Question of the day.

   What is a useless skill that you have? 

   My answer: 

   I can click with my big toes if I move them a certain way. I used to be more skilled at this when I was younger, but still can do it if I try hard enough. I can put my legs behind my head, which is apparently not something that most people can do although I think it’s weird because it’s not like I’m super sporty or anything, our Sofi is a lot more than myself and she cannot do this, and for some reason some people think it’s creepy and I sometimes do this and then rock in that position back and forth to make people freak out, ‘cause they think I’ll get stuck like that and won’t be able to get back to a normal position. 😀 

   When I was at the blind school, we would often get calendars in Braille at the beginning of a year. Usually here in Poland when you have a calendar it doesn’t just have dates in it but also names which celebrate their name days on a specific day, because like some other countries in Europe, we do name days. And that was the case with those Braille calendars too. I would often feel kind of intellectually understimulated at the boarding school, especially if I had nothing interesting to read because I would usually finish my library books quite quickly and often didn’t really feel like going to library several times a week. So to do something, and make it seem like I was doing something, I would often reread my current library book, or would read the name days in the calendar. The resulting side effect of that was such that I ended up memorising all those name days totally unintentionally, and a lot of people seemed quite impressed with that, especially my grandad, who values brains and I guess for him something like this must have been evidence that I must have them, even if it was totally passive and I didn’t really make any effort, nor did I had a particular desire, to memorise all that stuff. I’ve just generally always had a tendency to memorise a lot of useless stuff, which has often given people an impression that I know lots of things about lots of things, even if my knowledge about something is rather superficial. 😀 So he would often show off with me when we had some guests on family gatherings and stuff like that, asking me when those people’s name days are. I suppose this is quite a good example of an absolutely useless skill. Later on, I’ve learned to have a bit more respect for my brain and figured out I must be more mindful of what sort of things I let take up my brain storage, and so whenever someone would ask me when is so and so’s name day or whether I still remember that, I would say that I don’t, and eventually I indeed ended up forgetting most of it. 

   Hm, not sure what else, but some people would probably consider my Welsh a useless skill, because people are so often like “Why the flip would you even need Welsh?” And they’re totally right  that I don’t need it at all, I just want to learn it and speak it and understand it, but I most definitely do not need it, and it isn’t particularly useful here in Poland. But then thinking this way, perhaps we could say the same thing about my Swedish and Norwegian as well. English probably not so much, because I think it IS actually, objectively useful and would be for anyone, but I don’t really have to use Swedish or Norwegian, I don’t work with them, I don’t have to communicate in these languages. Well I do have pen pals with whom I communicate in these languages but it’s because of learning these languages that I wanted to find pen pals who speak them, not that I’m learning the languages to be able to communicate with my pen pals. 

   How about your useless skills? 🙂 

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