Gluttony and Maury

In life, we are all talented at something.  Some people are good at art, some are good at fixing things.  For the longest time, I figured I ranged from the B to B+ level at most life skills.

I was okay with the mediocrity, it means you don't get noticed.  McDonald's is the A+ in fast food chains and no matter how many salads or yogurts they put on their menu, they will always be condemned as the primary cause of obesity in the US of A, condemned for using chickens who live on top of each other in cages and criticized for each decision they make .  Burger King slides by as the B+ and nobody even notices that their menu contains fewer healthy choices, their chicken isn't even meat, and their mascot king is way creepier than any red headed clown clown.

I am Burger King (minus the creepy king); I was never the best at anything.  In 2nd grade I glued more construction paper leaves onto my hands than onto the paper tree trunk, leaving my teacher to subtly hide my fall art work behind another kids perfectly displayed foliage.  In a 5th grade basketball tournament, the jump ball was tipped and I actually got it. My biking shorts, coke bottle glasses and frizzy perm dribbled down the court to the basket.
I put it up.
It didn't go in.
I grabbed the ball again and threw it up.
Still a miss.
I had time.
In fact, nobody was down on my side of the court guarding me yet.
I aimed the ball at the square on the backboard.
Still, no dice.

Finally, a girl from my team ran down, grabbed the ball, dribbled it to the other side of the court, and continued the game.
Apparently, the baskets switch at half time and I was attempting to score points for the other team.  That was the last game I played.

But, like wine gets better with age, so do I (or maybe I just got better when I started drinking wine).
Last year I found my A+ perfectionism in something I had been training for all my life, without even know it:  Eating Contests.

I went to a radio station's Cinco De Mayo party at a Mexican restaurant to get in line for a free psychic reading.  I was hoping psychic Gary Spivey would see a bright  future for me.  I had recently watched Cirque du Soliel on late night tv and wanted to know if I would be successful, or break my neck, if I tried the trapeze (for the record, he said, not to take it up yet--I guess B+ isn't good enough when you're dangling 50 feet in the air).

During the course of the night, the DJ's held a taco eating contest to give away tickets to Star Party, a concert featuring Train, Jason DeRulo, B.o.B. and the girl who refuses to wear underwear (Ke$ha).  I raised my hand to be in it, because it was getting to be dinner time.  And, unlike every grade school kickball game, I was picked first.

After that, girls who had more girth raised their hands to kick my gastro-intestinal ass.
As six of us lined up on stage they brought out 8 tacos per person and a pitcher of water for each contestant. The weird thing was, I wasn't even nervous...I was thinking, "huh, this must be the appetizer."


That's how you know you've found your passion.

With the start to the whistle we had 3 minutes to finish as many tacos as possible.  And although I'm a good eater, I have to thank my husband for 4 years of being a cheapskate who likes to share meals with me and then inhales with the power of a hoover.

As the finale bell rang, I looked around with the last taco shoved into the side of my cheek.  The closest contestant still had two and a half on her plate.  I felt pride I had never felt before.  The glory of others cheering while I enjoyed the last cheesy beef was amazing.

Knowing that this is probably the only skill that I am an A+, I have learned to use it in areas where I need to improve.  For example, when someone wants to challenge me in basketball, I usually say "Let's have a pancake eating contest to see who gets the ball first."  When they agree, I know it's okay because as they are vomiting pancakes after I win, they really don't feel like shooting hoops anymore.

I guess the moral of the story is, find what you're good at and use it to be good at something else.

And if you don't like stories that have a moral at the end, read this instead: When I went to Star Party, a girl with a prosthetic limb got into a fight with another girl.  As the shouting match escalated to hair pulling, the girl's prosthetic arm fell off. She picked it up off the ground and began hitting the other girl over the head with it.