Seven things I suck at

Yes, just seven things I suck at...there are actually probably a thousand more, but these are the ones I am truly, truly aware of...

1. Saying "NO!" Lousy at it, ask anyone. I get into more messes (including a couple of marriages) because I just couldn't say "no"...I'm smart enough to know when I should, and God knows I've got the life experience to have learned to say it, but I hate saying it. I am constantly being time-leeched by both worthy and unworthy causes. It's a disease, I guess.

2. Waiting. Patience is something I have learned, but only ankle-deep. It's not that I want to inconvenience people, it's that I have the attention span of a gnat and when I have to wait, I forget what I was supposed to do or say next. Then, I end up saying the third things I was supposed to say, instead of the next and I look like an idiot, or I am insensitive, or I am from Mars. At best.

3. Typing. Or, in modern parlance, "keyboarding". I'm fairly quick and accurate for a guy who basically uses two fingers to type, but when I get rocking, the transpositioning of letters and the subsequent bad parsing of the words can render an online chat or IM all but illegible.

4. Knowing when to shut up. I know where this comes from, but I'll never tell. I open my mouth and keep talking ten stages past where I should have stopped. Again, it's a combination of a quick mind and bad attention span...I stop talking and I lose my train of thought, so I tend to keep rolling...only later noting that I have offended or bored my audience.

5. Drawing lines. Ultimatums are not my thing. More often than not, I'm the one who gets cornered by "do or die" demands in relationships, then I find myself getting pushed into an untenable situation.

6. Looking out for my own best interests. I'd have to break about 1,000 confidences to really explain this one, but I tend to volunteer to be the scapegoat when others are likely to get their lumps for something trivial or when the price of their failure would be too high for them. The result is often I end up demonized for something I had nothing to do with, or was just trying to help out.

7. Maintaining a budget. Hey, I'm not mathematically challenged, but I sometimes act like I don't think I need air to breath. My first divorce settlement left me with negative cash flow. Imagine that. In mys econd marriage I did not block a couple of purchases that were disastrous on our household budget.

That's not a complete list, but if you take those seven and run with them, you have about 99% of the problems that have haunted me.

Hey, tomorrow is the official release of THE MORGANTOWN SUITE POEMS as well as my daughter, Peri's birthday. I miss her, like hell.