of photos that I realized what I looked like. Now I can see before I even leave the house!
With this newfound sense of fashion came a desire to be seen! Since my social circle was still lacking, I decided to go back to school, with a new set of goal ideas in mind. That was last fall, and the past two semesters have definitely been slightly more successful, and I feel like I'm getting closer to knowing what that goal is. But I need to make money to continue to go to school to get there, and THAT so-called-brief bio brings us here. No, I am not HERE to make money. I am 3 months and about 200 applications into the job search with no results, and no life. But I am tired of feeling like a torn and melted cheese string so I've decided that it's time to put down the potato chips and ice cream and spend my abundance of free time trying to be good at things. Low budget things. So as I go about these things, I will try to share and photo-journalize so that any positive experiences I have may be repeated, and any negative ones avoided. I'll work on any skills I can when the opportunity arises: social, practical, technical, financial... and I welcome suggestions of things to try, though at this point, I'm sure that seems pretty vague. Once we get rolling, I'm sure we can reel that in a bit.
With that however, I welcome you to the recorded beginning of my quest for talent and personal betterment! Thanks for putting up with the wall of text and I hope that my next entry is significantly more useful.
Cheers!
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