Two nights back, an ex-girlfriend from college came down from Connecticut where she’s now teaching high school French, to join me in taking advantage of Restaurant Week at nearby Vice Versa. And over altogether too much excellent food and wine, after catching up on life and talking through our various angsts and excitements, she somehow roped me into helping her revamp her marathon training plans.

Somewhere between when we dated and now, it seems, she discovered that if she starts running, she can pretty much just keep going. And, as a result, she’s not only completed a number of marathons, but even placed in the top five runners for her age group in a handful of them. With another coming up in April, she was looking to speed up her mile split times, to do something in preparation other than just run as far as she could each day. By the end of dinner, I had somehow agreed to help coach her to that end.

On the one hand, as someone with a long-standing interest in sports medicine and fitness research, I might seem like a good choice. But, on the other, as someone who, after hitting about the one mile mark thinks “well, that’s enough running for this month”, I’m probably not such a good coaching choice after all.

I thought of the same thing last night, when another close friend came to my apartment to, over another bottle of wine, trade gossip and dissect her current dating conundrum. After hearing her full retelling of the sordid tale, I tossed in my guy-perspective analysis, which, it seems, my friend found dead on, and was apparently exceedingly grateful for.

But, here too, I felt a bit suspect in terms of qualifications. Certainly, as Edison once pointed out, the first thousand failed light-bulb prototypes weren’t really failures at all, but discoveries of a thousand ways not to make a light-bulb. And, from that perspective, I’m undoubtedly a relationship pro, having discovered about an equal number of ways not to have a relationship.

But, really, if you’re trying to run a faster marathon, shouldn’t you seek advice from someone who’s actually a marathon runner? And, if you’re trying to figure out if your ongoing relationship has any long-term hope, shouldn’t you talk to someone who’s navigated the pitfalls of New York dating into a long a happy marriage?

Well, yes, you probably should. But, apparently it’s easier and far more entertaining to talk to a smarmy generalist willing to pull elaborate theories about love and life and running long distances out of his ass instead. Which, come to think of it, is probably a pretty good explanation of how my life works as a whole.

I don’t seem to do delayed gratification very well at all.

Today, I was briefly very happy after I bought some demitasse spoons at Crate & Barrel that perfectly match my espresso cups.

Then, about two seconds later, I sobered up, and realized that if I become the sort of guy who regularly thinks about things like matching demitasse spoons, I’ll basically have to kick my own ass.

The problem is, my brain moves faster than my mouth. So I speak quickly, trying to keep words at pace with thoughts.

It doesn’t help that my parents are New Yorkers. I may have grown up in laid-back California, but I came home to fast talking every afternoon.

These days, living in Manhattan, I often completely forget that quick talkers aren’t the norm. Then I’ll get on the phone with someone off this frantic little island – say, someone at the Kentucky State Film Commission – and remember again what it feels like to speak with someone who makes each. Word. Into. Its. Own. Sentence.

Or, conversely, I’ll have people similarly irked by my fast speaking speed. A few months ago, I went out to LA to pitch a group of investors for Cyan’s film fund. Granted, in that case, I backed myself into a bit of a corner – I had ten minutes to give a PowerPoint presentation initially meant to have lasted fifteen. I made good time, though, and was nearly through when the time-keeper shouted out, “one more minute.”

“No problem,” I replied. “I’ll just talk faster.”

“Faster? Is that possible? God help us!” the investors chorused. And I got an extra three minutes.

You know how, in kindergarten, you draw stick figures and then you move on? Well, I didn’t. Sure, I can stick figure with the best. But that’s about the absolute limit of my drawing ability. I’m what you might call an art retard.

And it’s not just that I can’t draw. I can’t paint either, can’t sketch, draft or doodle. I see pictures vividly in my mind’s eye, and yet, somehow, by the time they make their way to the page or canvas, the dimensions are so far off as to make whatever I produce look like the work of a drunk, crack-addled six-year old.

It’s not for lack of trying either. At several points past, I’ve set out on stints of daily drawing practice, in the hopes that I’d eventually improve. I didnít.

In other spheres of my life, I have an excellent sense of spatial relationships – I can load up a car trunk well enough to go pro. And my sense of composition is elsewhere strong as well – I’ve even occasionally managed to get my photography into gallery showings. But holding pen, brush or pencil, I lose it all completely. My brain says one thing, my hand does another, unintentionally hilarious results ensue.

So, frankly, it shouldn’t come as much of a surprise that my handwriting is similarly atrocious. Not just so bad that other people can’t tell what I’ve written, but so bad that, a few hours after writing, I can rarely even decipher the scribbles myself.

And this is printing I’m talking about; I gave up cursive five or six days after I supposedly picked it up. Illegible as my print might be, it looks like fine calligraphy against my best attempts at script.

So, for years, even in birthday cards and personal notes, I’ve resorted to my third grade printing technique, uneven letters jumbled up against each other, precariously swaying from vertical to near-horizontal tilt.

Until, that is, today, when I decided I’ve had enough. Today, when I decided that, if I’m going to start feigning adulthood, I need to master some writing to match.

Scoff if you must, but I’m pretty sure it’s important. Until I get this cursive thing down, for example, fatherhood is strictly out of the question; sick notes penned in my usual hand wouldn’t excuse my future progeny – they’d get the poor kids sent straight to an afternoon of detention for forging notes, and for doing it poorly to boot.

So, cursive practice it is. A few minutes each day, in spare moments between more pressing tasks, the quick brown fox will be jumping over the lazy dog. Again and again and again, until I hit flowery cursive that justifies the purchase of manuscript, quill and India ink. Or, at least, until my handwriting is not so atrocious as to jeopardize the afternoon freedom of my hypothetical unborn children.

I’m always a bit amazed by how few other guys possess even basic clothing repair skills – buttons pop off and hems begin to come undone with alarming frequency, and knowing how to fix those small problems before they become bigger ones can save substantial time and money over the long haul.

I owe my ability in such areas to my mother, who, on afternoons home from the office, would occasionally pass along such brief lessons in self-sufficiency. And, in each lesson, as much as I’d learn how to, say, mend an emerging hole, I’d also re-learn that an unused needle should always be threaded with at least a short length of thread.

This second bit was of paramount importance, emphasized heavily along with the story of how my mother’s cousin (or possibly her aunt – I usually tuned out for this oft-told tale) had once not done so, and had stepped on a needle that slipped completely into a vein, coursing along before lodging itself (fortunately) somewhere in her upper leg, thereby avoiding its natural route up to impaling her heart in a Separate Peace sort of tragedy.

While my mother to this day views the needle-in-the-vein story as incontrovertible fact, the more I learned about basic biology, the more I realized there was no way the yarn could actually be true. I mean, veins are remarkably circuitous, and not terribly broad in most places. To think that an inch-and-a-half long stretch of rigid metal could mistakenly end up squarely in the middle of one, much less run luge-like all the way to your ticker, I quickly realized was essentially impossible.

Still, to this day, and despite the protestations of my rational mind, I run a short length of thread through any needle in my possession. Just in case.

My interest piqued by Greg’s discovery of the Anologia Star Estimator, I decided to give the system a whirl. In short, pop in a picture of yourself, and the Estimator suggests three celebrities you supposedly resemble.

Testing the system out with three different self-portraits, I ended up with a slew of possibilities, though with two suggestions popping up twice: Johnny Depp and George Clooney. And, flattering as that may be, I’m left rather seriously doubting the system, as I’m pretty sure I look absolutely nothing at all like either of those two guys.

Instead, in real life, I get stopped on the street by people who feel the need to tell me I look like Matthew Broderick. The beard and short haircut was, in part, an effort to stop that, which seems to have worked, though now I occasionally get Edgar Bronfman, Jr.

Still, by self-assessment, especially on those days when skipping showering forces the front of my hair into a kewpie-doll point, I’ve determined I most closely bear a resemblance to: TinTin.