A small sampling of things I cannot do

Lent is all about reflection and about how we’re pretty much down in the dumps when we’re sans Savior. In accordance with that, here’s my seriously truncated list of things I cannot do.

I can’t:

• Throw a football.
• Do math above a fifth-grade level. (Probably. I haven’t tried. The only math I do on a regular basis is calculate tips, and sometimes I don’t even do that accurately.)
• Eat chocolate without melting some portion of it into my clothes. Chocolate is really hard to get out of most fabric, kids. You’ve been warned.
• Read anything, anywhere without looking for grammatical or punctuation errors.
• Take politicians seriously.
• Touch my toes. (Have you seen how long my legs are? I protest! They are too long!)
• Dance.
• Wear cable-knit sweaters. (But, really, who can? Welsh or Irish farmers may be the only ones.)
• Pass a dog without wanting to pet it.
• Watch war movies. See also: Talk about war movies.
• Drive a manual transmission car. We got a 10-minute lesson from a car salesman in August, but I felt like we were all going to die in a jerky, fiery blaze the whole time I was behind the wheel and on the clutch.
• Read music.
• Watch golf for more than three minutes without crying out from desperate, desperate boredom.
• Skateboard. Not that I’ve ever tried. Or have any desire to try. It is easily the most stressful form of transportation to observe.
• Watch FOX News without my blood pressure spiking significantly.
• Enjoy a trip to the mall.
• Make crafts.
• Hide my emotions from my face.
• Open wine bottles without seriously messing up or losing the cork.
• Let my feet touch the bottom of a slimy lake or river without wanting to vomit. I can walk barefoot on rocks in a stream all day long, but please, please don’t ask me to put them in the green slime. See: Trip to Rivanna swimming hole, circa summer 2010, in which I bailed and sat on a log near the very pregnant and beautiful Cate.
• Kill animals or watch animals being killed. See also: Kill people or watch people being killed.
• Tell a joke without making an allusion to Liz Lemon or a member of the Bluth family.

And these are just a FEW of them! I can’t do so many things. Lenten conclusion? Jesus is OK with this list.