I’ve decided, like the characters on Heros, that I’ve actually got a superpower. Yup - that’s me - Belrix the Mutant. I have that elusive “X” gene that’ll one day make the world both fear and respect me.
My superpower is (da da daaa) the ability to get the last cup of coffee in the pot.
Call me “Good to the Last Drop Man”.
I’m the guy that’s alway making a new pot.
I think I’ve got a secondary power - the ability to make traffic lights turn red when I’m in a hurry. Unfortunately, I can’t make them turn red for the guys on the cross streets, just in my direction.
I’m sending my CV off to Xavier’s school for gifted children to see if he can help me to hone these awesome powers.
Oh, yeah? I have the super ability to leave ju-u-u-u-u-ust enough in the coffee pot that the NEXT guy takes the last cup and has to make the new pot.
The other superpower that seems to have been bestowed upon me today is the ability to find obscure pieces of information totally unrelated to my job for random people that wander into my office under the apparent assumption that I know everything.
Today, I have make-projects-go-too-long powers.
The project that was supposed to take an hour took me three, neatly taking up my whole morning and allowing me to feel both accomplished and not making me have to take on another new project. Go me!
*Able to grade 75 assignments in a single sitting!
*Able to watch a videotape and outline a graduate-level discussion of the techniques illustrated therein!
*Able to convert PowerPoint to RTF and post it to the course website!
*All the while, cooking dinner!
It’s a cat! It’s a splat! It’s Middle-aged Non-tenure-line Assistant Professor Hypomania Girl!
“Gosh, Middle-aged Non-tenure-line Assistant Professor Hypomania Girl! Where do you get your awesome powers of multi-tasking and concentration?”
“Good question, Slacker Dude! When I was your age, instead of taking a lot of drugs and having fun, I attended a small, liberal arts college in the effete Northeast! One day, I accidentally drank some radioactive coffee and I’ve been like this ever since! Want to see the 175+ journals I’ve written since I was 15? No? Want to hear me make a pun using two different languages? No? Want to know my radiation-enhanced GRE verbal score, or my commensurately radiation-weakened GRE math score? No? No?! What’s the matter with you rotten kids today? Middle-aged Non-tenure-line Assistant Professor Hypomania Girl gets no respect!”
When you get into your car and unlock the passenger door for me, I have the uncanny knack of trying the door handle at the exact same time, jamming the unlocking mechanism. When I do this, it makes the driver very irritated. Why I have this strange power, I don’t know.
Another superpower I possess is the ability to make all the clocks in my apartment malfunction. The clocks on my walls never keep the correct time. I think this power may be attributed to the foolish and headstrong experiments with anti-time that I conducted in my youth.
My evil power is to have 5/8ths of my group fail a training today and need to be retrained. sigh. My immediate supervisor didn’t seem overly concerned, she was sympathetic even, but this can’t reflect well on me…
Wow! It’s three hours later and Middle-aged Non-tenure-line Assistant Professor Hypomania Girl is still going strong! How does she do it? She is the sexiest superhero ever!
Three hours more… Her powers are flagging… Middle-aged Non-tenure-line Assistant Professor Hypomania Girl has been writing her Powerpoint for over 6 hours, while finishing tomorrow’s lesson plan, cooking a delicious pork dish and serving it to her darling, and watching the 8:00 PM rerun of yesterday’s Daily Show. But the PowerPoint is finished! Hurrah! Now the world will be safe for weekend intensive Motivational Interviewing students once more! Now cats can eat pork-bits! Now Middle-aged Non-tenure-line Assistant Professor Hypomania Girl can jump up again and again in the night to ever-so-slightly change her slides. Wahoo!!
Sorry, freckafree. I lied about the coffee. Middle-aged Non-tenure-line Assistant Professor Hypomania Girl is like this NATURALLY AND ALL THE TIME! Wow! I must be a lot of fun to live with!
I’ve discovered that I possess an apparently mystical artifiact that exists no where else on Earth…
A foot-long wooden CD case. Doesn’t sound too odd? Well, after a couple of days searching around town, AND on the Internet, and even knowing the manufactureer’s name, I’ve discovered that no other case like it can be found, anywhere on the planet.
I figure that either it fell into this universe through a rift in spacetime…or it was magically crafted by someone—or something—as part of some insidious, machiavellian plot that I, as a mere human, cannot hope to comprehend.
All in all, not bad for something I bought at WalMart six months ago for about eight bucks.
