Art & Sports

Two things I'm not very good at.

Art I just never got. How do you even come up with the ideas? How do you know what to paint or sculpt or carve? I have no idea. I do, however, love art from an audience perspective and I love art galleries. Travelling around Europe back in university I sometimes saw two in a day - for sure, some would have said that I was one of those travellers who just wanted to tick things off of a list, but it really was exactly what I wanted to do. I went to galleries to see artists I had never even heard of until I read about them in my Lonely Planet and I loved it. Half of the joy of living in Edinburgh was all the free art museums and little galleries with interesting shows.

As for sports, well, I see double due to having too many muscles in one of my eyes. I could have had them sliced out but lost all interest as soon as I heard the words awake, scalpel, eye. Ummm, no. I can't even put in contacts (big goal for the next year or so is to teach myself that, so I can try scuba diving, actually). So, I can't say I was ever any good at sports, what with the fact that two balls were coming at me at speed and it was too fast to figure out which image was real. I did coach T-ball for a bit in high school, which had its moments of hilarity - particularly when an ump called the infield fly rule on one of my little five year olds. Because it's perfectly logical that a five year old dropped a fly ball on purpose to make a better out, rather than that a kid who still doesn't know which hand his glove goes on might, you know, drop the ball. Otherwise, I didn't so much do sports. I would have these impulses to give it a go every once in awhile, but really, I'm not a sports kind of gal. I do enjoy watching just about any sport live (particularly hockey, but then I am Canadian), and I get fairly into the Olympics - though my favourite Olympic sport is snowboard cross simply because people fall over a lot.

However, I do slide myself into the corners of both art and sports. I love taking photos and have at times done it with some serious intent on getting interesting, creative pictures. I took a pottery course in university that I loved, though I didn't pursue it. I do love canoeing and kayaking, which are more activities than sports, I think. And then there is my recent obsession with hashing (I miss that I didn't hash this weekend, though I needed the extreme amount of rest that I've gotten).

I was, at one time, a bit of a perfectionist. It was hard for me to like participating in art or sports because I was never going to be great. I'm really glad that as I've gotten older, I've learned to enjoy things that I am crap at. It makes life a lot more interesting.