Whiteboard Deficient

We all have weaknesses that hold us back in our chosen professions. For example, Superman has kryptonite, and Batman, at least in the new movies, has a costume that is too tight in the neck area, which is why it always sounds like he’s just swallowed a handful of gravel. (On the other hand, Joe Biden’s weakness is that he is fully capable of talking at all times.)

I must admit that I have a weakness. It pains me to say it, but in the interest of full disclosure, here it is: I cannot write on a whiteboard.

Believe me, I’ve tried and failed many times. I’ll attempt to diagram something or create a neat bullet-point list, and when I’m done the whiteboard looks pretty much like somebody dipped ants in paint and let them walk around on it for twenty minutes. (The only difference, of course, is that ants spell better than I do.)

Some of my problem can be attributed to the fact that I’m left-handed, which means I can’t wrist-write, because my hand is trailing the marker and will instantly smudge out whatever I’ve just written. (Curse the dominant right-handed class and their left-to-right writing methodology!) That leaves me with no option but to write with only the tip of the marker touching the board, which always turns out to be an instant disaster, as whatever muscle it is that should control this shirks its responsibility, leaving me with absolutely no control of what I’m doing.

You may think that this really isn’t that big of a deal, but it is. It has placed a glass ceiling above me, which will keep me from moving of the corporate ladder. Have you ever seen somebody with ‘senior’ in their title stand up in a meeting and scribble illegibly on the whiteboard for ten minutes and still have the respect of their peers the next day? I think not. Sadly, it means that I may have no other option but to aim for management {shudder!}, where incomprehensible diagrams are assumed to be a result of you thinking faster than your body can react, and is considered a good thing.

I’m left with few options. I could hire a personal assistant to do all of my whiteboard writing for me, but that would be costly. I could learn to write right-handed, but that would be time-consuming. I could suck it up and quit whining, but that wouldn’t be any fun.

So I guess for now I just plug along, accepting my major deficiency and doing my best to not let it hinder me. I mean, things could be a lot worse, couldn’t they?

Plus, I can still smell the markers.

Recommended Reading

Before watching the HBO miniseries The Pacific, I had little to no knowledge of the war in the Pacific during WWII. This 10-part series was done pretty well, and it opened my eyes to a lot of what occurred during that time.

After finishing the miniseries, I moved on to the book With The Old Breed, which was written by E.B. Sledge, who was one of the main characters portrayed in The Pacific. His book is a first-person account of the two campaigns that he fought in, Peleliu and Okinawa. It goes into much greater detail than The Pacific had time for, and it gave me a much better understanding of what the fighting on the Pacific islands was like.

I won't try to give any sort of summary or specific details on the book. All that I’ll say is that it is one of the best books I’ve ever read, and I highly recommend it to anybody. In fact, I can say that, to me, the best part of The Pacific is that it led me to read With The Old Breed.

I Signed Up For What?

I’m getting kind of nervous.

This is because a few months ago I did something incredibly rash, without putting much thought whatsoever into just what I was committing to.

I blame it all on Christmas, or, more specifically, Christmas cookies. You know how it is: You swear to yourself that during the upcoming holiday season things will be different, and you’ll control the amount of junk food you eat. However, despite your good intentions, your resolve immediately disintegrates and you end up eating just as terribly as you always do, or maybe even worse. (The closest thing to a vegetable you consume in the second half of December is a cookie that has green frosting and/or sprinkles.) This leaves you a bloated mess when January rolls around, which is the perfect time to ignore your New Year’s resolution to get into shape and instead focus on seeing how long you can stay inert on the couch.

That’s what happened to me last Christmas, which is not unusual. What is unusual is that in February I usually get serious about getting back into some semblance of shape, but this year, for some reason, I didn’t. Soon it was mid-March, and I realized that I had to do something quick, or else I’d have to update my wardrobe to include pants the size of two-man tents

 So I signed up for a half-marathon. The day was March 19th, and at the time the snow was still piled up everywhere. May 14th, the day of the race, seemed like a long, long way away.

But now it’s almost here, and I’m getting nervous.

It’s not because I haven’t trained, mind you, because I have. In fact, signing up turned out to be a great idea, as it busted me out of my lethargy, which was causing me to rival Garfield himself in terms of food consumption, and motivated me to exercise enough so that I no longer have to worry about the button on my pants popping off due to increased belly-pressure and taking out somebody’s eye.

Yet now I have to run the actual race, and I’m no runner.

I envision the race to consist of a bunch of hard-core fanatics with subscriptions to Runner’s World, all smiling smugly and using running terminology such as “splits”, “gentle pickups”, and “speed-work”. They will all have high-tech running shoes and space-age clothing and know all about the benefits of proper stretching. They will be hoping to improve on their previous half-marathon times or warming themselves up for a full marathon. (I reallize that this is a vague, possibly demeaning, generalization of runners. However, I'm sort of intimidated at the moment by them, and this is what I can't help but picture.)

Then there’s me. I don’t use running terminology, unless “my dogs are barking” counts, and my only goal of the race is to not throw up.

So it’s going to be interesting. How will I handle being put into a situation that's like nothing I have ever encountered? Will I wilt before the pressure, or will I rise to the occasion? The day will be memorable, but what kind of memories will be made? Will they be memories that I’ll be happy to have, or memories that I’ll wish I could forget? The tension is nothing if not thick.

So, if you’re in the Maple Grove area on Saturday, feel free to stop on by to cheer or heckle. I’ll be the guy who’s wheezing a lot and cursing the March 19th version of himself for getting me into this situation in the first place. I’ll try not to throw up on you, but I can’t promise anything.