Three Obscure Wishes
Why does receiving wishes from a genie always have to include epic requests? Can’t it ever be simple things that receive a petition? Not the biggest and the best, just the small things you wish you could change? Here are three obscure things I would wish for. Oh, and obviously for this exercise we aren’t focusing on things like world peace and social harmony, which of course all my wishes would go toward if genies were real.
First request - I wish I could reset my brain to hear music as if it were the first time. I love music. All kinds of music. I grew up playing the clarinet and saxophone. Symphonies and jazz still flow through my headphones from time to time. What about the other musical categories? Oh, I love those as well. I basically pick music for each situation and mood I’m in. I’ll crank Rage Against the Machine for those last hours of work when I need the motivation. Dance songs with a heavy beat are what keep me washing those dishes with a little sway in the hips.
The only difficult thing about loving music is that we grow familiar with it. Eventually it sounds boring. It becomes background noise, something we like, but aren’t engaged with. Now imagine that you could magician your own ears into hearing everything new again. Just think about opening up the music app on your phone, with all your favorites and playlists right there, organized and waiting. After so many decades of living, I have curated quite the long list of songs I like. Wouldn’t it be amazing if you could hit play, knowing that you would absolutely love the next 100 unheard songs?
Second Request - I wish my body could recover from injury and have the same metabolism as when I was 18. To be clear, I’m not requesting to live forever. I’m not requesting that I don’t age. All I want is consistency. I’m quite used to how I can treat my body, what I can eat, and how far I can push those runs. What bothers me is the slow decline where recovery takes forever, and I have to eat half the food I used to if I want to keep the same waistline. Bring on the gray hair and wrinkles, but when I twist my ankle please let it be healed in two days instead of two months.
Third Request - I want a photographic memory, with a dash of speed reading skills sprinkled on top. I love learning. But what really ruins the experience is the next day, when you can’t remember anything you took in. Memorization is cool, but it fizzles over time. I just wish I could remember how many cups are in a liter. Currently, I read at the speed of a turtle standing in honey. I want to read at the speed of a bullet train. And when I finish zipping through those pages at lightning speed, I want it filed and accessible in my brain at every beck and call.
You know what’s really funny about this exercise? I watched Aladdin recently, and I realized that if genies were real, I probably wouldn’t ask for anything. I’d just keep him around as a friend. If you told me I could have the above requests, or I could have a magical being follow me around with the voice and energy of Robin Williams, I would probably take the latter. What weird things would you wish for?
