I’m a man, and I’m proud of it dammit. But as proud of a man as I am, there are some manly things that I am severly inept in.

There are some things I can do around the house; take out the trash, mow the grass, do some light landscaping, change the occassional light bulb.

But when it comes to doing carpentry type things, OH DEAR GOD THE HORROR. I replaced some curtain rods in our house and attempted to cover up the holes left from the previous mounts. What should have been a simple spackle, sand, and paint ended with me having to completely replace a 4″ x 4″ piece of drywall. It’s an eye sore to this day.

Another time, I tried to put some storage shelfs in our garage. Never mind that I have two college degrees and used a level, 66% of those shelves are lopsided.

The only thing in our house that I’ve managed to successfully “fix” was when my wife asked me to replace some towel bars with towel hooks. This is by far the only job around the house that I have completed that demonstrates any ability to be handy around the house… but only because I just put the hooks up over where the towel bar holes used to be.

I think the first clue that I’m not very handy  is that I don’t own a traditional tool set. I mean, I have tools, but unfortunately they consist of all the tiny screw drivers and wrenches that come with our cheap Ikea furniture.

I honestly don’t know how I can be so smart yet struggle so mightily with do-it-yourself themed home repairs. It’s like I have a full on brain fart the second you put a tool in my hands. My judgment (and otherwise rational thought) gets clouded in the fog when having to fix something and I end up using a hammer as the multi-purpose tool to fix the problem. No seriously, I apparently think a hammer can fix anything, and it almost never does. In my mind apparently hammer = duct tape.

I damn near begged one of my “handy” friends to help me mount a flat screen television above our fireplace (and hide all the associated wires) and install a dimmer for some LED lights in my daughter’s room. I can’t begin to fathom the damage our house would have endured had I been left alone to complete those projects. It would have been so bad, I’m fairly sure I could have filed an insurance claim.

The worst part? It’s totally my fault I’m not handy. I have a father who showed me how to do a lot of things around the house. Hell, I even paid attention! But I guess things are different when you’re 15 and doing these things with close supervision and guidance compared to when you’re in your late 20’s and going solo (and trying to recall things you did over a decade ago). Things are always easier when someone else is there to clean up the mess you make.

In fact, right now our house has been missing a piece of siding since October of 2012. This same piece of siding came loose a couple years ago and, for the life of me, I couldn’t reattach it. I had to rely on the home builder to fix it. My inability to fix a simple problem is not only depressing, but humiliating as well. Since October, that piece of siding has yet to be replaced (it’s worth noting that relying on a home builder is akin to ignoring the problem entirely, but that’s a story for a different time), essentially mocking me for my inability to do seemingly simple tasks around the house while at the same time signifying that we are, in fact, the white-trash residents in our neighborhood.

God help us if the water heater pilot goes out. God help us if the garage door won’t open. God help us if something happens to our plumbing.

The moral of the story is, if you’re as handicapped as I am around the house, it’s just best to find a good (and inexpensive) handyman to do things around the house for you… preferably when your wife isn’t there so she thinks you did the work. You don’t want her questioning your manhood to your face, right?