A list of ten things I am bad at, in no particular order:

1. Avoiding doing what everyone else is doing. [Cf. Cheesemaster K on 3.25, THE Pete Beatty on 3.22, and my favorite English grad student on 3.22]

2. Writing papers in a timely fashion. [I didn't use to have this problem. And then I started caring. Oh, I miss the days when I could crank out pages at a rate of 3.33 an hour without reading any of the books and still be okay with myself in the morning. I'm not sure what happened, but I can't go back and I'm not exactly happy about it.]

3. Crying. [Seriously, I am terrible at crying. The day you catch me crying, you'll know something is seriously, seriously wrong. 'til then, I wouldn't count on it.]

4. Improv comedy. [You might think that I would be good at this. Well, you would be wrong. I cannot possibly express to you how terrifically awful my improv abilities are. I have all the creativity of a brick with the personality of an over-cooked piece of pasta. Although I went through probably 15 hours of intense training in an attempt to fix this problem, I can conclusively say that I have never so thoroughly frustrated anyone who has tried to teach me something. Ask Rob. Seriously.]

5. Pool. [Not much to explain here. But drunk or sober, alert or sleepy, angry or joyous, I couldn't sink a ball if my life depended on it]

6. Getting regular haircuts. [Is this a sign of a deeper malaise? Or just general laziness? I can't really say. But I know this: if one ranked great states/individuals of the past in terms of territorial acquisitiveness, it would look something like this: (1.) Genghis Khan (2.) Tamerlane (3.) Germany (4.) the hair above my ears. Give me a week, and my ears will have been 60-65% annexed. Give me another day or three and I might even have a full-on mullet.]

7. Any game involving dice. [One could argue that dice are, on the whole, not something that one can be "bad" at. One might even claim that there is no such thing as "luck" in games of chance. In which case, I would like to tell you a little story about a game called Axis and Allies, and a battle colloquially known as "Pearl Harbor". Now I don't want to get into the gory details, but I do want to point out to you that in the one and only game of Axis and Allies in which I ever participated, I (as the Empire of Japan) lost the battle of Pearl Harbor. The funny thing is, I didn't even lose it half-way. I committed everything I had to annihilating the one puny soldier standing on Hawaii, and lost ALL OF IT. The entire might of the Japanese navy was broken and sent to the bottom of the ocean by a little plastic man with a rifle. Granted, the rifle had a nice bayonet on it. But still. And don't think that this is the only anecdote on this subject I could tell you. I have others. Many, many others. Give me cards, give me video games any day of the week, but keep me away from the dice.]

8. The telephone. [I hate the telephone. I call people I know any time the spirit moves me, but only because I really really want to talk to the person on the other end. When it comes to calling strangers, particularly doctors, dentists, etc. I really struggle. Which explains why I haven't been to either in oh, say, 3 or so years. I guess this is more of an irrational fear than something at which I am bad, but I'm sort of struggling here, in case you couldn't tell.]

9. Follow through. [I am often bad at finishing what I start. To wit,