two things happened when i was about 11 years old that influenced the way i feel about my present situation. (yes, i have a nipper onboard.)
the first was the discovery in my next door neighbor's garage of several field hockey sticks that lead to many afternoons playing crude renditions of the game on her front lawn. there were two teams. and three of us. under any other circumstance, there would have been a fight to claim the extra person for your team. logic (and the slightest understanding at all of how team sports are played) would state that the two person team would inevitably triumph over the single player. In our case, this was not so. in fact, my little sister, Amanda, was so horrible that for whatever reason, she assisted in leading the opposing single-player team to victory, while her team lost the whole shooting match. It never failed. Basically we had two options. Manda was her own team- or argue over who got stuck going down with her. it was fantastic how horribly useless she was.
the second occurred in the back of my mother's car listening to Marlo Thomas sing to us about the way we should behave and live our little lives. our family had a cassette tape recorded in 1972 featuring the vocal stylings of Shel Silverstein, Dionne Warwick, Mel Brooks, Harry Belafonte, Kris Kristofferson, and Kurt Vonnegut Jr. anyway, i must have listened to every song and every story on this tape a million times. i knew all the words, i sang along, and part of me felt i was very good friends with most of the characters. one of the songs was about HELPING- which showcased the talents of these arbitrary little children either doing good, or making something, and the struggle with an antagonizing character who basically undid all of their efforts. it's a cute little tune that i still sing quite a lot. "some kind of help is the kind of help that helping's all about. and some kind of help is the kind of help.... we all can do without"
to conclude, i guess what i was looking for were some relevant and painless examples of how to portray how absolutely worse than useless my little helper has been to me this week. to say that he was less than instrumental is not doing it justice. i'm pretty sure his attempts at labor actually set me back a half day or so in getting this boat ready for the regatta this weekend.
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