superpower

My superpower - playing dead. Image and apron by J.

This is how I feel. Which dear J captured so well in an apron he painted for me... a greenish soursop heart walked over by 2 birds, a gigantic spleen, a blockish blue liver ("because our body is 3/4 water!"), lungs looking like aged blood stains, and wriggly intestines with an escaped bloth of blue liver. There's no stomach. It's spread all over behind the heart and spleen - yellow, all bile.

Why I do my job, I have almost forgotten. And when I think about what I've gotten myself into, I think I somewhat fear being entrenched in some system. wheyface asked if my job is taking up "mindspace" (her lingo for an invasive job, taking away precious personal space and energy to think - and write), she was spot-on.

J wrote in his photoblog: "The PM said that for a small country of 3 million people, what the Singapore Government said actually registered on the Super Power's (US) radar, that is really something. That makes me laugh."

That's the kind of system and its thinking I fear. The ability to laugh, I miss.

Earlier this week over dinner with CT, Singapore's #1 comic expert, was telling us about Marvel Comics' latest civil war series, why Captain America must die and what I imagined is America's dialectical political imagination. The North-South myth, and the underlying belief in the self-regenerative power of conflict within. A belief sympathetic to conspiracies.

It was midnight on our walk home from dinner, J has been telling me about some TV series, Heroes. I asked if he could design or choose any superpower to have in the world, what it would be. After the initial "I can make anyone do anything I say" and deciding that was too boringly villain-ish, he decided on the cop-out "Everyday I can have 3 wishes come true" - ah, yes, the Aladdin-man. I couldn't think of any for the longest time. Fly? but where to? Teleportation? But it would be too dull to be able to go so many places but essentially alone. With much deliberation, I would rather not have a superpower, I told J. But I would love to be very good at making things. A talent and a skill, maybe. But not in excess of what is human.