and the winner is... (there's nothing to win, but nothing to lose either)

i was watching this tv show the other day about a loser. this man is broke, divorced, and lives in a tent in his own backyard. so naturally he attends a seminar on how to employ his natural talents in a profitable way. except that the only innate 'winning tool' this guy could come up with about himself was the fact that he's hung.

right. because the only direction this show can go is for him to become a hooker.

so it got me thinking about what my winning tool was and how i could put it to work for me, without involving prostitution in any way.

the first thing that came to mind is that i'm a decent cook. but then i realized that a million other people can also do that as well. not to mention that i'm lacking both the massive start-up capital and spare hundred hours or so a week needed to ensure that your culinary skills will ultimately become profitable.

i can also knit pretty well. but again, a trillion other people can do that. and i'm way too lazy to maintain an etsy account. besides, i'm also learning that yes, you can have too many throw blankets. and then, maybe i can't knit so well because i can only make things that are square or rectangular. this is what happened when i tried to make a hat for the fuss:



it was a little big.

so what the fuck else am i good at? (besides throwing unnecessary sweary words into sentences)

my moment of clarity has arrived.

i am an awesome negotiator. or i guess you could say i make good bribes. but i like negotiator better, it just sounds slightly more badass.

this is a skill i've had to hone over the years. it wasn't always so sublimely refined as it is today. when i was in college, the power of my skills used to even blow my own mind. like, for example, when i would go out to the bar with a fiver in my pocket and come home wasted and with about thirteen bucks stuffed into my pack of marlboro reds.

there was also the time that my piece of shit nissan sentra exploded on a major interstate, at 11:00 at night, on my birthday, in those dark days before cell phones. somehow i managed to convince the state trooper, who found me crying in a ball fifty feet from my smoldering vehicle, to drive me the forty plus miles to my house instead of following his orders to drop me at the place where they were going to tow my car to. he even let me use the radar thing to clock speeders. it looked like a tv remote from the eighties.

as i matured, so did my ability to reign in my power.

just this morning i successfully convinced the fuss that playing with the maraca i made out of plastic cups, hot pink duct tape, and quinoa is way more entertaining than chewing the nest of wires underneath the desk.



as anyone who's ever had the pleasure of a teething nine-month-old's company can tell you, this is not an easy thing to accomplish.

and if you wanted even more evidence of my winning tool at work, i will now predict that i will become, literally, a winning tool over at yo mama's blog. i'm pretty sure i can convince miss yvonne to send me a care package of insult gum, a handmade card, and maybe some cookies by spreading linky love for all you out there in blogland. i know you want to be a winner too, and you just may be if you head over and check out her contest.

whew. all this talking about myself has tired me out. what about you, dear reader, what's your winning tool*? i ask in part because i care about you and want to get to know you a little better, but also because i want to get some ideas for different ways i can exploit things to make bags of money. alright then, let's hear it.



*please don't creep me out by being perverted. i may be using a dirty pun, but i'm hoping for clean answers.