Talents and Hobbies

There are certain hobbies that you get into simply because you have the corresponding talent necessary for it. Take the visual arts like drawing or sketching for example. Maybe as a kid, you liked drawing. Your mom always wondered how you could consume that whole set of pad paper she bought you just a week before. And she discovered that you filled up every sheet of it with the sketch of your favorite cartoon character. But instead of getting mad at you, she enrolls you the following summer to an art school for kids.

Or maybe as a kid, your idea of killing boredom was disassembling that toy train that you got last Christmas and trying to build a robot out of it. As you grew older, that toy robot was replaced by that bike which you disassembled and re-assembled every weekend to improve its aerodynamics. And as an adult, that bike eventually became the car that you souped up every now and then, not only to improve its performance, but also to score more pogi points with the chicks.

You might think that I was describing myself in the above paragraphs. Well, the first part on being artistic, I don't think that would apply to me. You see, back in kindergarten, in one of our coloring projects, I managed to color the eggs in the drawing using the black crayon. I kid you not. Even my Mom got teary-eyed when she saw the artworks of all the kids displayed side by side in our classroom. My kid might be disturbed. Black eggs, tsk, tsk, tsk. Well, at least, my eggs stood out from the rest.

The second hobby, I admit, somehow applies to me. I remember having quite a few experiences with disassembling various toys and broken appliances. Yes, they were already broken even before I tinkered with them, you smart ass. I just thought I could fix them. But most of the time, the only thing I got to accomplish was to electrocute myself with a jolt.

And so I ponder about my writing talent (or lack of it). This blog is supposed to be an outlet for me to develop my writing skills. I try to remember if as a kid I already showed signs that I would be a pretty decent writer.

A visit to our ancestral home (It's actually just an old house which my grandparents did not even get to own. I just like the sound of ancestral home to refer to the house of my lola) would reveal evidence about my writing skills.

There's a certain wall up in the second floor which I would like to call the kulotski board. Using pencils, crayons, ballpens, even markers, that was where I practiced writing the alphabet, my name, and drawing creepy-looking stick figures which I'm afraid to show to psycho-analysts now. I have no idea why my mom and lola allowed me to vandalise that part of the house. It's not as if I showed potential in being a writer or an artist. You would even need a mirror to read what I wrote. This is because my writing was classified as mirror writing. It was not only written backwards, but the characters were also flipped horizontally. In short, talagang baliktad. Thinking how I managed to do that freaks me out. I know, I was really a weird kid.

Well, look at the bright side. I think I may have improved my writing. I don't write backwards anymore and my letters aren't flipped horizontally. The only things backward and flipped right now are my brains.

Would you consider that as improvement?