Incompetence

For about a month in 9th grade, I seriously feared that I might not pass geometry; it was the first time in my life thatI had any reason to worry about flunking a subject. Math had never been a passion of mine, but I'd never done poorly at it until it suddenly involved shapes and space. I sucked at it. It was terrible. Eventually, I figured out how to manage the disaster, and I wound up with a B for the year before returning to more familiar -- and non-patial -- ground the next year with algebra.

I mention this only because I'm one of the worst fathers on the planet when it comes to assembling things from diagrams. To open an instruction booklet is to bathe instantly in my own terrified perspiration. Someday, I'll make friends with someone who owns cardio-pulmonary equipment, and I'll be able to monitor exactly what happens to my pulse and blood pressure when I need to assemble something like this, as I did the other day.

Yes, it's a stroller. Yes, it arrives from the box almost completely assembled. Yes, the only parts that need to be attached are the wheels and the damn snack tray.

Yes, these minor tasks nearly exhausted me. I managed to put the rear wheel assembly on backwards no less than three times. I would stare at the instructions, trying to figure out how to map two dimensional drawings onto the three dimensional space of my garage, feeling the sort of stress that normal people reserve for the SATs or a police-administered polygraph. My wife came down several times over the course of 20 minutes to see if I needed her to take over, as she so often needs to at times like that. I barked at her to go away. I figured if I couldn't put four wheels on a bloody stroller, I might as well give up on nearly everything else in my life.

"I can do this," I yelped, as if I were trying to defuse a pipe bomb.

Long story short, I won my battle with the wheel. Then I had to sit down for a while. It's difficult, I imagine, to feel simultaneously triumphant and humiliated, but there I was, both at once, champion of my own incompetent world.

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