Let's Pretend

Whenever I run across the results of one of those "What would you ask of a generous genie" or any plain wish thing, near the top are always flying or being invisible. This makes sense. More than half the population are women and I suspect they're mostly the ones who don't recognize the exciting benefits of being invisible, especially not near or in showers, dressing rooms, and locker rooms in some of the nearby gyms.

Even with all that going for it, being invisible wouldn't be my first choice.

For a long time my pat answer would have been stopping time. In an episode of Bewitched, which I watched faithfully although less so after Darren was switched, she once wiggled her nose and everyone around her was frozen. This, I thought, was very cool.

Not only could you run around, molesting and embarrassing people, but if you were so inclined you could also grab a bunch of stuff and live happily ever after. The stealing, however, might make it difficult to live happily, but still on the plus side would be the ability to mess around with people and their stuff and create hilarious situations.

Later on, of course, I recognized the drawback of all this time stopping. If I wasn't careful, I could spend so much time in the stopped universe, time that would still count against my years on the planet, that I'd age rather quickly. If I even spent as much time in the stopped universe as I did in this one, I'd age twice as fast as everyone around me, mostly without any explanation.

This worried me. Being the recipient of such powers would have to be carefully controlled, something I'm not always good at doing.

At this stage of my life, when I have about twenty years left, I've come up with an alternative wish. No, not to live forever, although doing so metaphorically wouldn't be half bad, and I'm not even sure that I'd want to be a vampire and obtain my longevity through sucking the blood of innocent strangers, although the super powers vampires are rumored to have are very cool.

No, now I'd like something more like this:

I'd like to divvy up my remaining time and live it out at the pace of one week every five or ten years. The rest of the time, I don't know, I'd be in suspended animation or whatnot.

The thing is, I'm damn curious about what the future will bring. Everything from how the oil crisis will be resolved to what becomes of the polar bears to how many goddamn more changes are they going to make to professional American football. I want to see how long the United States will be rule before she falls like every other major civilization has and if we'll ever get flying cars.

The future intrigues me, and not least of all because it's going to happen. There's a lot of ways a lot of things can happen, and I want to see what biologists and doctors and scientists come up with to change things. I keep hearing things like "What would Galileo make of our world today?" and, while I can't compare to the great thinkers or inventors of the past, at least I could be around to give future generations a fresh perspective.

Since I can't imagine living every single day for five or ten thousand years as being much more than a chore of eating and surviving, and since just a glimpse of the future would leave me with many questions and much unknown, I've decided about a week every five or ten years would be enough to catch up. I wouldn't be conversant with everything going on, but I wouldn't be totally out of the water, either. It would give me enough time to get up to speed, to discover a few hidden gems, and to answer the question of how history will treat George Bush.

I'd also lose everyone I know and love and would be sentenced to a life without friends or even acquaintances. That would be a heavy burden, but at least I'd find out if pubic hair made a comeback.