Criminal minds

[nancylebov]

This week's Studio 360 has Howard Gardner (the multiple intelligences guy) and Sarah Brown (who does an amazing range of accents and personas). She talked about how, as a kid in school in the days before cell phones, she'd imitate the voices of her friends' parents to get them excuses for getting out of school.

And I remembered that when I was a kid, I'd forge my mother's signature (and once or twice, someone else's mother's) for school stuff, and how meticulous I was about getting it right. These days, I'm a pretty good calligrapher.

So I'm wondering....what deceptions are you meticulous about, and does that show talents which have or could pay off in other parts of your life?

If you want to comment anonymously, that's fine.

Comments

I am good at

[wolfdancer.livejournal.com]

Covering for other peaple, but lousy at covering for my self.
I can see some one mistake, and turni it into a advantage, or a good thing.
I am good at making sure that peaple do not get hurt, or used to be.

[metahacker.livejournal.com]

I'm great at coming up with facile white lies to make what I want to have happen, happen, and happen smoothly. Making events make the sort of sense the listener wants to hear and leads them to the conclusion I am desiring.

I am so good at it that I overused it, and now am spending a huge chunk of my time trying to eliminate deception from my approach to life...

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

Could that skill be of use for fiction or story-telling?

[metahacker.livejournal.com]

Absolutely. :) (I forget, are you in my stories filter?)

And comes in fabulously handy for being a GM, too.

It also helps in mediating conflict, because it contains within it the ability to understand what the other person needs to hear; this lets me (if I don't have my own agenda) help translate between people with different needs and different ways of expressing themselves.

[avram]

I can be pretty stealthy, physically, to the point where I've been known to sneak up in front of people. I haven't figured out how to do anything useful with this talent.