Muchness and Light

Will you let me follow you wherever you go? Bring me home.

It's been an incredibly busy six weeks, and I've been sorely out of touch.  Summer break for the boys was surprisingly busy, especially for Max who was gearing up to start high school.  (High school!  My baby is in high school!)  I was working when I could, and I was constantly doing homework or in class—completing the 15-hour class load for the summer session.  It exhausted me, but I managed to pull off a 3.8 GPA for the semester and both boys are still alive. 

In the midst of all of that chaos, there came Rango.  While talking during our first date, I was telling him what my hectic life was like.

"How do you manage time to date?" he asked across a ginger beer.

"I just do it," I replied.  "If it's important to me, I find the time."

That was an issue with so many of the Fragile Cats before.  They would often say they were too busy to be regularly available, but they also had the expectation that I would be happy and welcoming when they wanted to drop a dead mouse on my doorstep.  As most of the Castration Committee will attest, I thrive in chaos; I am generally at my best when I am forced to prioritize and organize and be efficient in my decisiveness.  I could always find time to spend with Bounder or Katniss or Rex or any of them. 

They wouldn't always find the time to spend with me.

As I realized over the year-and-a-half of dating after my separation, I was mostly drawn to avoidants—the asshole Fragile Cats who justified running hot and cold and often made me feel like it was my fault for wanting or expecting them to follow through on their word.  Yes, if you tell me you're going to show up or call, I actually expect you do show up or call.

Somehow they were always surprised when I felt hurt or angry with them for not doing what they'd said they would. 

Eventually I learned it wasn't me at all that had screwed up in these exchanges.  La Bruja told me months ago that I would eventually find an amazing guy who wasn't like that, at which point I would cease to even see the avoidants who were trying to get my attention. 

She was right.  Kind of.

I still see them; I'm me—I can pick them out of a crowd in five seconds flat.  But I don't pay attention to them.  I don't feel drawn to help or empathize or soothe.  Usually I smile and nod politely while mentally running through my to-do list for the upcoming days.  Sometimes I just roll my eyes and walk away. 

Given my own hectic life, it's surprising that I even bothered to try one more time.  I was determined that July 2nd would be my last date for a very, very long time.  I'd intended that to be the case if and when it turned out that he was another avoidant asshole.  Never did I expect the guy to actually be Rango. 

Because he mattered to me, I had to make the decision very quickly to incorporate Rango into my life.  He was willing to accept me and my crazy, plus my two sons and the logistical issues that divorced parenting brings.

Somehow, because I matter to him, he finds the way and the time to make me and the boys a priority.  When a recent family illness brought an unexpected road trip to Alabama, he didn't hesitate to offer to go with us.  He hasn't shied away from meeting my family or friends.

More importantly, when I woke in the middle of the night crying a few weeks ago, he didn't shy away from me.  The logistics of my life were taking a physical and emotional strain, and I woke at 4 a.m. to a barrage of hot, angry sobs.  He was awake elsewhere in the house, trying not to wake me with his own sick and sleeplessness. 

I laid there for a moment in the dark, paralyzed with fear and hurt.  All the nights I woke alone like that came crushing back, and I couldn't breathe.  Then I remembered that I had begged the Universe for someone who could help shoulder that weight for me.  I had prayed for someone to be there in the middle of the night when I was crying.

I padded down the hall to where he was in the kitchen.  He looked at me, saw the glint of streaming tears in the dim light, and dropped everything just to hold me and listen while I sobbed against his chest.  Eventually he put me back to bed and stayed right there with me until I fell back asleep. 

Impossibly, he was still there the next morning.

Rango doesn't shy away from my heart any more than I do.  I warned potential suitors that I was a lot to handle, and they always said they were okay with that.  He is the only one who has consistently and unabashedly embraced the intense chaos that swirls in and around me. 

He loves me not in spite of but because of that intensity.

Queen Frostine commented the other day that I had not once called her crying or lamenting some stupid thing Rango had said or done—totally unlike any of my other relationships.

"He grounds you," she noted.  "He keeps you centered."

I quickly pointed out that I do the same for him.  Even though it's a tenuous balancing act some days, it's easy to be with him, to love him.  We are open and honest in our communication.  We are true to ourselves and to each other.  He is the same way with me that I am with him... that I was with the others who couldn't manage to get their furry heads out of their own asses long enough to realize that it didn't have to be so damn hard all the time. 

Interestingly, he doesn't make me feel like I want to puke.  Yes, there is the excitement and the giddy and the uprush of love.  There are no underlying warnings, no red flags flapping above choppy waters that bring the seasickness. 

Invariably, I am me.  Stephanie is prone to moodiness and difficulty.  She attracts sea monsters, curiously dancing with both Scylla and Charybdis, struggling sometimes to stay afloat in a hopscotch board of eddies. 

Hurricane Sassafras is always swirling, in danger of whirling me under my own upsurge.  My biggest fear is that I accidentally pull Rango into that riptide.

But this one has his own undercurrents, his own battles and strengths that pull against mine.  Somehow we manage to moor each other into the safety of our own harbor, like Puerto Rango is the capital of Glamazon Island.  (In my head, it kind of looks like the lagoon on Gilligan's Island.)

It's natural and easy.  We just fit in ways that we've never felt together with someone else.  Even with all of the awareness of the past and cognizance of the present, it feels effortless to love each other in the ways we each need to be loved. 

Rango and Sassafras live contentedly in the eye of the storm, looking up at brilliant skies in the midst of so much buffeting wind.  And if it means a lifetime of my cracking coconuts for dinner and his building radios from the hollowed shells, so be it.  At least there will be piña coladas and music.

 

 

 

Binding quarks into atoms like I am bound to you.

I believe in love the same way children believe in Santa Claus.  The way tent revivalists believe in Jesus.  The way cats believe in laser pointers. 

Like everything else in the universe, love is a manifestation of energy.  As a series of electrochemical responses in the brain, it has a measurable fluctuation and wavelength—like any other thought or body process.  It can feel kinetic or thermal, sometimes stored as potential, or even like a nuclear blast inside us. 

In my pseudo-scientific explorations and insanely intricate analyses of both self and others, I believe that love is the spark of life in the universe.  The same way we are all made up of atoms from the Big Bang, love is starseed. 

When two people come together, their own energies mingle and influence the other.  There's a push-pull, an ebb and flow, between the two of them that is unique to those people and that moment in time.  Falling in love is like nuclear fusion—the two energies collide with such force as to create something new that is unique and beautiful in its very own right.  It's like the conception of a star. 

I have argued for ages that the fragility and beauty of that is what makes love so incredibly and utterly vulnerable.  Like any new life, its value is incalculably priceless; it is defenseless and demands protection at all costs:

In his poem "the very old sings", Dutch poet Lucebert says, "All things of value are defenseless."  The words famously adorn the top of a building in Rotterdam.  The things that we as humans hold most valuable—love, beauty, knowledge, truth—are completely unable to defend themselves but are undeniably the most defensible, the most in need of defense.

The acts and actions required to defend the valuable are often the things that cost us the most.  Certainly there's an emotional cost to such an endeavor, but the real, tangible cost is often exemplified in productivity hours, marketing or outreach, and sacrifice of resources to help ensure an often zealous defense.  Maybe the true value lies in the cost the Editorial You is willing to accept in defend of the indefensible. 

So what is Self worth?  Again, maybe the value of Self is tied directly to what you're willing to sacrifice to protect and uphold what, by its very and pure nature, cannot support itself.  Because of its subjectivity, each person holds different things to be dear; they find their own self-evident truths.  For one person, it may be love or trust.  For another, it may be reputation or intellect, though there's an argument to be made that even those are partially monetary in nature.  

I think it's the acts and actions we require of ourselves to actively defend ourselves that make us valuable, that make us worthwhile.  And when those acts are performed in the face of adversity, especially self-adversity, they can often be those most costly while offering us the most to gain. 

For me, there is no greater or mysterious force than love.  It is God and creation and the foundation upon which everything else is built.  Love at first sight?  That's like my Higgs boson. 

No one fights harder or truer for it than I do, both for myself and others.  I believe in it.  I work for it.  Sometimes to the point that I will sacrifice myself to give it a little more energy, a little more life, to protect it because it is perfect and special and fucking deserves that above all else. 

Just like my children. 

But sometimes it doesn't fucking matter. 

Like a child, love has to grow.  No matter how perfect and adorable it is when it's born, no matter how much you may want to freeze time and hold that exquisite moment forever in your hand, you can't.  No matter what you do, it will change and expand, getting bigger and stronger until it is eventually self-aware and makes its own choices as it finds its place in the world.  Or it will die. 

Love demands attention and nurture.  It cannot give these things to itself.  It requires a healthy balance from both partners or it grows up dysfunctional and maladaptive.  At best, it then dies quickly and everyone gets on with their grief.  At worst, it becomes a cannibalistic, patricidal maniac. 

Thankfully, there's no legal ramification for neglect or abuse of love.  Indifference and carelessness are morally reprehensible to me, but no one is actually going to die because of it.  (We all know anecdotes of people who died of a broken heart, but I'm not tracking every outlier.  Though I have believed that, if anyone could die of heartache, it would be me.) 

Sometimes the intricacies and logistics of life clash with the philosophical ideal of love.  The responsibilities and actions of living have to outweigh the obligation to the sublime.  No matter how much you want to defend what you've created, the day-to-day realities don't support the metaphysical incorporeal, and we must content with the legitimate limitations of being human rather than suprahuman. 

Sometimes it just doesn't matter because it can't.

That's when the decision has to be made, to keep trying to breathe life into what is dying or to let it go.  Is it kinder to end it or to drag it out until the very end?  Is the sudden evisceration easier to heal from than the lingering infection? 

The worst is when you gut yourself and it doesn't stop hurting, cutting away the part of your heart that you know keeps you alive—you know it like you know your own breath or your child's name—and you can't bleed to death fast enough.  The pain never abates, but the staunching comes so slowly that sepsis sets in and you just wish you would die. 

But somehow I keep coming back, searching for that again and again, the sudden uprush that comes like lightning straight at my heart.  I wish for it and write letters to it like Santa.  I pray for it.  And I chase it like a stray, bright dot that flickers randomly around my life.

Catch it or not, see it or not, it's still there.  It still exists.  It may elude me most of the time, but I stay alert, hoping to catch the flash out of the corner of my big, green eyes.

 

Show me your secret, and tell me your name. Catch me with your fizzy smile.

Men love to tell me their shit.  People, in general, will reveal private information to me pretty readily, but especially men.

I can fall quickly into easy conversation with almost anyone.  For all of my talk of being ignored when I go out by myself, it's not entirely true.  In the grocery store or out running errands, I talk with strangers all day long.  While I can be a little shy in the beginning, I'm pretty loquacious once I'm comfortable. 

But there seems to be something about me that just puts men at ease, to the point that they will share their deepest and darkest pretty quickly.  I have more unexpected details of random men's deviant pasts and sexual proclivities than I could write about in a lifetime.  (That doesn't mean it won't stop me from trying.) 

It has kind of become a joke within the Castration Committee, that I can walk into a room of a hundred men and point them out, the fragile cats, and pinpoint their damage on sight.  There's something about the way they carry themselves or a look in their eye; I just know who they are. 

Something about me seems to strike a chord, like they're seeing a kindred spirit for the first time.  I certainly have my own dramatic past, and I am more than willing to talk openly about it.  Even without revealing my own intimacies, they pick up on some aspect of my personality that makes them feel comfortable enough to tell me all the ways in which their parents and exes failed them, to describe how they clawed their way to and from their own rock bottoms, or to whisper their most lurid desires into my newly-acquainted ear. 

Maybe there's some pheromone that I'm releasing constantly.   Maybe they really can smell me in the air.  Maybe it's just that I am so damn attracted to the fragile, skittish cat and that I'm seeking them out without realizing it. 

Because I am a non-traditionalist in so many ways, I tend to gravitate toward the fringes.  I like strong personalities that lean toward the left.  I may be on the hunt for a great alpha male, but he would never be a hardcore Republican corporate attorney.  That may be perfectly fine for some people but not for me.  I like intense and creative and non-conformist, because that's where I find the intellectual stimulation I need coupled with the passion I crave.  Men like that, people like that, often come from dramatic and traumatic backgrounds, especially now that we're halfway through our lives. 

Part of me loves being in that position, of being a safe place of comfort for someone to off-load some of their strife for a while.  I am especially adept at filtering other people's energy and helping them carry what has become too much for them.  In the end, it's their job and not mine to deal with that baggage in the long term; I can't keep it for them forever.

 When it comes to men, though, I often find myself on the receiving end of sincere thanks, of hearing how I've changed and altered them and their perceptions of their worlds, how I've helped them deal with some shit so they could move on in a healthier way. 

Seriously?

How the hell did I become someone else's catalyst?  What is it about me that make me worth some time and a little effort, plus a hell of a lot of intensity, but not worth a longer-term relationship? 

I want to be that safe haven for someone for more than a day or a week or a few months.  I want to find that man who can share his heart and his life as easily as he shares his bed and his secrets.  I want someone who is willing to stick it out, who doesn't say, "Thanks for helping me deal with my fucked up head.  Have a nice life!"

There will always be issues with men like this.  Even the most reformed of the fragile cats remain skittish to a degree.  I'm the same way.  Every so often, I'm still surprised by a memory or recognition of something from my past that collides brilliantly with my present.  It scares the hell out of me when it happens.

What I need is someone who can be patient with me through that process, to continue to love me when I'm scared or angry or hurt, and not just because it's what feels right that day.  I want someone who can face the worst of me and still love me the next morning.  I expect myself to be able to love others with full openness and reciprocity; it is really too much to ask for the same?

I can't stand myself. I'm being held up by invisible men.

Sassafras O'Malley has double-blind confirmation of a new superpower: the unmitigated ability to attract alcoholic men. 

She's not especially thrilled to have this talent, though I suppose it's an equal and opposite reaction to her ability to dazzle small animals and children (and stupid people) into submission with her disco ballness. 

All joking aside, it's shocking to my system, just how well I can not see the addiction sometimes, how I can have come so far toward self-awareness and integration and still be so willing to ignore the flashing red signs when my heart is on the line. 

The thing about addicts is that they are selfish: self-centered, self-aggrandizing, self-deprecating, self-loathing, self-mutilating, and self-destructive.  As Bounder said to me recently, quite ironically, it's not that they don't want good things in their lives—they aren't trying not to love or feel or be available to those that seem to matter most to them—it's that they can't; they are so selfish in their addiction that they are unable to see past themselves to the secondary and tertiary damage they inflict on those around them. 

It's one of the hallmarks of addicts, to deny themselves the things and people who are truly good for them, to push out anyone and everyone who might be able to serve as a lifeline to reality and healthfulness.  They will instinctively surround themselves with people who support and facilitate their patterns of addictive behavior, who tolerate and even sometimes encourage their excuses and their inconsideration and their lies—enablers.

My refusal to enable the addiction of men I loved was, in part, responsible for the demise of previous relationships.  It's always more complicated than that, but addiction has played an important and sometimes torturous role in more than the last twenty years of my life.  When I wrote at the end of the year about what I didn't want going forward in my life or a new relationship, addiction was part of that list—mine or anyone else's. 

And yet, here I went again. 

I don't get it, either.  In my head I can understand how the addiction, especially alcoholism, works and impacts the addict's entire life, including the people closest to them.  But deep in my soul, I cannot fathom how a person could be in such desperate need for something, or someone, and flatly refuse it when it's presented to them on a shiny, silver platter.  When you most need it, you're given a gift from the universe of exactly what you both need and want, and you are openly thankful for that—until you realize it won't follow you to the bottom of a bottle.  Then you turn your back on the good in exchange for the bad, like an ungrateful, petulant bastard?

I don't fucking get it. 

What I do understand is the other side of it—the heartbreak and the rejection and the feelings of being worth less than a fucking bottle to that person who says they care about you.  The dismissal and the isolation that come when they start drinking.  And it's dramatically juxtaposed to the attention and the connection that's there when they're sober, when you let yourself think for just a moment that just maybe this time you will be enough, be special enough, to help them see the light and to give them the goal and the strength to break out of those patterns.  But those moments become more and more fleeting as time goes on with the addict, until it's a constant daze of distance and excuses and emotional neglect that borders on malice. 

Hot Pocket says it's not that I'm worth less than that bottle; it's that he feels he deserves the bottle more than he deserves me. 

Growler says she understands why it feels like I will never find another person to love, who loves me back in a healthy way, but that it's just not true, no matter how hard that may be to see right now.  (I'm not looking, but I wasn't looking this time, either.)

Queen Frostine listens patiently while I rage about how I'm done with men, about how I hate the catch-22 of being myself and attracting damaged men or going back into my own box just to make a man comfortable in the hopes he loves what is ultimately a shadow of Stephanie. 

And I'm pretty positive I don't want a romantic relationship with a woman.  Women are crazy.

Yet again I find myself spinning, trying desperately to touch solid ground and calm the nausea, to stop the sickness that is surrounding me and invading every fiber of my being.  I'm trying again to catch my breath, the wind knocked out of me simultaneously by love and heartache.  As much as I may want to fix this, to use my incredibly unrelenting resourcefulness to make this okay, I can't.  This is not my battle, no matter how hard I fight.

Maybe it's not about me, but it sure as hell still feels like it's me that's taking the brunt of the damage.

So I'm pulling back again, shunning men and shunning that sector of my heart.  I was pretty sure I was ready this time, pretty sure I was healthy, but I feel like I missed something.  My trusting, naive, hopelessly-romantic nature let me, encouraged me, to believe the unintentional whispers of another alcoholic.  I can't do this again.  I really would rather be alone that to go through this another time.

 

Well you're in and out and up and down and halfway in between.

Tiff and I had a chat this morning about my assertion that I am, at heart, a wallflower.

"That's the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard," she said.

No, really, I am.  Okay, maybe not so much now, but historically?  Yes. 

At least, I always thought so. 

As a child, I was shy.  Not in a painful way, not so much so that I couldn't say my name in public or actually answer a direct question.  But I was slow to engage other people and tended to stand back.  In peer groups, I was almost always the last chosen for games—though it didn't help that I was a fat, out-of-district transplant, moved to a school with a gifted program.  I wasn't like my classmates, and I was generally happy that way.  I didn't socialize with them away from school, I didn't dress like they did, and I didn't think like they did.

In junior high, I had a few good friends, but I tended to stay on the outskirts.  Sometimes it was, again, because of my history of being generally unpopular.  Blending into a crowded hallway let me stay anonymously out of the line of middle-school-fire. 

When I got to high school, though, some of that changed.  It was a small magnet school with about 150 students across four grades.  We were all gifted outcasts who were encouraged to flaunt our eccentricities, and we did it with abandon.  RLC was a revelatory experience for virtually everyone who went there.  Most students found their identities within the walls of that old, mustard-colored building.  Some found they didn't really fit the amoebic mold of gifted eccentric and chose to return to their regularly scheduled programming, leaving RLC for a big, normal high school. 

Even then, though, I had an amazing talent for being able to go unnoticed.  I could wedge my way through a situation quietly and garner as little attention as I wanted.  Usually.  I really did learn at an early age when to keep my mouth shut—though I know some of you who read this will argue that point until the cows come home.  (You're all a bunch of contrarians anyway, so shush it.)  I can be sociable with almost anyone, but I can also be non-existent when it suits me. 

At least, I always thought so.

I'm an Amazon.  I'm 5'11 with broad shoulders and a loud, stomping step and a louder, projecting voice.  (Thank you, choir.)  I am often brash and bold and demanding, though usually with the sweetest of intentions and persuasions. 

If I'm in a very crowded situation—a store or a show, for instance—I can maneuver quickly and quietly through that sea of people and get to where I need to be, with very little flourish.  I don't have to be pushing and demanding to navigate the crowd.  Hence, my wallflower super power.

It occurred to me as I was talking to Tiff that maybe I'm a little more foreboding than I thought.  Maybe my general size and aspect make people just get the fuck out of my way.  When I'm in that situation, I tend to stand very tall, shoulders back, tits forward like a shield.  Maybe that countenance is enough to make people want to step aside.  I can smile and say please and excuse me, but I sometimes don't.  I'm incredibly adept at giving the get-the-fuck-out-of-my-way look, and people usually do.  I often don't have to say anything at all.  They just move. 

I'm much, much more extroverted now than I used to be.  It's taken me years to grow into that.  But I still have times when I like to skirt the edges, to slide my way along the wall and go unnoticed.  Whether people really aren't noticing or they're looking away for some other reason, I have no idea.  It doesn't really matter, either.  I'll still use that ability, as needed, to maneuver along my path.  Sometimes it's better than bulldozing my way through. 

What I don't want to do is find myself paralyzed, stock still, waiting for someone or something else to come along and make me move.  It happens every so often, the fear of my life and my surroundings freezing me into submission.  That's when I have to feel my way carefully, inching along slowly, extending my vines blindly until I can find the sun. 

 

Now the world is ready for you, and the wonders you can do.

I'm kind of a geek girl, and I'm not ashamed to admit it.  I'm not nearly so geeky as some, but I'm smart and I have a weird sense of humor.  I wore glasses for a long time, though now only when I'm on the computer.  (Thank you, LASIK!)  I was in the gifted program from the third grade, right through my four years at a small, all-gifted, freak show of a high school.  (I still dream about it sometimes.  I know of no other school that had an annual drag show every Christmas, the Ms. Poinsettia contest.)

One thing I never really got into was comics.  Maybe it's because neither of my parents really cared about them, so they never introduced them to me.  I can admire their artwork (when it's good) and storylines (when they're cohesive), but I'm just not that into them. 

But I love superheroes.  As a kid, I loved to watch Isis on both the television (The Secrets of Isis) and in my coveted View-Master reels.  I don't remember much about the specifics of the show, except that she was really pretty, had a great costume when she went from school teacher to ancient goddess, and there was a giant crow.  Sometimes Shazam showed up.  (I bought the entire series on DVD a couple of years ago and have yet to watch it.  I guess I know what I'm doing this weekend!)

 

For years I would ask people randomly if they remembered a show that used to air on WTBS, long before it was the national TBS channel, based out of Atlanta.  It was in black and white and featured a Japanese boy whose best friend (also a boy) could turn into a rocket.  He had parents who could also turn into rockets.  The human boy called the rocket people with a special whistle.  Sometimes Godzilla showed up.  Most people tried to tell me it was probably Ultraman.  One look at pictures told me that was wrong.  A couple of years ago, I Googled for it again.  Finally!  It was Space Giants, which was a terrible Japanese show that TBS used to fill its afternoon schedule.  I loved it, but even by 1970's rerun standards, it was lacking in production quality.

 

My very, very favorite, though, was Wonder Woman.  Oh, Diana Prince!  How I wanted to be her!  Any time anything went remotely wrong in my world--parents arguing, friends being mean to one another, cat scratching the carpet--I would run into the midst of the melee sing-screeching, "Wonder Woman!" while I spun around.

 

I spent the summer of 1978 trying to turn into Wonder Woman, but all I got was dizzy.

I didn't have a real Wonder Woman costume that I remember, but any vaguely superhero garb would do.  Pillowcase cape: check.  Old plastic Halloween mask: check.  Rubberbands intricately woven around my toes like gladiator sandals: check.

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Years later, while working on a totally unrelated geek project,   I learned there actually was some literary and mythological veracity to Wonder Woman.  Three of her greatest artifacts--her belt, her crown, and her bracelets--were based on actual Greek myths of the Amazons.  The girdle of Hippolyta, the crown of Antiope, and the bracers of Penthesilea were all items belonging to Amazon queens.  They were looted by men.  (Imagine that.)

The lasso of truth, though, and the invisible plane--those were all DC Comics.  And what woman wouldn't love to have a golden lasso she could catch a man with and make him tell the truth?  Or a really fast vehicle that let you be ultra stealthy while you traveled?  I know there are logistical issues with the plane, but it still kicks ass.

So I often ask people what their superhero power would be, if they could choose one.  After years of this, I often find the answers are incredibly telling about the person's psyche.  A former boss of mine wanted to be able to sneak around undetected to see what others were doing.  A woman I knew, who had two pre-teen daughters, wanted to be able to see through walls.  And yet another female co-worker, who was obsessed with physical looks of both herself and others, wanted to be able to take on the form of anyone around her, to suit her needs in the moment.

I recently asked a couple of people this question again.  Adam Taylor said his quick answer would be invisibility, but that he recognized he would likely get himself into trouble, a là the curious cat.  Then he said he would probably choose to be able to run really fast, defying gravity and friction, because he often dreams of doing just that, and he relishes the sensation. 

Interestingly, my mom said she has similar dreams, but for her it's more about the quick movement.  She would like to be able to blink and just be somewhere without having to actually take the time to travel.  There's no flying sensation that she's after.  She hates the wasted time of the journey and would rather be able to enjoy the destination a little longer. 

My elder son who adores going to the comic shop with his dad, and who loves all things superhero, says he would want to be able to absorb the powers of heroes around him.  He concedes that it would only be one at a time, or that would just make him too powerful and spoil all the fun.  He's a child with a highly-developed, black-and-white sense of social justice, who likes to examine everything in great detail.  DH/Dad is totally a morally-unambiguous DC kind of guy.  (The eldest golden apple doesn't fall far from the Magic Tree.)

Then there's me.  Would I like to be able to force people to tell the truth?  Nope.  How about fly, or walk through walls?  Uh-uh.  In mixed company, I will say that it's mind reading.  It gives you something of a psychic, know-things-before-others-do kind of advantage.  But there's also the double-edged sword of knowing what others really think of you.  And then there's the potential problem of not being able to turn it off when you wanted, which makes people crazy in Superhero Land.

But the real answer (sorry, Mom!) is that I would like to be able to give people orgasms on command.  Yep.  You read that right.  I came to this conclusion (no pun intended) around 1994, during a late-night, non-sober conversation with DH. 

I think about what this ability would do for world peace, on the largest scale and the smallest.  Would Tiananmen Square have gone differently if all of the repressed Chinese military had a unanimous, personal quickie?  Would the LA Riots have been avoided if we could've given those four cops just ten seconds of unexpected release?  Would that bitch at the grocery store just adjust the price of the mislabeled cookies if she had some sweetness of her own?

But what I really want to do with it involves the craziest, most heinous day of the year: Black Friday.  I want to go into malls across America on that hateful, fateful day, high noon in the food court, and make tens of thousands of people come at one time, if only to see the fountains of Diet Coke spewing forth from the lips of repressed capitalists, all at the same time.

That would be teaching the world to sing. 

I think fixing the world is kind of like rescuing your friend from the Borg.  You gotta think low and slow.  It won't be a grandiose fix to human nature, or some great moral lesson from without.  It's all about making the little things better, and there just ain't anything better than that.