Tuesday, November 10

#45 - three wishes


While coming home one day, you notice an old aluminum can sitting on your front yard. Seeing no nearby places to dispose of the object, you bring it inside to throw it away.

Once inside, you take note of the its relative good condition, despite being a can of a long defunct brand. You rub the aluminum a bit to clean off the only piece of mud that you see, and seconds later a great deal of colorful smoke issues from the mouth of the can.

After a few more moments, the smoke has gathered and formed into a recognizable shape... it's a genie!

The genie seems pleasant enough, though not overly talkative. He states that you have three wishes.

When, remembering the genie education of your youth, you ask if there are any rules associated with the wishes, the genie shares the one rule (besides wishing for more wishes, which will not work and does not seem to amuse the genie). You may not wish for anything that will directly conflict with or override the free will of another individual. This seems fair, but also limiting. You wouldn't be able to make someone fall in love, and a world peace wish would be problematic to say the least. You couldn't use a wish to land yourself a job, though you could wish for a good interview performance.

As you reflect on this, the genie shares his one other main limitation (a result of him being merely a sodapop genie, which you gather is sort of like the minor leagues of genie-dom). Any wish not made within the week cannot be used. In one week he will travel to some other place and any unused wishes will expire.

How do you use your three wishes?

4 comments:

jo. said...

if only this were true!

here are my 3 wishes:

1) I would ask for a live-in masseuse so that I could get these knots in my back taken care of daily

2) I'd ask for the ability to communicate in 10 different languages

3) 30 hours in a day once a week... it would really help!

Holly said...

1. A magical 8.5 hours of sleep every night (despite when I go to bed/have to wake up).

2. I agree with Joyce - the ability to speak in multiple languages - I'd settle for five, but since I've got the wish, why not all of them?

3. For my student teaching to be over...although this might be a bit short-sighted...: )

Paul said...

1) shoes that would make me a superb dancer when I put them on

2) a pencil that would enable me to write with the power of any author whose book I have a backpack that I'm wearing. If I have multiple books in the bag I will gain a morphed power of communication

3) a coffee brewer that would make cups of coffee that not only caffinate me, but also provide me with internal motivation.

Cheers!

Matt said...

1) Like Joyce and Holly said, something time related would be good. I'd probably choose a fixed amount (an extra hour or several hours a week) rather than the ability to stop time, something less easy to misuse.

2) Some sort of superpower. Probably flight.

3) I was thinking of some sort of "fruit of the Spirit" related wish, and one thing that might help cultivate a bunch of them would be a heightened sense of empathy. So maybe like, anytime my negative emotions crossed some preset threshold, I would be given a quick glimpse of the situation from the other guy's shoes. I'm imagining it like a shot of adrenaline, except instead of "adrenaline" it would be "perspective". Hopefully I could communicate this to the genie well enough.