The origins of 'bad at life'

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"Write an article about yourself...."


This assignment was given to me at the beginning of last year for a creative thinking class at VCU Adcenter. After a week of weighing my options, it came down to the night before the assignment was due and I still had nothing.

As I often do when I am desperate for inspiration, I resorted to sifting through my belongings I've kept in a shoebox under my bed since I moved away to college. However, after hours of sifting through my old letters, pictures and bills, I started to notice a disturbing trend.

I was alone, sitting on the bedroom floor of my tiny loft apartment at 3am, with an un-started article due in 6 hours and a life's worth of failures and shortcomings scattered around me, when my inspiration hit:

I am bad at life.

I awoke at 6am the next morning, wrote an mock news interview about my being 'bad at life' - including testimonials from old managers, ex-lovers and current schoolmates - and taped the article to the top of an old cigar box. In the box I enclosed prime pieces of evidence I had found the night before, along with their respective stories. This is just a sampling:

This was a note left on my windshield in Minneapolis a few years ago. It reads:

"Asshole, you are parked 10 inches from my car! how do you expect me to get in? I have back problems and even if I didn't it would be hard to climb over the middle! What goes around, comes around..."

This is a picture I found of my best friend from high school, Tara.

I have absolutely no idea what she is up to these days.

And this is my cousin and her old fiance of three years, What's His Name

Here are some letters, postcards and/or envelopes I wrote to the following people:

My big sister
My little brother
My dad
My aunt and uncle
Grandma
My two favorite college professors
My german foreign exchange student


Then postage went up.

This is an old phone bill from Aug 13 to Sep 12, 2005.
Highlighted are all the Sundays I forgot to call home.

Thats all of them

In the year 2006:

Number of weddings attended: 6
Number of weddings I was a bridesmaid: 2
Number of bachelorette parties attended: 1
Number of R.S.V.Ps: 0

I own these movies

Although this was my most ill-planned assignment of the year, I got my first A.

Sigh.