Hermione Plays with Clay

Tonight was my first ceramics class over at the Creative Arts Centre. I really didn’t know what to expect. I’ve never seen anyone do wheel-throwing in real life, and all I knew was that it was hard to do. Now I know that it’s hard, but it’s not that hard. I think my biggest problem was that I was afraid to really push the clay around. Instead I kept trying to shape it with my little fingers, and therefore making my first bowl took me AGES. Then I watched the instructor sit down and knock one out in about ninety seconds flat. Damn. So I tried to get a little more fearless, and ended up with a couple useless lumps of goo (a lot of which you see spattered on my pant legs and shoes here; my upper half was just as bad). In the end I managed one decent bowl (which we’re going to “turn” next week) and one semi-okay sorta-straight-sided column thing.

You know what drives me up the wall though? The way stuff like this always turns me into Hermione Granger. I wanted to do the class to try something new and maybe pick up a fun hobby. No stress, right? But as soon as our wheels fired up I was immediately mentally comparing everything I did with everything everybody else did. I have to try to be the top of the class. I was irrationally jealous of one lucky guy who just seems to have an innate knack for this stuff. Why?? You’d think at nearly thirty years of age I could do a group activity where I didn’t compete with everyone else. Sadly, you’d be wrong. And no matter how much I tell myself that it’s okay to be mediocre, that I don’t have to be good at everything, that the world will not end if my very first pot isn’t perfect… I still do it. Every damn time. Tell me you guys are like this too, right? (I mean, I know Kel is…)