Have I mentioned that I enjoy being good at things?

The human brain has some impressive mechanisms for revising unpleasant memories. That’s how I manage to try V-8 again every couple of years.

This same phenomenon also dulled my recollections of middle and high school P.E. enough for me to take a volleyball class one semester in college.

The early days of class, however, showed several areas in which both my memory and my technique could use improvement.

After a few sessions on basic skills, the instructor broke us into teams for in-class tournaments. He asked us for team names to fill out his roster, and my group quickly ceded our naming rights to the one member who seemed excited about it.

We changed teams every couple of weeks after that, but for some reason the coach stopped asking us to make up our own names.

As the course progressed, our positive, encouraging instructor did everything he could to help us all improve our individual skill levels. It wasn’t his fault that my existing level was in the negative numbers. He also had the perfect attitude for an intro-level course, which he shared with us at least once a week.

(I don’t think I’m the only one who heard the subtext to his start-of-class pep talks, though.)

The semester went on with very little change, save for rising frustration levels on all sides. In between missing the ball, ducking the ball, and miscommunicating with my more skilled teammates, I started feeling compelled to defend my personal worth. I wanted to stop the game and declare, “There are things I’m good at, I promise!”

By the end of the term, though, thanks to the coach’s superhuman patience, I had transformed into a person whose overhand serves cleared the net at least 15% of the time. I may even have discovered one of those non-athletic lessons that ragtag kids learn in sports movies: I’m trying to hold on to that feeling of utter and ridiculous volleyball helplessness to reflect on in moments when it’s my turn to be shocked by someone else’s colossal incompetence.

Of course, that kind of thinking can lead perilously down the slippery slope toward self-betterment. Thank goodness I’ve developed a workaround.

Kerrville Folk Festival 2013

I recently returned from the Kerrville Folk Festival in the Texas Hill Country, which I attend pretty much annually. I’ve mentioned it a couple of times before.

It’s a phenomenon that’s not very easy to explain to people who aren’t already familiar with it. This time I tried a new variation on my standard description.

I got a new response, too.

This was a fair question, as I had left out an important part: I love aging hippies. All my festival friends are aging hippies. I’m afraid of the ones in my age group, who are much more cool and tan and alternative than I am.

It’s intimidating.

Generally, the previous generation suits me a lot better.

I’m not sure how I managed to become simultaneously forty-five and eight years old, but there you have it.

Come to think of it, I know exactly how this happened. It’s clearly caused by the genetic material inherited from my two favorite aging hippies.

Thanks, guys.

The Tough Coughs as he Ploughs the Dough

My Intro to Linguistic Analysis professor explained that older dialects of English used to pronounce the “k” and “gh” sounds in words such as “knight.” We sadly lost them over time, and their absence hit Dr. Pangolin hard. He spoke of these sounds as if remembering them fondly from his own youth in the twelfth century.

His nostalgia reminded me of the fading words my friend Wendy and I had sworn to preserve in middle school, at a noticeable cost to our already tenuous social standing.

Outside of Dr. Pangolin’s class, though, I reverted to the impoverished modern pronunciations of “knee” and “know” and “Knott’s Berry Farm.” Then, two years later, I learned the hard way that she who forgets her history is doomed.

I needed to speak with a Student Activities administrator about arrangements for a campus organization, and not offending her would have been a really good way to start. Brimming with responsibility and foresight, I visited the department ahead of time to determine her office hours and pick up a business card.

Everything was going swimmingly until I arrived for my appointment the next day, loudly wielding my knowledge of contemporary pronunciation.

Dr. Pangolin would have been deli-gh-ted.

Extra Credit: Further lessons courtesy of Dr. Seuss and Desi Arnaz (from about 2:45).

You better listen to the radio

There’s an amazing weekly program on public radio that is consuming my life.

I discovered it about eleven months ago, and since then I’ve listened to all seventeen years of archived episodes. The show made it into my Christmas letter as one of the six most notable features of my year.

Every week on the program they pick a theme and present a variety of different kinds of stories on that theme, ranging from personal essays about Israeli poultry to investigative reporting on the juvenile drug court system to interviews with embittered professional Santas. It’s difficult to convey the show’s huge range, though my attempts to do so can be measured in the number of people who now run away when I start sentences with, “I heard on the radio….”

The subjects jump back and forth from public figures and major events to ordinary people who just happen to be fascinating. Naturally, since day one I’ve been imagining future episodes in which I could feature.

It doesn’t hurt that the show has helped launch the careers of essayists such as David Sedaris, Sarah Vowell, and David Rakoff, all writing frequently in my preferred genre of “I’m rather awkward; here’s how that’s working out.”

For months, then, the voice in my head has been host Ira Glass asking insightful, journalistic questions to turn my perpetual internal monologue into an intriguing radio story.

These self-congratulatory interviews don’t stop at illuminating my creative process, of course. Frequently they spill over into examining the compelling intricacies of my everyday activities.

It turns out that imaginary journalists shadowing you, just like real ones, can bring uncomfortable truths to light. All the hard-hitting nonexistent reporting is leaving me less and less sure of my own striking newsworthiness, and gradually I’m adjusting my vision of episode themes that might apply to me.

Searching the show’s contributor list for comparisons indicates that I am not among the philosophers issuing expressions of such shattering profundity that the only possible reply is a muted monosyllable.

Instead, I’m one of the people who keep eating foods they know will trigger their severe allergies, or at least the guy moved to tears by an American Express commercial on an airplane. The appropriate journalistic response to my statements is, “Wait, what?”

Luckily, like I said, this show tackles an amazing range of topics. They made an hour of compelling radio from an all-night interstate rest stop. Maybe there’s hope for me yet.

P.S.—If you would like to cultivate your own informative, entertaining, and potentially self-doubt-inducing radio habit, you can stream every episode ever at the This American Life web site. If you need more cool stuff to do, I also suggest giving them money for being so awesome.

I know a song that gets on everybody's nerves

In the tenth grade, my Great Books teacher mentioned that she enjoyed telling ridiculous stories to extremely gullible people.

Hoping to provide her with more material, I promptly explained why songs get stuck in your head: Certain radio frequencies resonate well with human tissue, and those snippets of music get trapped inside your skull and bounce around on their way through the air from the local soft rock station.

My teacher was so enthralled with this new piece of scientific knowledge that I felt bad having to suggest that maybe she should reconsider throwing around the phrase “gullible people.”

I can hardly blame her, though. The mysterious force of song-head-sticking is not to be trifled with. My roommate recognized its devastating contagious properties and finally declared that I am not allowed to tell her what’s lodged in my head if there is a chance she knows the tune. One of my friends at work is bound by a similar domestic edict, so she and I started inflicting the brain virus on each other instead.

Of course, music carries other dangers aside from relentless repetitions of “Hey Mickey.”

A few months ago, just before the office radio rolled over to non-stop Christmas music, the awesome power of classic hits suddenly moved me to dance while sitting at my keyboard.

The woman at the next desk did not heed the call of the same muse. She did, however, notice my arrhythmic jerks and strained humming and spring into action.

Next time, though, I know just how to explain the situation: