aroraborealis | (no subject)

Avoiding conflict.

architecture and sex, I hope. :-)

Biology, particularly in breadth. Synthesis of concepts. To a lesser degree, knitting, and designing my own knitwear. Unfortunately, I'm also kind of talented at Taking Things Personally and It's All My Fault.

Seeing patterns. Solving problems. Condensing ideas. Communicating ideas in ways people can understand.

Taking pictures of stuff.

Apparently I'm getting much better at not freaking out about doing work for a presentation at the last minute. I've learned to rely on past experience and trust that this is a pattern that works for me.

Not bad for during the dissertation year.

Cooking, massage, being a smart ass

Hosting parties and making a spectacle of myself, though I never do both at the same time.

Touching, listening, drawing (sometimes). Seeing beautiful things.

giving the most objective position I can on a subject

Listening. Coping. Witticisms.

Understanding both sides of a conflict. And skiing.

Making an argument based on something I've read. Baking cookies. Getting head. Explaining things in lots of different ways.

Enduring.

* Expressing complex thoughts with precision.
* Being aware of my own internal state, including my own biases and irrational quirks and emotional states and the ways they distort my perceptions of the world. (I'm relatively good at acting, when I choose to, in ways that are not driven by those biases, quirks, and emotions but that's more because I'm aware of them than it is because they don't drive me.)
* Thinking quickly
* Speaking compellingly
* Modeling ways of perceiving the world and/or assumptions about the world without necessarily sharing with them or agreeing with them. (This often comes across as being good at listening, but it really depends on what I'm listening _to_, and consequently there are people to whom I come across as very bad at listening.)
* Finding humorous/ironic/paradoxical descriptions/perceptions of events and objects

Talking my way into places, events, situations. Talking my way back out. Changing jobs/careers. Yoga. Travelling inexpensively.

Making order out of chaos. And other stuff. Like flirting. :)

I like this question :)

* communicating
* building and maintaining relationships
* organizing people and things
* travel planning
* cooking
* pattern-matching

Lately, I'm beginning to suspect I might even be good at directing.

And I'm looking forward to finding out if I'm any good at parenting.

Wild laughter, making big decisions fast, planning things, talking to strangers.

enduring, i guess?
cooking
making sock creatures
interior design/organization

backing up a trailer.

My first instinct was to scream "NOTHING" but I think that's the cranky talking.

Listening. Empathy. Making people laugh. Procrastinating. Making a mess. Driving stick. Explaining stuff.

Having fun, regardless of circumstance.

Risotto and spelling.

But that's all.

Cooking.

Following instructions. (Seriously. I can do anything, even things I've never done before, if I have good instructions to follow. I think I could take over the world if there were some very well written instructions telling me how to do so.)

Pattern matching and noting variations from patterns.

making the people i love feel loved.

making new friends (face to face)
making people laugh
writing concise (work) emails
dancing like a fool, with no shame or sense of embarassment
procrastination

Apparently I'm good at pissing off professional cooks -- for example, an awful lot of cooking magazines, shows etc insist on silly things like you can't cook with a microwave oven and that you can't rush bread while at the same time moaning about how the soonest they can get bread in and out of the oven is two and half hours. By two and half hours, people have already finished eating my bread (and yes, it's yeast bread and it rises in the nuker then it's baked in the oven). If I'm organized, I can get bread in about one hour from start to finish, more often it takes just shy of two hours. I also had an awful lot of people praise my meatloaf until they find out it was nuked too, then it becomes rubbery and unappetizing... ;-)

I guess in general I just don't believe that something is good because it's hard to make and/or takes very long to make. I think things are good because they were done right, not because it was hard to make. For some things, it's easy to show, for example, it takes no time at all to type stuff and have them properly typeset and looking gorgeous from the laser printer, it won't look better just because someone took hours to put each and every lead character together by hand. For others, like sewing, cooking etc, it's an uphill battle to prove that something doesn't have to be a huge production to be just as good if not better.

So in general, I think you could say I'm good at finding better/more efficient ways to get stuff done with at least as much quality, if not more, than the traditional ways. Which tends to upset people, even though that's not my original intention. ;-)