What's the life of a man, any more than a leaf ?

[venta]

Come January, I shall be making my usual bookkeeping post in which I witter tediously about the extent to which I've kept the previous year's resolutions. However, I have a new plan for making resolutions this year... and I need a bit of assistance.

My aim for this year is to acquire twelve new skills - one per month. They are to be things which could be regarded as useful life skills. Now, I'd love to learn to speak Japanese, or to play decent jazz piano from a fakebook, or to learn to ride a horse, but these are clearly abilities I'm unlikely to acquire in a few weeks.

I've already selected some of the skills I shall attempt to acquire. I don't know how to feed or bath a baby, or change a nappy, and I feel I should be able to (learning this obviously requires me to locate a friend who will lend an appropriately sized baby. Offers welcome.) Most of the basic first-aid skills I've learned have fallen out of my head (or changed in the years since I learned them), so I should brush up in that area. I'd like to learn a few basic guitar chords; I've no delusions of learning to play guitar in a month, but being able to keep up with the three-chord trick should (I hope) be manageable.

However, I'm after suggestions to add to my list. As the guitar should suggest, I'm willing to accept a fairly broad definition of 'life skills'; think of it as a list of abilities which today's urbane sophisiticate could be expected to possess. The skill must be plausibly learnable (or its basics graspable) in a few weeks. And I don't wish to get all SMART, but it should be objectively measurable. There should be some goal (a first-aid certificate, a non-wailing baby, and a quick rendition of a few Status Quo numbers) to demonstrate I've achieved some level of competency.

Does anyone else fancy this for the new year ? If so, shout up and we can get compiling a list from which any takers can select their twelve life skills.

Comments

[jiggery-pokery.livejournal.com]

Learn to juggle a three-ball cascade for 15 seconds or more without a drop, four times out of five. (I can't.) Maybe a bit trivial, but perhaps it would be useful for diverting a six-year-old?

Make a will, if you haven't? (Poo, I meant to do this in November while Will Aid was in progress, but it went completely out of my mind. Were I to die today my estate would be worth very conisderably under £125k - in fact, it would be worth below £0k - but it's still something I want to do.)

Learn to swim, if you can't? (I can't - well, I swam 25 metres once, but normally I can barely swim ten.)

[venta.livejournal.com]

I think the will is a good idea, though it's not really a skill as such, so doesn't come under my heading. I should do it, though.

Juggling and swimming are both excellent suggestions, of exactly the kind I wanted, though as it happens they're both things I can do.

[jiggery-pokery.livejournal.com]

You could take some suggestions from this list someone once cooked up (hetero-male-centric in places) or Heinlein.

[jiggery-pokery.livejournal.com]

Or even a de-Americanised version of Esquire, for that matter.

I kind of faintly disapprove of lists that imply that if someone can't do something then they're a failure, or not a Complete Human Beling, but conversely I like your mix-and-match pick-twelve-to-suit-your-needs approach.

[venta.livejournal.com]

The quotation from Heinlein is something which caught my attention some years ago, and is written into my Commonplace book. I did consider taking it as a list to work through during the year, but figured a lot of them would be hard to organise.

I'd rather not get into fighting unless unavoidable, and I'm not sure many of my friends would be willing to die just to check whether I was comforting or not ;)

[ebee.livejournal.com]

how about a 3 beat wave with poi?

[venta.livejournal.com]

KentwellRichard taught me that at your birthday beach party last year!