cute but dumb

Annals of idiocy, local division: no, this isn't about Rob Ford, for once, nor about Stephen Harper or the Tea Party. It's about moi. As you may know, I have a Master's degree. Yes, it's in Creative Writing so not terribly useful in the day to day - though very helpful when it comes to editing my friend's books, as I've just started to do for Chris in Vancouver. But to continue - I am fairly well-educated, I've travelled, I'm a sensible person who always pays her Visa bill in full before the due date and manages to run a big old house and maintain a teaching schedule.

What I cannot do is figure out how things work. And yesterday was particularly humiliating. I use a French press coffee maker, and as I was cleaning the plunger, it came apart. So I washed the parts, and then had to reassemble them. Six parts - a stem, four different round bits with holes in the middle, and a silver dohickey. Well, do you think I could figure out which went where? Eventually, of course, I turned to Google and was enraged - there were pictures of the assembled plungers but no INSTRUCTIONS WITH DIAGRAMS in how they go together.

It took me half an hour. I kid you not. Embarrassing. Not nearly as embarrassing, though, as the time when I was trying to frame a picture and told my father-in-law that the glass didn't fit any more - it must have shrunk. He showed me that I was putting it in the wrong way.

Look, I'm gorgeous, brilliant, hilarious and amazing in almost every way, a mix, I like to think, of Doris Lessing and the Dalai Lama. And also, sometimes, a moron. You just can't have it all.