The Truth About Me

So I was walking down the hallway today when a coworker stopped me.

“I hear you like crossword puzzles,” he says.

“I do?” I say with a very confused look on my face.

“Try this one and tell me if you think it is too hard,” he says shoving a piece of paper into my hands.

I have to say this was very confusing to me on many levels.  First of all, I am not sure who started the rumor that I like crossword puzzles.  A few years ago, Molly and I were completely addicted to the People Magazine crossword puzzles because they were all about pop culture.  I think for about a month, we did every People magazine crossword puzzle that existed.  Then we ran out of them…and I haven’t done one since.

Secondly, I am not sure if this was a challenge, a compliment or a friendly gesture.  I now feel obligated to try the crossword puzzle (which is incredibly hard by the way!) and feel like I will be judged based on my inability to complete it.

SO let me just tell you a little known truth about me. 

I am not incredibly good at stuff that requires a lot of intellect. 

I know…this comes as a shock to all of you who think I am brilliant.  But intellectual things kind of stump me.

For example, I love to read.  I read a lot and I read fast.  (So fast in fact that in the required Speed Reading class I had to take in high school I surpassed the reading goal that we were supposed to accomplish by the end of the semester on Day 1…they didn’t have anything to teach me.) But I don’t read things that are too heavy or require a lot of thought.  Poetry and Shakespeare is confusing to me.  I love Romeo and Juliet and have seen/read it over twenty times.  Just recently I was watching a movie adaptation and understood a MAJOR plot point that explained the entire movie…for the very first time.  I completely missed it the first 19 times.

I love to write…but notice that my strength is straight forward, to the point writing.  Not a lot of frou frou adjectives, bogged down descriptions, heavy metaphors and foreshadowing.  BECAUSE I DON’T GET THAT STUFF (at least on first pass through).

Really.  Politics…don’t get it.  Financial stuff like mortgages, retirement accounts….don’t get it.

I can fake it pretty good though. 

It is not that I am not smart…I really am.  I just don’t like to spend time trying to understand things that I don’t care about.  I don’t care to hold every piece of trivia in my brain so that I will be good at Trivial Pursuit the one time every five years I play the game.  I don’t care about politics so I don’t try to understand them except the one time every four years I vote (ok…I can hear the audible gasp now…yes I don’t vote either).

When I read a book, I want to understand what it is about…not try to figure out every little word, the hidden meaning and the context.  I want to be swept away in the story.

So, there you go.  That is the truth about me.  I will now go and try to figure out what a 12 letter word for “marsupial warfare” is.