For Want of a Nail
By Spacey 8 Comments
I don't think anyone can say that they haven't, at least once, dreamed of having superpowers. I know I have. When I was younger and a big test was coming up, I'd always say to myself "If only I could move at super speed, I could run around the room and see everyone's answers!" or "If only I could turn invisible! Then I wouldn't have to study, I could just sneak around and get the answers from my classmates!" But of course I didn't have super powers, so I had to settle for actually doing some work, that is to say, cheating in the normal, boring ways. But as I have grown up, I have found myself wasting great portions of my life considering the nature of superpowers. And how much they would probably suck. As an adult, I concede that this may not be the best or even most sensical way to spend my time, but... well, I have no defense. It is pretty ridiculous. But one must acknowledge that, for all the awesomeness that having superpowers entails, there is also some suckiness. I speak, of course, of the required secondary powers.
The superpower that I would most love to have is, of course, super speed. There's something about it, a romanticism I feel for the idea of super speed that I have cherished since I was a kid. And yet, having it would probably suck. First and foremost in my mind, as it will now invariably be in yours, is chafing. I do not even want to imagine what the friction would do to my body if I moved that fast. Bad things, probably. Bad, chafe-y things. And then there's the metabolism. You'd have to eat a metric ton of food just to keep yourself alert and moving for a couple of minutes. And while I realize that the calories would get burned up pretty fast and not affect my girlish figure too drastically, there's still the fact that you would need to buy all this food, or be a supervillain and maybe put your powers to use stealing candy from babies or something. Plus, bugs would get all up in my face, and I just could not deal with that.
Alright, you're probably saying, but there are other powers that would be super awesome, like flight! Wrong, my friend. Putting aside the bugs-in-grill issue that we should never forget, there're still a couple things that would suck about flight. Lets say you're flying, and you head up, up into the air, where the air is clear and the sun is shining... but this air is way less oxygenated, so you're struggling for breath, and it's so very, very cold up in the stratosphere. Fine, you stay low to the ground, but now you're getting dirt and dust particles blown into your face, and the strong winds (especially if you're a fast flier) is not being kind to your hair or your skin, and let's not even think about adverse weather conditions. And this is just if you've got some method of propelling yourself through the air without any visible means of support, a la Superman or Northstar. If you have wings, you have to deal with a whole new set of problems. Like bumblebees are supposed to be, we are just not designed to fly. We are horribly, awkwardly shaped, and this does not lend itself well to soaring gracefully through the air. Your wings would have to be pretty powerful, and huge as well, to support a human's body mass. And the bugs, man. I just cannot accept that.
Fine, so super speed and flight are out, those powers aren't any fun anyways. Now invisibility, that would be a cool power! It would be, if you can turn your clothes invisible, and if there is no dirt or mud or anything splashed on you, and if you could somehow avoid bumping into anyone or anything. Also, you aren't too tied to being able to see, are you? Because you can't if you're invisible. At least, not in the traditional depiction of invisibility as the ability to distort light around yourself. Your eye has to take in light to see, and when you distort light around yourself you're also distorting the light around your eyes, rendering yourself invisible but also blind. Kind of a win-lose situation. On the plus side, less danger of bugs in the face.
Superpowers seem to have an awful lot of corollaries and hidden costs, which makes them a little too much like my phone bill for my liking. Sure they'd be super cool to have, but only if you had the extra powers that are necessary to keep you from running your skin right off, or suffocating to death, or going blind, or getting fucking bugs in your face.
And all for the want of a horseshoe nail