Operating in the real world has never been my strength. I have trouble wrapping my mind around time and space and material objects. There is a certain fluidity to all three for me, a concept which both philosophers and physicists seem to support. As a fiction writer, this attribute has served me well, however, in real life, not so much.

For example, one summer I briefly worked as an apple cider doughnut maker at a farm stand in Vermont. In theory, this job should have been simple. However, it did require attentiveness to space, a material object and time.

Space presented my first challenge. I am not a tall person. The controls and top of the doughnut machine stood above my eye level. I should have found a foot stool or box to stand on, but it didn’t occur to me. Next, I had to deal with a material object, the doughnut mixture.  To create the dough and put the correct amount into the machine, I needed to have command of basis arithmetic, particularly fractions, which is not in my skill set. Lastly, so as not to produce a raw, burnt, or flat doughnut, I needed to pay attention to time, a task impossible for me if a task is repetitive. My mind likes to leap from one idea or story to another and spends as little time as possible in the real world. Disgruntled customers carried their burnt or raw and/or flat apple cider doughnuts to the manager resulting in my losing the job by the end of the first day.

Shortly after the doughnut debacle, I started graduate school in New Hampshire. At the time, I drove a Dodge Colt hatchback, an orangey-yellow car with jet black racing stripes. The car looked like a giant bumble bee buzzing around the White Mountains. But, after spending three harsh winters in New England, salt and ice had transformed my bee into a rust bucket.

Sadly, YouTube wasn’t born yet which forced me to figure out the DYI project on my own. I purchased piles of sandpaper, a can of canary yellow spray paint and Bondo body filler. I attached a sheet of gritty paper to an electric sander and began sanding, oblivious to time, space and the material object in front of me. My mind happily wandered through a land of fictional characters on fictional quests.

Possibly, hours passed, after which my friend, Dan, walked by. He said, “Oh my,” then suggested that I stop sanding. He pointed out that I’d scraped off a good third of the yellow paint on the car.

I glopped Bondo over the gaping rust holes and the otherwise denuded areas. My Bondo application skills turned out to be subpar, with many lumps remaining on the car’s surface. I waited the requisite time for the mess to dry then sprayed canary yellow paint over the bumps. By the end, splotches of orange, gray, green and bright yellow covered my Colt, giving the car an aesthetically underwhelming appearance.

I put an ad in the newspaper, “Yellowish Dodge Colt. Runs. Best offer.” The best offer wound up being $300.00. As the new owner drove away, the Colt’s rusty muffler fell off. I ran up the road and refunded the man one hundred of his dollars.

The sad truth is that I possess few practical skills. If you left me on a deserted island with a rope, a match and a sharp knife, I wouldn’t survive more than two days. However, chances are that I’d die relatively happy and thoroughly entertained, spending my last few hours dreaming up fantastical stories.

I grew up hearing the adage, “If you want a job done right, you gotta do it yourself.” Years of experience have taught me, if I want to have a job done right, I need to hire somebody.