Something I've never done

There's something I need to ask my mother about and I can't for the life of me remember. Or rather, now that I have my phone in my pocket I can't remember. When my phone is upstairs I have no trouble remembering, but then the minute I have the phone in my hand I can't remember. I know there's some research out there saying that our short term memories are being affected by not having to remember things like phone numbers (because they're kept in our phones) but I didn't expect my memory to be tied so closely to my phone.

I did something I've never done this week. I showed up at a new job and quit within an hour. I like to think of myself as a hard worker and usually a humble worker. I've worked fast food and group homes and college recruiting and I think I've done a lot of different things with approximately the same effort. But Tuesday I showed up to paint a house in St. Paul and all the people wanted painted was the second and third story trim. I've known about this painting job for some time and I've been psyching myself up for it. I thought I had a mild fear of heights and I did have a small knot in my stomach about it. It turns out that I'm terrified of heights. I got maybe six feet off the ground, up one of those flimsy aluminum ladders and I started sweating and my heart started pounding and my hands and legs started shaking. It was bad (and embarrassing). I think I could have climbed up the ladder and come back down, given enough time anyway, but the idea of spending all day 25 feet up on a ladder, reaching around to scrape and paint trim ... no way. So I quit. I still feel terrible about it. But I would have been a waste of money at that job. It's a strange thing to say "I can't do it."

When I was in fourth grade at Fair Oaks Elementary School in Brooklyn Park, MN our school slogan was "Every kid a winner every day." Problem 1: the sentence is missing an "is". Problem 2: some days we're losers. Some things we can't do. I can't hit a 90 mile an hour fastball regularly enough to play Major League Baseball. I couldn't really hit a 70 mph fastball often enough to play Babe Ruth baseball in middle school. I think I could practice hard every day and still not hit that 90 mph fastball, let alone a breaking ball of any kind. And I feel totally fine with that. Maybe we should be teaching kids to be proud of their strengths, aware of their weaknesses, and that basic human worth isn't built on either of those things.

Good thing my self-worth isn't tied into my short-term memory.