David's Blague

Earlier today, a coworker asked me if I thought some people were just destined for mediocrity- to be one of the crowd. Average. Well, my answer is yes. The vast majority of people suck at the vast majority of things.

Who cares?

I love to bumble along. I bite off more than I can chew, then chew for a while anyway, then maybe keep on chewing, or maybe spit it all out and try something else. I like to dive right in and go with the flow, even though I don't know what I'm doing. I like, in a word, to suck.

For most things, I couldn't possibly be great at what I'm doing. After all, I have had neither the time nor the inclination to become an accomplished professional. And that assumes I have the raw talent, if you believe in that, which I don't.

Take the piano- I quite happily suck at the piano. Same thing with the harmonica, concertina, guitar, tuba, and trombone. I can barely read any music, I'm not creative in the way that some people are where they can come up with something on the fly, and I can't play by ear.

I suck.

And I love it. Sometimes I'll play the piano for ten whole minutes, and suck the entire time. Worst part is, I have little desire to play any better than I do. I don't know why. It's supposed to bother me that I suck, and I'm supposed to want to be better, but instead, I play badly with great fervor and gusto. I even play publicly sometimes.

I can write code in fifteen different programming languages, and I totally suck at all of them save one, and I kind of suck at that one. But it's so much fun that I just can't stop learning new ones to suck at. Some of them are even designed explicitly to be sucked-at. Wow!

The list of things I happily suck at is too long for a blog post, but I'll make a half-assed list here anyhow, in the spirit of sucking:

• sharing
  
• gardening
• swimming
• electrical engineering
• woodwork
• driving
• calligraphy
• writing a book
• building robots
• starting fires
• finishing anything
• cooking
• home repair

The only reason I left blogging off the list, is probably because I suck at list-making.

Now, as I thought more about my coworker's question, I wondered if sucking at a whole lot of different things might not be a fairly good way to eventually discover something I don't suck at. But I don't really care. For most things in life, not-sucking is highly overrated.