Being crap at something you do care about

[Jockice]

As a music journalist I was the very epitome of someone criticising something I can't do myself. I haven't the slightest bit of musical talent. My dad was a good musician (and a couple of other family members still are) but when I started piano lessons aged about 11 I soon realised that I just didn't have it. After a year's lessons all I could do was play the start of Happy Birthday with one finger (I can still do it) and my teacher decided to go back to Communist Poland rather than deal with me anymore. My dad told me this news, expecting me to be upset but when I burst out laughing that was the end of him paying for lessons. I was quite relieved. 

I can't sing either. I got thrown out of the school choir aged around eight. I cried. It's a shame, because I still maintain to this day I'd have been a fucking superb pop star. I had all my quotes ready and everything.

And football. I love it and although I wasn't terrible during my youth I wasn't much good either. I even got into the secondary school team a few (about half a dozen in all) times, and one year supplied the pass that secured us the league. Well, actually it just bounced off my knee and went to a kid who I thought was a prick who scored and therefore got all the glory.

The highlight of my life though came about three years later when I was selected as a substitute for my Cubs' six a side team for a local tournament, to the disquiet of a couple of others who thought they were better than me. Then one of our team didn't turn up on the day, so I was in and went mad in the first game, scoring four goals in five minutes. I've never had so much success in such a short period before or since. I was a hero. Boys from other Cub packs were coming up to me and asking if I was really that kid who scored four goals.

Then my dad turned out to watch, which I always found extremely offputting and I didn't score again for the rest of the tournament. Although we did get to the semi-finals but were cheated out of it by a referee with a connection to the other team. I still want to be star striker for Celtic and Scotland though. And be a chart-topping pop star at the same time.

[thenoise]

I can play music well enough, but I am absolutely hopeless at the technical side of recording.  Everything I try and record at home sounds like actual human shit.  Even in a studio environment, I need someone to guide me through it like it's the first time, or I'll do something stupid like turn my back on the microphone or cough into it.  I'm also really frustrating to the poor engineer type because I'll tell them it doesn't sound good but I've no idea how to communicate why.

[buttgammon]

I sell kitchens but I can't actually cook

It has to be football. I've been a football obsessive since the age of five, but I was so bad at playing football, I gave up trying when I was about twelve. I'm willing to bet my ineptitude has actually worsened since then, to the extent that on the rare occasions that I'm required to kick a ball, I'm genuinely impressed with myself when I'm able to do it.

And it's not sports in general that I'm bad at; I was a handy tennis player as a child and teenager and I like running, it just happens to be that the one sport I truly care about is the one I'm incapable of playing.

[Depressed Beyond Tables]

I was a handy tennis player as a child and teenager and I like running,

Running's not a sport mate.

[Danger Man]

Learning a language.

I am the poster boy for "Those who can't, teach"

[New Jack]

I enjoy getting stoned, but I cannot roll a joint to save my life (not that that scenario has arisen yet, and I bought a vape pen anyway)

Somehow I find a way to cope with the shame. Oh yeah, I get stoned

[bgmnts]

Languages.

[nedthemumbler]

Am I the first to say sex?

[Blue Jam]

"I must be musical, I've got hundreds of CDs..."

I've always been really into music but have no musical ability whatsoever. Music lessons at school were a nightmare, I really couldn't get my head around anything at all. The whole system- chords, keys, notes etc- feels like it was developed by some alien civilisation much more advanced than my own and which I will never be able to understand in this lifetime- I imagine it's what not being able to read feels like.

I can however DJ, with proper beatmatching, avoiding key clashes etc, and I can put together mixes with music editing software, but I think that's more about having some understanding of rhythm and tempo. I don't really count that as being musical.

Naturally, effortlessly musical people- the likes of Bill Bailey, saying he can tell what key a toilet is flushing in- are probably the only people who really make me jealous.

[Pijlstaart]

A Cornicing snob, got a pinterest album of bad cornicing to snigger at, but no aptitude. Wouldn't even try.

[Dex Sawash]

Spend most of my time thinking about racing silly little sailboats since about 1990 and I am still not good. Understand the rules, tactics, strategy well enough. Good enough at technical aspects. Can't put all those elements together consistently, have won 2 races ever (a typical raceday has 3-5 races) and rarely finish in top 50% in a multiday regatta. Fucking love it though, like playing chess  combined with athletics on a moving gameboard. No better weekend than driving 5 hours after work on Friday to get to an event and returning home Sunday at 10pm with about 8 hours sleep total.

CaB- contribute mostly board meme variations or boring anecdotes

[BlodwynPig]

Languages.

que vous non spasyba la inconsequencinho del languitsa para glossario nyet?

[buttgammon]

Languages.

This as well. I tried to speak some very basic Dutch last week and ended up majorly confusing a variety of waitresses and bartenders.

[greenman]

"I must be musical, I've got hundreds of CDs..."

I've always been really into music but have no musical ability whatsoever. Music lessons at school were a nightmare, I really couldn't get my head around anything at all. The whole system- chords, keys, notes etc- feels like it was developed by some alien civilisation much more advanced than my own and which I will never be able to understand in this lifetime- I imagine it's what not being able to read feels like.

I can however DJ, with proper beatmatching, avoiding key clashes etc, and I can put together mixes with music editing software, but I think that's more about having some understanding of rhythm and tempo. I don't really count that as being musical.

Naturally, effortlessly musical people- the likes of Bill Bailey, saying he can tell what key a toilet is flushing in- are probably the only people who really make me jealous.

As you say actually playing music feels more like a foreign language(which I'm uniformly terrible at picking up besides some basic French learnt on holiday when I was very young) very unrelated to enjoyment of it.

Big advantage of photography I'v found is that its so heavily based on taste, I mean yes there are some technical considerations if you use more advanced equipment and post process much but generally nothing that couldn't be picked up in a few weeks. To some degree your learning the mechanics behind more unconscious taste but not to nearly the same degree as music.

[The Culture Bunker]

Certainly playing music. I can hack away on a bass well enough, but any idiot can do that. I have tried to learn guitar/piano, to absolute zero results. Luckily, I have been in bands with people who vaguely understand my half-baked verbal suggestions.

I was probably a shit journalist too, which used to bother me as I'd wanted to do that job through most my childhood. I think it was the mentality side of it that meant I never went beyond doing the B2B stuff, adding into my inherent laziness.

Plus football - I was way taller than everyone else growing up, probably close to 6ft tall by the age of 12 with the added advantage of being left footed. Alas, I was shit at heading, have no pace or balance and can barely trap a bag of cement.

[Shit Good Nose]

Guitar, but with an interesting caveat...

My school didn't offer guitar lessons whilst I was there, so I got myself a private teacher and started learning but, like a prick, went straight into wanting to learn lead despite his recommendation that I just start at the beginning like everyone else.  After a year or so I got reasonably good at playing existing solos, even to the point of being able to copy a solo by ear and being pretty fucking amazing at fret tapping. 

BUT I neglected to learn the basic chops, so whilst I could play the solos from, for example, Genesis' Firth of Fifth flawlessly, give me Bert Weedon's Play In A Day and I'd be lost, leave me a space in a song to improvise a solo and it'd be out of tune noise.  I struggled on for ages with chords and scales and after another year I just couldn't do them.  Then my guitar teacher moved to Scotland and went pro and I sold my Gibson custom SG like a prick again in favour of a car.

Sigh.

[Icehaven]

Guitar, but with an interesting caveat...

My school didn't offer guitar lessons whilst I was there, so I got myself a private teacher and started learning but, like a prick, went straight into wanting to learn lead despite his recommendation that I just start at the beginning like everyone else.  After a year or so I got reasonably good at playing existing solos, even to the point of being able to copy a solo by ear and being pretty fucking amazing at fret tapping. 

BUT I neglected to learn the basic chops, so whilst I could play the solos from, for example, Genesis' Firth of Fifth flawlessly, give me Bert Weedon's Play In A Day and I'd be lost, leave me a space in a song to improvise a solo and it'd be out of tune noise.  I struggled on for ages with chords and scales and after another year I just couldn't do them.  Then my guitar teacher moved to Scotland and went pro and I sold my Gibson custom SG like a prick again in favour of a car.

Sigh.

I've met and heard of a surprising number of extremely able musicians (one's even a music teacher) who can play from sheet music or learn by repetition beautifully, but can't play by ear or compose or improvise to save their lives. I'm mostly the other way around, I can improvise fairly well, compose alright and am also far more able to remember how to play something if I wrote it myself, but (although it's been years since I even tried now)I was never any good at reading music and always found sight reading impossible. 

[kngen]

I've met and heard of a surprising number of extremely able musicians (one's even a music teacher) who can play from sheet music or learn by repetition beautifully, but can't play by ear or compose or improvise to save their lives.

Yep, very common. I have a very half-baked theory that the two disciplines (repetition and composition) inhabit two seperate parts of the brain, and truly gifted musicians are able to draw on both aspects with equal ease. I'm very much in the latter camp (ie I can compose and improvise, not truly gifted - not at all), but I found it mindblowing working with someone who was far more technically proficient than I am at the piano (to a ridiculous degree), when he made a kind of 'system overload' face after I asked him to rustle something up over a fairly simple chord progression I was playing.

[timebug]

Musically I always remember an old Parkinson show where
Stefan Grapelli played some jazz, with Yehudi Menuin. The
tune was some old cassic jazz piece,can't recall exactly what,
but the point was, Menuin was reading from  sheet music, at
the same time Grapelli was 'playing by ear' (or feel!).
Stefans violin sounded warm and gorgeous, he was 'living'
the moment and enjoying what he played. Menuin was just
going through the motions;technically he was playing the
same tune, but it came across as mechanical and souless.
And yes, I would love to play the violin, and have tried a few
times. I cannot play the violin. There it is, tough shit! I can
and do play a variety of other instruments, but something
about the fiddle just eludes me. Never mind, I can't play any
brass instruments either!

[garbed_attic]

Pacman

[Sebastian Cobb]

I can however DJ, with proper beatmatching, avoiding key clashes etc, and I can put together mixes with music editing software, but I think that's more about having some understanding of rhythm and tempo. I don't really count that as being musical.

I was never much cop at this, I think I blame not being able to afford enough records at the time to keep myself interested and belt drive decks, but deep down I know it's bollocks because I knew some people much poorer than me who ammased shit loads of records and could mix better on worse decks.

That and I bought a novation controller a few years ago and can count on one hand how many times I've used it. Keep meaning to rip some funk and soul and piss about on it doing that. Probably never will.

[MoonDust]

Sport. Don't care if it's just a bit of fun, stop trying to invite me to work-related sports groups.

Swimming. I've seen the future from now until my death: never gonna get into a situation where I need to swim. Arsed.

[RenegadeScrew]

Languages.

This for me, especially given the ability of some just to pick things up being around foreign speakers.  I've been abroad for 13 years or so and can't understand anything.  I know a decent amount of French words but none of the small connecting ones, and certainly not enough words to speak/understand others.  The only way I ever understand French is because I pick out a word or two from a sentence and guess the rest.

I don't really understand how any foreign speaker understands any English language speakers either, unless they are directly speaking to them, or unless they are speaking 'proper'.  All the various accents are wildly different, even just on one little island.  I'm from Edinburgh and start to struggle as I head proper north like Skye.  And my accent isn't understood well south of Newcastle (except London).  A guy from Brighton used to repeat what he'd said if I answered "aye". 

[Small Man Big Horse]

It's music for me too, I was given a guitar when I was a kid but then told I had fat fingers and would always be rubbish at it.

The other big one for me is art, I spent a ridiculous amount of time trying to improve as a kid / teenager but am still shit to this day. Frustratingly one of my best friends at the time was a superb artist and regularly praised by our teacher, but didn't have any interest in doing it at all.

Edit: Oh, and stand up. Did about 70 gigs and eventually had ten minutes of fairly okay material, but it was clear I was never going to be anything that special at all.

[BeardFaceMan]

Life.

[idunnosomename]

Farting

[dallasman]

Guitar, but with an interesting caveat...

My school didn't offer guitar lessons whilst I was there, so I got myself a private teacher and started learning but, like a prick, went straight into wanting to learn lead despite his recommendation that I just start at the beginning like everyone else.  After a year or so I got reasonably good at playing existing solos, even to the point of being able to copy a solo by ear and being pretty fucking amazing at fret tapping. 

BUT I neglected to learn the basic chops, so whilst I could play the solos from, for example, Genesis' Firth of Fifth flawlessly, give me Bert Weedon's Play In A Day and I'd be lost, leave me a space in a song to improvise a solo and it'd be out of tune noise.  I struggled on for ages with chords and scales and after another year I just couldn't do them.  Then my guitar teacher moved to Scotland and went pro and I sold my Gibson custom SG like a prick again in favour of a car.

Same, but opposite. I never practiced or took lessons, but I had a book of chords and simple songs, and learnt that way. I've played lead guitar in bands, but I have no chops to speak of. Considering how long I've been playing, I'm objectively crap. In my first amplified band, at school, there was an element of "culture war" in that all the other bands played Metallica covers, learned from tabs. We played early Pink Floyd covers learned by ear (Eugene, Cymbaline, Ibiza Bar, Green Is The Colour), mixed with originals spanning from two-chord punk songs to 14-minute prog epics. We quickly got into unorthodox song structures, tricky time signatures and all that, but I was too lazy and "intuitive" to push the technical aspect very far.

When I took musical studies in high school, my classmates were all people who'd had formal training and could read music, but were very stuck in that rote learning mode. I was the rock 'n roll kid from the wrong side of the staves. I struggled with the reading part, and couldn't really play any classical guitar pieces, but felt right at home when we were tasked with arranging something to play together. It's not really a tradeoff though, because I was always able to improvise and learn things by ear, and I started writing songs at nine. Having supreme chops on top of that basic musicality would only have enhanced it, and could possibly have led to a pro or semi-pro career, who knows? I certainly would've gotten better grades. It's basically just laziness and becoming distracted by a thousand other things (but mostly laziness).

Incidentally, in my late teens/early twenties, my mates and I had a weekly comedy show on local radio, which was one of the major distractions from the Band, and actually outlasted it by a year or so. As with the music, this was mainly something we did for a laugh, but which also seemed like a possible future. With some effort, perhaps we could've knocked it into presentable shape and perhaps gotten a foot in the door somewhere serious. In fact, one of my two co-hosts did just that, all on his own, and is now a movie producer. The other one was sectioned. I lost heart and left town to become an office drone in the big city. Judging by this and similar threads, I feel like this is quite a common trajectory for CaBers, so it's always great to hear about the ones who actually took the next step and pursued their interests.

[dallasman]

It's music for me too, I was given a guitar when I was a kid but then told I had fat fingers and would always be rubbish at it.

Oh yeah, I have those too. Like little cocktail sausages.

[rectorofstiffkey]

I can't sing either. I got thrown out of the school choir aged around eight. I cried. It's a shame, because I still maintain to this day I'd have been a fucking superb pop star. I had all my quotes ready and everything.

what kind of school kicks 8 year old children out of the choir?!?!  that's horrible!

[Jack Shaftoe]

I'm piss-poor at running roleplaying games, which doesn't sound like a big deal, until you realise I truly believe stuff like D&D and Call of Cthulhu are better and more meaningful than any other medium and if I ever made a million quid, I'd instantly retire and pay someone to run a different rpg for me every night. I wouldn't care if I never watched telly or another film ever again.

But when I run a game, I'm achingly aware how utterly I fail to capture even a tenth of how great an experience it can be. I've got better over the years, but some people are just amazing at creating and running a game, and it wounds me to an almost mortal level that I'll never be one of them.