tara cleveland

06/03/2002 Archived Entry: "I vant to suck your talent!"

I was reading dieter.ca today and I thought to myself "Damn it! I wish I could be as talented as this guy". Dieter writes like he was born to write. His style is so natural. Maybe he works on each entry, going over it again and again. I don't know. But it *seems* like the words are just tripping off his tongue. I hate people like that. I mean they're great and all, but damn it! I get so jealous of people with talent like that. So I wish I could be a talent vampire. I wish I could just suck the talent out of people and be talented like them.

All my life I've been surrounded by people who are talented. We all know someone who is amazing at music or sports or drama or something - not me. I was always at the back of the chourus. I was always the bit player in the school play. In grade 10 music, the teacher told me to *pretend* that I was playing the viola when we had concerts. I'm not kidding. She told me to move the bow up and down, but not actually touch the strings. I was the only viola in the high school orchestra too, so it wasn't like it didn't make any difference to the music that I wasn't playing. Oh well, I deserved all the viola jokes.

I'm 26 years old and and I still haven't found a useful or impressive talent. Well actually, that's not entirely true. I have found a talent, it just doesn't get many kudos. Wanna know what my talent is? I can't get lost. I can always find things. As long as I have some type of map there is just no way for me to get lost. Even without a map I won't get lost if I've been there before.

For instance, my parents' cottage is on a large lake with lots of bays and inlets and islands and penninsulas - in other words, it's not just a round pool of water. It takes about an hour or more in a motorboat to go from our cottage (it's for rent this summer by the way) to the other end of the lake. So it's a pretty big lake. I went out on the lake for the first time with a friend to a town about half an hour away by boat. The next time I went (without my friend) I knew exactly how to get to the town. Didn't even have to look at the map. I just remembered which bay to go around, which little passage to go through, to turn left at that penninsula... untill we came to the town.

Another example... I found a restaurant in NYC. Okay finding a restaurant in NYC is like shooting fish in a barrel. But this particular restaurant my mom had pointed out when we were going past in a cab. I found it 3 years later and coming from a different direction. I remembered what it looked like and *exactly* where it was. I said "I think it's 5 blocks up that street on the right hand side, on the corner".

I didn't even get lost in the Khan El Khalili (the bazaar in the old part of Cairo) which is notorious for it's twisty alleys and lost tourists. So plonk me down in any city, hand me a map, tell me where you want to go and I'll lead you there. And if you lose the map, I'll be able to get you back to the hotel.

I think that's a talent. Marginal. But still, I have to cling on to something - I'm no Mozart after all.

Replies: 1 Comment - add a comment

Hey Tara, thanks for hating me -- that's the nicest thing someone has said in a long time. And yes, I tend to go over things a bunch of times. For instance, I started that last entry back in 1986.

Oh, and seeing as I got lost on the way to the bathroom this morning, the talent-envy goes two ways. :)

Posted by dieter @ 06/04/2002 01:58 PM EST

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