Superpowers

The conversations we get into at work…Jo started it.  If you could have a superpower, what would be a good thing to have?   Jo’s first thought was to have a new-and-improved Midas touch—the power to turn objects into cash, but only when you mean to do it, to avoid the nasty side effects King Midas suffered from.  Karen protested that Jo had got the best one, but if she had something like that to make some money, she’d like to travel, so the ability to teleport would be useful—she could see a lot of new places if it didn’t take hours to get there. 

Then they turned to me.  While I was thinking, Latasha made the observation that a lot of people think reading minds would be fun, but that it sounded like a terrible superpower to her.   We all agreed with her reasoning—hearing what people deem appropriate to say out loud is bad enough; we certainly don’t want to know the things they filter. 

I finally decided that if we had the Midas touch and could teleport, then we needed the time to do fun and meaningful things with those abilities—so I would have a bewitched-style power of putting things in order: Twitch! The table is cleared.  Twitch! The laundry is in the washing machine.  Twitch! The shower is sparkling.  More time for travel and money-spending!  Latasha one-upped Jo; she said we should just have the power to get what we needed free, and skip the objects-into-money step altogether. 

The big things taken care of, we turned to fun: I would love to fly, but Jo says she’d be terrified to try it.  Powers can fail, she reasoned.  What if somebody showed up with kryptonite?  Reflecting on Karen’s teleportation travel, I added that the ability to pick up languages instantaneously would be quite useful.  Karen agreed with me, and then told us how, as a child in the Philippines, she and her brothers and cousins would play X-Men, and she always wanted to be Storm.  Her favorite part of the game was standing on a stump, hand raised, yelling, “Storm!” to the gathering clouds.

Yup, the conversations that happen at work…so, which of our superpowers would you choose?  Do you have one to add?