If I Were a Superhero

If you are a superhero what would you be and what powers would you have?

This was one of the supposed essays I should have had answered the previous week when I applied as a web content writer. But listlessness or out of carelessness, I thought I should have only given the question a 100-word essay.

If I would be a superhero what power should I have? The question is tough and silly on the second thought given the fact that I’m already past the age of Christ.

What powers should I have, I would prefer having the power and knowledge of the underlying ‘realities’ of our world. I don’t know if this is the product of reading Castaneda but somehow it has something to do with it.

If I have this power, I could manipulate the world, the physical world. I can bend spoon like a Buddhist monk. I can hop over the deck of buildings with ease – no, without a web, but by sheer force of what I know about the universe and its design. I can easily learn kung fu, aikido, taekwando, and karate in seconds. I can manoeuvre any vehicle that I want.

If these descriptions are coming to you with some familiarity, yes, they all come from the trilogy Matrix. When I watched this movie, it struck and spellbound me. I was slouching at the back seat of my older brother’s car staring blankly at the moonless sky. What if this universe is not the real universe that there is? Possible.

Anyway, what I was thinking then when I was answering the question was to be the Neo; the One.

Yet, on the second thought, who I could come close to the characters in the Matrix is Morpheus.

You’ll learn it when I smile.

All Talk

I recall the days when I discerned that all I wanted in life is to be a writer. A sophomore in a well-known university and surrounded by peers who had the same vision and hope for themselves outside the campus, we talked after classes in the soccer field digging Hemingway and Gabo. We yakked also all about the books that we had just read and if we understood them well. The discussion would last until the guards in blue would shoo us to go home because it was already late in the night.

Those were the days. I was surrounded by peers who write when they reached home while what I seemed to do then was to yak about wanting to be a writer. I finished my college days still not knowing how to write. I remember that we were known to be good writers but probably that was true for my peers. But not for me because I could not even get myself write past the first sentence. English language is a hard boulder to chip and I was getting nowhere understanding it.

I remember this remote past for what I seem to do right now is rest on my laureates of getting published by some magazines and winning some writing prizes. Everyone in the neighbourhood knows that I write, that I am a writer.
But if only they knew that I no longer write as much as I used to do then. Nor read for that matter. I’m getting in the full cycle of being a talker rather than being a true writer.

I still have to write that first story that would be published with my byline, something which is due for more than a decade already. The sad part is that there is still no material for me to work on so that promise to myself is still far from reality.

Right now, a lot of things, practical responsibilities have been making me busy. I’m on the look out for a good writing job which is hard to come by. And while it is making me busy, I’m getting lazy trying to write.

But everybody is still calling me a writer. Something that is not true right now because I’m more of a talker.