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My ignorance is not Bliss

20:34 / 06.12.06

Regrets? What didn’t they teach you? What did you fail to learn? Why?

I’ll start with these. We had 2 BBCs and 2 PETS in my school, and I learned to program a triangle. It’s been downhill from there, and I’m old enough to view my PC as a magic box which does as it’s told but, left to its own devices, would do rather more than write boring letters. My ignorance is breeding within me, though. How hard would it be for me to learn how to down/up load a (is it?) MP3 onto something to give me music*? I am my mother, and I’m 38. I was deeply proud of my DVD player for months even before someone else plugged it into the telly.

Oh, there’s so much more. Like Latin, which I sat through for 6 years and know nothing of. Sex, too, which is an odd thing to have jumped out of Latin.

What do you regret ignoring, or would like to have had beaten** into you? Am I just lazy? Did I fall short when it came to things that needed effort?

*They tell me it’s more than music, now.
**Metaphorically, course…

Elijah, Freelance Rabbi

20:57 / 06.12.06

I would have been glad to have learned something about money management from the adults in charge of my well being.

Instead I had a stepfather with some manic need to collect Star Wars toys (followed by my mother's next marriage to a woman who was very good with money but would rather I didn't exist) and a mother who now calls me to bum a couple hundred.

That and skateboarding, I wish I had learned to skateboard...

STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK

21:18 / 06.12.06

I remember my mum telling me that I was free to give up taking piano lessons if I wanted, but that I'd probably regret it later.

I remember thinking "bollocks".

My God, that was really, really, really REALLY FUCKING STUPID OF ME!!!

*goes back in time*

YOU ABSOLUTE COCK!!!

Oh, and that whole time my mum tried to teach me how to be careful with money.

Christ, I was a fucking moron.

Closed for Business Time

21:37 / 06.12.06

Seems like every time I look to what my parents was saying when I was even more stupid than now, the one thing I never heeded, and probably never will, is - don't borrow money you can't pay back, and don't spend what you haven't got.

And I would love to have Mandarin or Japanese beaten into my skull. Ko\ni\chi\wa?

Mon Oncle Ignatius

21:38 / 06.12.06

I was just regretting not learning to swim as a child yesterday, having decided not to get involved in all that tedious going to the swimming pool malarkey because my school were forcing me to.

It seems so much more difficult now I have tried to learn as an adult. Harder to take the plunge, even.

Mon Oncle Ignatius

21:46 / 06.12.06

I've also constantly regretted that my parents, despite both being fluent, decided not to bring myself and my siblings up to be bilingual in French.

Now I get the grammar all wrong and usually have to be drunk to converse intelligibly, or at least, I think so at the time anyway. It always seems to make so much more sense after a bottle of vin rouge.

jentacular dreams

10:37 / 07.12.06

LosMontes, be warned. I know a guy who is (/was) multilingual, but upon learning it discovered to his horror that japanese eats other languages! Now if he's not thinking in english he has a hard time thinking in anything that's not japanese.

Closed for Business Time

11:14 / 07.12.06

kingofthebees - how bizarre!
What other languages does your friend speak? And is the person a native English speaker? Myself, I'm not a native E-speaker, but years and years of Anglophone comics, sci-fi books, telly, music and videogames have corrupted my brain to the point where I now think mainly in English. Also, I now live in the UK... Now, there was a thread somewhere about the changes that happens to people when they move to other cultures...

14:41 / 07.12.06

I would have liked to ride horses. I got bitten by a pony called Golly when I was 5ish, which put me off a bit. Then, in my teens, I was taken actual riding by friends on some big hills, but they were really ace and made my horse run really fast after theirs. That really put the mockers on it. Really. I'm still scared I'd break myself, but...

The language thing sucks, too. I lived in a town in Taiwan for 6 months - 25,000 chinese and me - sharing an apartment a group of locals. They all spoke fluent English, and so did the taxi drivers, and shop staff. It was almost impossible even to try to speak Mandarin. So now, pretty much all I remember is how to ask for a beer, with no ice.

Which all suggests to me that my problem might indeed be lack of application, rather than lack of interest or battery. Why didn't someone teach me to apply myself?

All Acting Regiment

14:47 / 07.12.06

This doesn't seem very healthy, but I feel I should seriously have headbutted/punched a few more people. I actually mean that. I'm talking about when I was that age, you know, eleven, twelve. I'm pretty sure it would have made me a better person today.

16:40 / 07.12.06

Seconding the desire for violence when younger. If I had punched more evil childs as a child then I think I would be much more happy now.

17:01 / 07.12.06

This doesn't seem very healthy, but I feel I should seriously have headbutted/punched a few more people.

Thirding. I really understand the "If I'd just thrown that one punch..." regret. The one time I ever did ...
Yeah - really satisfying, well deserved and worthwhile.

Still haven't learned to play the guitar. No excuse. I am a loser.

21:13 / 07.12.06

Somewhat concerned by the tone of this thread; first of all, if you've got any real aptitude for the piano, guitar, honing your body into a deadly weapon so you can fight crime and so on, then I suppose you'd carry on with the training because it came fairly easy, and was enjoyable. Otherwise, what's the point of beating your head against a brick wall? Our younger selves are often wiser than we know.

Similarly, the main thing about fisty-fights is knowing exactly when to walk away, which, unless it's in a really extreme situation, is as early as possible - if you haven't worked this out by the time you're in your mid-to-late teens then realistically, prison does sort of beckon. So regrets about fights you didn't have age twelve seem a bit counter-productive, unless you're planning a career writing lyrics for an emo band (nothing wrong with this if you are, it is fairly lucrative, but still ...)

Kiltartan Cross

07:11 / 08.12.06

I regret that school music lessons consisted only of rubbish about Great Composers of the Distant Past, as if "proper music" was only that written years ago and played by large orchestras, and included almost exactly nothing about contemporary music whatsoever. And even if they had, they'd probably have managed to make it rubbish too. Bit of a shame. Music lessons these days are (a bit) more interesting and relevant.

Happy Dave Has Left

07:34 / 08.12.06

Mathematics. I can't do numbers. When I gave up higher maths in Scotland, my maths teacher gave me a thoughtful smile and said 'well, at least you won't feel like you're banging your head against a wall anymore'.

It makes me feel teh stoopid when colleagues do sums in their head, and I need a calculator.

That said, I can take anyones incoherent technical ramblings and turn them into something anybody can read. A place for everyone I guess.

Whisky Priestess

08:10 / 08.12.06

I wish I'd actually bothered to practise piano rather than simply pretending I had, and scraping through Grade One with the lowest possible mark. For someone who has in the past been paid money to perform original musical numbers, I'm absolutely shit at reading music and can't play a single instrument.

I feel like amending this (by practising reading music, for example) but don't have much chance or inclination. I've I've got any free time I'd rather write something than teach myself Chopsticks.

Whisky Priestess

08:11 / 08.12.06

And I used to be pretty good at French, when I did A-Level. Not to mention learning Dutch when I was four and forgetting it by age seven. I wish I had had both languages continually beaten into me, rather than just for a few years.

13:19 / 08.12.06

It makes me feel teh stoopid when colleagues do sums in their head, and I need a calculator.

That´s not math. At least, that´s what one of my teachers used to say, when people started complaining. And he was probably right. In my last math years, there was hardly any need for numbers. It was all about vectors, probabilities, strange shapes colliding in many dimensions, different kinds of infinities and other insanities.