Meanie’s Monday

I suck at sports. I am not graceful, I trip a lot and I feel like I have too many limbs. I was never chosen first for team sports at school. I was chosen last, along with the smattering of rejects nobody wanted on their team. And when everyone in the neighborhood signed up for softball, I did too (glutton for punishment I was), and I was always stuck out in left field, with everyone praying the ball wouldn’t come to me. I was never coordinated enough to catch the ball, and if by some miracle I did, when it came time to throw it back in-field, my wrist would become quite affected and limp and the ball would travel a mighty distance of two feet.

It wasn’t all doom and gloom though. I was good at running (not a pretty sight, but I was fast) and I was also on our community swim team. With swimming, I was always chosen for the relay race. I was a star, and I have medals and ribbons to prove it. I have to explain though. My lack of coordination made the front crawl quite difficult for me. I looked like a robot mid-gear shift gasping for air when doing the crawl. With the back crawl, I’d always be surprised when my head would hit the wall and I’d look around and see that I had crossed the pool diagonally rather than lengthwise. And the butterfly? There are no words to describe the horror of watching me do the butterfly. In fact, I’ve had a life guard try and save me thinking that my flailing was drowning rather than me executing a most difficult stroke. There was an exception though. My breast stroke was phenomenal. In races, I would SMOKE my opponents. And for relays, there was probably some element of surprise when they saw I wasn’t doing the front crawl. I was always put in as the last swimmer, the one to catch us up and get us to the finish line first. I may have looked like a frog on crystal meth, but I always pulled through for the team.

Did you shine at anything when you were growing up? Or did you exceptionally suck at anything?