We Knew You Wouldn’t Amount to Anything

By Lisa

I’ll never forget the day my high school guidance counselor told me I was an overachiever.

I said, thank you.

Then I went home and looked it up.

Since then, “overachiever” has become one of my favorite words of all time.

I like its honesty.

It means, none of us thought you would amount to anything, but it turns out that you can walk and chew gum at the same time.

Can you think of a better insult-compliment?

Really, you’re doing a lot better than anybody thought you would with what God gave you. Will wonders never cease?

By the way, when I say I went home and looked it up, I looked it up in something we used to have in the olden days, called a dictionary. This was a big thick book, from when we used to have books. The pages of a dictionary were thin and crinkly, and there were little black half wells in the side for your finger, which provided hours of enjoyment in ancient times, back when there were kickstands on bicycles.

Did I mention that my bicycle doesn’t have a kickstand, either?

Why there are no more kickstands on bicycles is a complete mystery to me. A kickstand is one of the most useful things ever in the whole wide world, and now I have to lean my new bicycle against the wall instead of having it stand up all by itself.

Why?

I see nothing wrong with having a kickstand on a bike. In fact, I wish I had a kickstand on my body.

I can’t tell you the number of times I’m in a conversation with someone and I think, I’m going to lean against the wall while we have this conversation, because it’s taking a long time and I don’t want to have to hold myself up.

But I digress.

I am an overachiever, so it follows naturally that I would overdo things.

One of the things I’m overdoing is over-improving my home.

I also love the word “over-improving.”

It’s another great insult-compliment, isn’t it?

In other words, you’re fixing up your house, but none of us thinks you’ll ever get the money back for it. We knew you’d do something stupid eventually and now you’ve gone and done it. You haven’t improved the kitchen or the bathroom, which are the two places that everybody knows increase the value of your home. So, as we predicted all along, you’re blowing your hard-earned money on dumb stuff, which makes a lot of sense to us, though we never thought you’d make any money in the first place. It figures that you’d make it writing books, since the only people who buy books are the people who like dictionaries, and we all know how plentiful they are nowadays.

Like that.

Okay, so let me tell you about the dumb thing I’m doing, which is putting on a room. I don’t know what the room is called but I can tell you how it came about. I love being outside in my backyard, playing with the dogs, reading, or writing by squinting at the laptop in the sun. I’d been thinking a lot to myself that it would be great to have a room that I could work in and be sort-of inside and sort-of outside, to save myself from squinting, which as we all know gives you wrinkles and I have plenty of those.

I told this idea to someone and she said, you mean a “three-season room.”

This term appealed to me instantly, as it sounded exactly like the kind of thing an overachiever would do, spend money to make a room that you can only live in for three seasons.

Also it sounded better than that no-squinting room.

Or wrinkle-free room.

So they’re building my three-season room right now, and it has windows on three sides, with a flagstone floor, and I can’t wait until it’s finished, so I can go inside and sit around with the dogs.

And overachieve.

Because it doesn’t matter what anybody else thinks you can do, only what you think you can do.

Ha!

Know what that was?

The last laugh.