Nobody is perfect. We can't all be great at everything. Even though we so desperately believe we can do it all, that is not the case. That realization can become a haunting issue when it pertains to life's simpler activities. For instance... I can't do math. After years of struggle and self doubt I realized... who cares? I hate math; hand me a calculator. No shame. We are just wired to intake info in different ways. And sometimes certain wires are just not meant to cross. Often times the deceptively simple alludes us and it's a mystery.
Redditor u/HarveySteakfries was hoping everyone was wiling to compare notes and admit to all the small things that so many of us just can't seem to conquer by asking.... What are some basic things that you can't do?Chop-Chop
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Use a chopstick (I'm asian).
Try eating spaghetti, I'm Italian and I hate those pieces of crap, long live the mezze penne rigate.
Sorry. And you are?
Remember names and faces. Don't know what my deal is but unless my brain decides I should remember you for some reason, I will probably forget I've even met you. It's screwed up and embarrassing really.
Ugh, I feel you. It was a great night when I turned to my GF's friend and said "I'm sorry, what was your name again?" and she was like "It's Caitlin! I am literally your GF's best friend, we have met three times!"
1 + 1=.... UM?
Do basic math quickly. Like simple adding and subtracting math. I used to be a bartender, and one of the basic jobs of a bartender is surprisingly enough to check ids. Well whenever any handed me their id I couldn't do the math fast enough to actually be sure they were over 21. So I just said okay. Later they put up the sign with date that the birthday had to be after to be served. Made it slightly easier.
Goodnight....
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Get to sleep at a reasonable hour.
I always go to sleep after midnight, have done for years now. It just feels natural to me now, any time before that and its too early for me. I've been told to go to bed earlier by a few people. Its definitely easier said than done - as I just lie in bed looking at the ceiling if I'm forced to go to bed before midnight.
Hello....
Interact with someone that I don't know.
Like anything, it takes practice. I'll admit though, making conversation with strangers doesn't feel as natural as if it was to somebody you know.
Doped....
Produce dopamine at an acceptable level.
It's serotonin you want if you'd like to feel content and happy not dopamine. Too much dopamine will make you miserably.
Edit: this is an oversimplification and there are many pathway signals in the brain that we still don't completely understand on the whole. Far from it. So please do not think this one thing will solve a complex issue.
Bad Bite
Bite into apples or an ear of corn.
I have to cut up apples and whatnot bc one of my front teeth is partially fake. If there was somehow only apples and corn on the cob available and no knives? You gotta come at it from the side and hope you have floss.
bad cycle
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I'm 16 and I cant ride a bike.
A common mistake when beginning is trying to keep balance by moving the front wheel. Move your body slightly left or right instead. It is also much easier to keep balance at faster speeds.
Bodies are weird
Process dairy. Thanks for nothing, ancestors.
Yes, I have problems with this. However, when I was pregnant I craved ice cream so bad and ate it several times a day and my body was ok with it. Bodies are weird. Type of ice cream: just one kind, superman.
Don't Pucker.... Blow....
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Whistle, snap my fingers, blow bubbles with gum.
From someone else on reddit:
As someone said, whisper 'Q'. (Elongate the Q, expel all of your air over 4 or 5 seconds of whispering a single Q. You should be close to a whistle if not whistling at the end of the exhale). The idea is that you want to direct a stream of air downwards, across the opening of your lips. It's like blowing across the top of a coke bottle, only you're doing it from the inside.
To do this, you push your tongue up to the roof of your mouth for a cat/lizard/vampire hiss: hhkhkhkkhhhhkkkkkhh.
When you make that noise, you should find yourself blowing on your lower front teeth.
The tip of your tongue should be neutral to start - not all the way forward as for yyyyyyyy, and not all the way back as for aaaawwww. Just a loose, neutral uuuhhh.
Last and least important, the lips. Starting out, keep it relaxed - position them for ooo, like you're going to mutter 'cool' under your breath. Don't pucker, it'll be harder to find the tone.
So, put it all together, and you whisper khlhkhhkkkhkhkkheeeeeeoooooooo - and somewhere in there you should find a lick of tone. Keep practicing until you can home right in on it. It'll be kind of breathy, but we'll fix that in a minute.
You change the pitch by moving the tip of your tongue forward and back. You'll notice that high notes are a bit hard to reach.
Once you've got this down, and can find the tone every time - then you pucker your lips into a wwwww shape.
It's got much less tolerance for finding the tone, but the tone will clean up and lose the breathiness, and high notes will become a whole lot easier.
That's it, that's all you need.
Cereal Fails
I don't know if it's just me and God I hope it's not but for the life of me I cannot open a resealable package the correct way. You know the packaging that's like tear here along the lines to get to the resealable part? Without fail every time I tear it off and somehow there's just enough to not be able to get to the resealable part. My girlfriend watches me every time I open one with the same disappointed face. She has to watch the man she fell in love with paw at a bag of cereal like a seal wearing oven mitts.
"khhh"
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My native language is Russian, and the phonetics of the letter 'r' are very different to those in English - you have to roll the letter, kind of like in French or Spanish. However, I still can't do this, even after years of practice and failed assistance to try and learn how to pronounce the letter; I replace it with an awkward "khhh."
Drowning
Swim.
Saaame. Maybe it's only in the US where it's a shame to not know to swim. I was fine in my home country bc a lot of people don't learn how to swim.
Muscle Movement
Raise only one eyebrow. How do people do that?
Yeah, I used to know how to do 1 but not the other without compressing muscles of the other one. Then i got face paralysis and couldn't move half my face for about 2 months until i began going to physical therapy where i had to learn to move my face again.
Now i can move both of them independently and without any need of using muscles from other side to keep it down. So basically a lot of looking in the mirror and just thinking about moving it and using imagination to picture it all while helping it with a finger and you can learn it... if you decide its worth your while.
learning life
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Pay taxes, drive a motorcycle, networking, flirting, create ties with people, fix stuff, go to places without a GPS and cooking.
Twisted
I cant twist my tongue to the left, I encourage you to try this, idk why I cant, I can twist it to the right but no matter how hard I try I can't twist my tongue to the left.
It's genetic, same as the pattern in which you clasp your hands together with fingers interlaced. Whether it feels natural to have your left or right forefinger in the top position is genetic.
Lonely Still
Find a girlfriend.
Same, where do you even find them and how do people have the confidence to ask girls out, not something I could ever relate to lol.
52 Pickup
Shuffle cards. Embarrassing when I have to mix them all up in my hands. I'm 29.
Here is sexy card shuffle tutorial.
Side to Side
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I can't move my eyes to the left and right, only up and down! If I want to look to the side I have to move my whole head. If you see me reading it looks like I'm constantly shaking my head.
Licensed to Walk....
Drive a car (I'm in my early 30s).
I have a friend I went to high school with back in the 80's who was scared to learn to drive. Her mom thought it was because her dad was teaching her to drive and he was being a butt to her so she asked me if I could teach my friend to drive.
She had no interest in learning to drive and finally told me that she didn't want to learn and liked taking the bus and walking. She finally told her mom the same.
She is my age (50) and still has never driven. She lives in a city where she does not have to drive and is very happy there.
I drove as soon as I could but not everyone is in a hurry and some people just aren't interested. I worked with a guy at my last job who was 36 and didn't know how to drive. It's probably more common than you think.
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I'm on the fence about high school. I want to hate it, but nostalgia haunts me. I saw a lot of violence, there is that.
We were on CNN.
don lemon nodding GIF by Red Table TalkGiphy"They started charging us for ketchup in the cafeteria. Most of the school boycotted cafeteria lunch and brought all manner of condiments from home. We were on CNN. They eventually caved." ~ Ash3Monti
No one liked him.
"I was big into drama club and musical theatre when I was in high school. There was a girl in the drama club in her freshmen or sophomore year who was super nice and everyone loved her. Her older brother on the the other hand, was a complete and total douchebag. No one liked him."
"He always made inappropriate comments or jokes and no one liked to be around him. One night, he was driving him and his sister back from school when he took a steep curve going around 100 mph. He lost control and hit a telephone pole. His sister died instantly and he was in a coma for a few weeks but ultimately survived."
"Myself and my friends in the drama club were devastated. She was one of the sweetest girls you'll ever met and we all loved her. A year or two later, the brother messages my sister and tries to use his sister's death as leverage to get laid. F**k you, you piece of crap." ~ FearTheKeflex
Bribes
"Guidance counselor was taking bribes to change grades (Both money and sexual favors). Invited one male student over to his house. Had the student tie him up and hang him by chains in his basement "dungeon." Student was homophobic and while the counselor was tied up, bludgeoned him to death." ~ monthos
H2O Issues...
"This is not that extreme, but it's still disgusting. We have drinking water taps instead of fountains. One parent was suspicious of whether they were cleaning the tanks or not. So they made an announcement that the tank was being cleaned every single day."
"A lot of us didn't believe it, so a group of boys decided to see for themselves if it was true or not. So they put a dead frog in the tank when there was no one around. I don't even know where they found the frog but they swear they didn't kill it. Anyway the frog was there for a few weeks. And obviously the water started tasting weird."
"After the teachers got multiple complaints, they opened the tank and found the frog. The boys were punished, but they fired back with the fact that they lied about cleaning the tanks. They were still punished, because they proved it in a disgusting way. They could've put literally anything in the tank, but they chose a dead frog." ~ R00mTemperature
The Quad
Acds2 Look Away GIF by Anime Crimes DivisionGiphy"A worker doing stuff on the roof. He fell off. Landed in the 'quad' at lunch. A large piece of machinery fell and squished his head. Like a cartoon, only funny. Like 150 Kids saw this." ~ LordInventus
Threats
"The Latin kings gang threatened my cousin and his friends and they had 10 squad cars guarding the whole school and dismissed us the same day early." ~ Terrykrinkle
“it’s gonna blow”
"I had just moved in from Egypt to the states in my senior year of high school. A teacher thought it would be funny to fold a bunch of papers and wrap them in duck tape to make it look like a bomb and threw it my direction and went under his desk saying 'it’s gonna blow.' Everybody started laughing and I was so clueless then I just laughed along. It infuriates me to this day that I didn’t call him out on it or report him." ~ ezzabousaif
Go Fish
"Someone somehow made a bomb threat on a Swedish fish candy. Like one single piece. I don’t know how it happened but he got arrested." ~ ts_13_
Masternid
"A couple weeks before graduation, this kid hacked into the school system and put a Hitler quote and a Boston bomber reference in the senior quotes for the yearbook. One of the affected parties was a trans girl, and we're still not sure if it was a targeted act because of that."
"Administration didn't find out until the entire senior class had received their books. Some people turned theirs in to get their pages replaced, but some kept it because it was a 'limited edition item' or some stupid sh*t like that. Kid got arrested and charged with cybercrime, since he hacked everyone in our school system's school passwords."
"He was so close to graduating too, but got expelled like two weeks before he could. Looked like a rat too. It was all over the news, and everyone in the state of CT basically knows about this now. Got out on bail for $5000." ~ kocorpsie
Season 3 What GIF by On My Block
"Apparently one student brought drugs to school and was selling it to her friends. A completely unrelated student caught on and stole the drugs while everyone else was in class. She was caught snorting the drugs in the bathroom by the group selling the drugs and got the crap beat out of her."
"We also had a recently graduated student murder his parents for insurance money . He hid the bodies in a chicken coop and told everybody they were on vacation. It wasn't until 7 months later the bodies were found by the landlord because the rent was late." ~ randomgenericcow
Enjoy high school, at least try too. Maybe if more kids do that, it wouldn't be so insane.
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