I tried to paint with Gouache today, and it sucked.  I don’t know if the paint was just bad quality or if I lack the technique to make Gouache work, but it did not flow very well for me.  It was sticky.  Now I could just blame the paint and let that be that, but I also know that I am not a great painter.  I do not have the skill and for some reason my patience runs out far too easily while I paint. 

Strangely this only makes me want to crack the code of painting.  I wish I was one of those people who could look at something they aren’t good at and go ‘oh well, that is not something I need to do, so I won’t worry about it’.  Instead, if I am not good at something it will annoy me every time I think about it.  Let’s take languages for an example.  I have a pretty good ear and can pick up accents rather easily, but I am terrible at memorizing vocabulary and I hate getting the grammar wrong so much so that I find it difficult to put the language into practice.  Combine these things and I wind up being not so great at languages.  This bothers the heck out of me. 

The problem is that I can also be incredibly lazy and unwilling to put the extra work into things that don’t come easily to me.  Instead I just wind up being mediocre and annoyed all the time.  I envy those people who find that one thing that they are passionate about and devote their life to that thing.  The musician who only plays their instrument, or the computer programmer who devotes her life to coding.  The kid who knows she wants to be a doctor and pursues that goal with seemingly unwavering dedication. 

I was never like that.  I have always had far too many desires, too many interests.  I spent a lot of my life wandering from thing to thing trying to figure out what I really wanted to do.  Honestly I still don’t know, but now I am in my 40s and I have pretty much accepted that I will never have a singular goal.  I can only try and fill the time I have left trying out as many somethings as I can.  Maybe I can even convince myself to put a little effort into mastering, or at least gain competence in some of the things with which I struggle.