Que sera, Sarah

Please! Don’t make me answer this!

It took me a while to think of 10 things to include for today’s list prompt – things I wish I liked – from Carole, mostly because I kept coming back to things that I don’t care that I dislike, like bananas and mornings. But eventually, I did come up with 10 things that I do wish I could enjoy. Here’s my list:

1. Talking on the phone. I have never liked talking on the phone (well, except maybe when I was a teenager) and current technology – text messages, email, social media, blogs, etc. – has allowed me to get to a point where I almost never use the phone. But realistically, there are times when a call is the next best thing to being there, and I wish I was better about calling people.

2. Exercise. No shocker here. I like almost none of it, and the few things I do (yoga, swimming, ice skating) I don’t necessarily enjoy enough to go out of my way to include in my schedule.

3. Rollercoasters. A developing plan by some friends to go to Kings Dominion this summer reminded me that I don’t like rollercoasters – or really anything else at amusement parks. I could figure out how to gut through my fear of heights if they didn’t make me so damn pukey. I am not especially prone to motion sickness in cars/trains/buses, but everything at the amusement park requires sitting dead still for an hour afterwords so I don’t vomit. Not fun. I’ll have a sno-cone and hold your purse, thankyouverymuch.

4. Fashion. I would like to care enough about clothes to always be in style, but it just takes more work than I am willing to give. Instead, I strive for (mostly) good-fitting, un-rumpled, and clean.

5. Costumes. So many of my friends love Halloween and events like the Seersucker Social that involve dressing up in costumes. I used to be fairly good about playing along, but the older I get, the more I am becoming an absolute crank about wearing anything other than “normal” clothes.

6. Lipstick & fingernail polish. Other people look so nice with lipstick and fingernail polish, and I just… don’t. I think I missed the day in “how to be a girl” training where keeping lipstick on and nail polish unchipped were on the agenda, because no matter how I try with either, it just never works for me, so I’ve mostly given up.

7. Winter. Given that I think snow is pretty and my favorite sport is hockey, I should like winter a lot better than I do, but it’s too cold and too gray and too wet for me to enjoy it.

8. Space. All of the news lately about the retirement of the Space Shuttle program and the first commercial spacecraft launch have reminded me that I am just totally disinterested in space (something I also recall whenever my nephews want to go to the Air & Space Museum). I am totally on board with space exploration being important, but I am so glad other people deal with it, because wow, it bores the snot out of me.

9. Sci-fi books. This is clearly related to the item above, but what interests me about this is that not so long ago, I would have said “sci-fi/fantasy books.” Over the last few years, though, because of the Harry Potter books, the Hunger Games trilogy, and  the A Song of Ice and Fire series (Game of Thrones, etc.), among others, I’ve actually come to like some fantasy novels – so maybe there’s hope for sci-fi someday.

10. Bike riding. So many of my friends love to ride and having Capital Bikeshare now makes hopping on a bike nearly anywhere super-easy, but I still just don’t like riding. I have horrible balance and spend pretty much every moment expecting to topple over and be crushed by a car. And that makes it hard for me to like it, unsurprisingly.

So, what activities do you wish you liked?

(A blogger I’ve been reading a long time, Gretchen Rubin of The Happiness Project, has a great post on this topic, and it includes one of what she calls Secrets of Adulthood: that, “Just because something is fun for other people doesn’t mean it’s fun for me, and vice versa.” So very true – and yet, sometimes incredibly difficult to acknowledge, on either side of the equation.)