It took me a while to come up with anything, because although I do things like play viola/violin and prefer a manual transmission to Point and Drive and make a pretty good team with husband in Large Appliance DIY repair, so do zillions of other people.
But a couple of things finally filtered into mind:
I have unusually acute hearing, even now that I've gone more than fifty times round the sun, closer to sixty, in fact. My parents used to call me "rabbit ears", which brings me to the next part: I'm a pathological eavesdropper, because people are broadcasting their conversations loudly enough that it's hard to ignore. Besides, I'm nosy, possibly because I am likely an extravert brought up by introverts, so lack the social skills to actually ACT like an extravert, so I have to live voyeuristically instead. So the other day I was in the grocery store laughing my head off (internally) because at the other end of the Mexican food aisle, a pair of French speakers were trying to figure out how to pronounce Spanish words like "tortillas" and "guacamole", which no one around here pronounces correctly anyway...probably even the native Spanish speakers take liberties with the latter, which is derived from a Nahuatl word. (I can decipher French because we used to listen to Teddy Berlitz
ad nauseam, so I can parse the sentences into separate words. And there are so many cognates with Spanish, that,
voilà, I can eavesdrop on simple conversations. Especially when people don't know anyone is listening.
And that takes us to my second (fairly useless) talent. I have an enormous vocabulary, which I credit to my childhood habit of pathological reading. A few years back my friends/family were taking those online tests that estimate vocabulary size...mine never came in under 43K words, and often 45K or more, over 10K words more than the nearest competitor. (My husband was downright smug when it turned out that he knew what "exegesis" means and I didn't. Now I do, hahaha!) Of course this talent is basically useless, because almost no one wants to hear words they don't know. (This probably goes in the TMI category, but this morning Big Dog and I were tagging around on equipment rounds with husband, when he mentioned that someone had seen a feral hog in the vicinity. So I told him that my mom wouldn't let us use the vulgar vernacular
cochinos for "pigs" like our neighbors in Mexico did, so we looked it up. And found out why...
)
My third talent is not a talent at all, but just one of those things that influences people's interactions with me. I think my face is plenty wrinkly (result of age and living at high altitude for several decades), but my hair is mostly its original color, aside from a few white strands. I'm obviously not dying my hair (because of the three dozen rogue hairs), but many people my age are completely silver or completely dyed, so I must be younger than my face looks, right? (The flip side is that I think people who are close to my age are older. Or younger, depending on whether they dye their hair or not. I'm a literalist.)
Deborah