Thursday Thirteen: Things I Should Have Learned To Do

1. Play the French Horn. I like music, but it's not anything I'm particularly talented at. I can pick out a few bars on the piano here and there, and I played the flute in 6th grade but never got very good at it. But one of the first pieces of classical music I can remember hearing, and loving, was the wolf's theme from Prokofiev's "Peter And The Wolf." I would love to be able to play that.

2. Paint. I've taken...oh, dozens of art classes since childhood, including pottery, sculpture, photography, and graphic design. But anything 2-dimensional doesn't seem to be within my realm.

3. Make puff pastry from scratch. Mmmmmm, puff pastry. Making it from scratch is a skill that pastry chefs really need, and it involves a lot of butter and rolling and turning and flipping and more rolling, and I just don't have the patience for it, especially when I can just run to the store and buy a box. Still, it's one of those things I wish I'd learned to do.

4. Cartwheels. I am tall and semi-awkward and as a child I was even more awkward than I am now, and when my tiny 4'3" friends were all learning to do cartwheels in gym class, I was still trying to keep from falling off the balance beam.

5. Excel spreadsheets. There is a surprising call for me to do these in my current job, which I don't understand, given that I'm a writer/editor. I can muddle my way through one, mostly, but occasionally I am felled totally by my inability to make a column of numbers behave the way I want them to behave.

6. Get through a marketing meeting without rolling my eyes. Luckily, my boss travels most of the time and dials in from wherever she happens to be.

7. Put on eye makeup without either blinding myself with eyeliner or making myself look like someone has punched me.

8. Read a map. I mean, I can read a map, but generally speaking, I don't have a great sense of direction and I almost never know what direction I'm facing without the assistance of the little digital compass readout in my car.

9. Write like Aaron Sorkin.

10. Golf. Everyone in my family plays but me, and I swear to God, they use that time out on the golf course to talk about me behind my back.

11. Walk in high heels. I look like a drunk when I try.

12. Properly blow my hair out straight once it's grown past my shoulders. It's too long now, and I look like I gave up halfway through every time.

13. Iron. My clothes look worse when I'm done than when I started.