I have been thinking of a few blog posts I wanted to make before Rosh Hashana, but it seems as if I will start off with something completely unplanned. I was tagged by BTS for the superpower meme, which I see almost everyone has already posted by now.

The rules are as follows:

Rule number 1: Read the rules.
Rule number 2: Write one superpower you would like to have and what you would do with it.
Rule number 3: Write why you chose that super power over everything else.
Rule number 4: Tag and link 7 people, and write why you think they will have an interesting meme.
Rule number 5: fix your broken links.

This is one of those memes that I just feel useless in attempting. I mean, I've gotten the hang of life. I know for the most part what my abilities are, and I try to use them to the best of my ability. I used to spend a lot of time dreaming about a more ideal me and a more ideal world, in which I would be capable of knowing and doing more. Daydreaming is a powerful thing -- it sometimes convinces you that impossible things are a reality, and although you consciously know that it is impossible, there is still this small subconscious part of you that says, "It's true, it's possible, this dream can be a reality." The descent to earth and to true reality then becomes even more difficult when it must be done.

So I try not to dwell on the abilities I only wish I had. I want to make the reality work. Perhaps that is why when BTS tagged me, my first reaction was, "Oh no, not this meme. I don't want superpowers. I just want to be the best that I can actually be."

If I had been asked this as a child, I would immediately list a dozen superpowers I would like to have. But now, it is not at all something I would want.

So while I am still doing this meme, it is going to be less about 'superpowers' and more about actual abilities.

Since Rosh Hashana is coming up, the correct thing to say would be to say something nice and fluffy about how I want to be a perfect Jew and be able to immediately know what is sinful and what is not and to refrain from sinning. But I'm not going to say that, because perfection does not appeal to me.

I suppose that the ability I would most like to have would be to understand people and their motives thoroughly.

BTS wrote that he would like to have organized information on every single person, and BoSD wrote that she wants to be able to "get a glimpse into the minds of other people" so she could understand them better, be more sensitive to them, and not hurt anyone unintentionally. Shlomo's post was along those lines as well, although he went off on a tangent about Jews and Nietzsche, and when he finally wrote what abilities he would like to have, it was to read minds and manipulate them. So we have the spy, the sweet blob, and the manipulative Israeli, all wishing for similar superpowers. And here enters the writer, with a similar wish, for completely different purposes.

I would like to see people's intentions -- why they do the things they do. I would like to understand their thought processes, whether they lead to good actions or to crimes, and I want to be able to see the world from their point of view, so that I could create realistic, human characters based on them. I want my characters to have depth and complexity, so my readers should connect to them whether the characters are generally perceived by society as 'good' or as 'bad'. I suppose I want to do away with those terms entirely; I want my characters to be not good or bad, but human -- to be real, since that is perhaps one of the greatest things a writer can achieve.

That sounds like it can be easily solved by majoring in psychology. The truth though is that although I can study psychology as much as I want, the ability to see every facet of a person's mind and heart is impossible for us mere mortals. So that is why I am writing this down as the 'superpower' I would most like to have.

And now, for the tagging. This is proving to be a bit tricky, especially since Google Reader greeted me this morning by informing me that there were nearly thirty new blog posts, a large amount of which were for this meme, so there are few people left to tag. So here are the people I am tagging:

Subwife, because she sounds pretty stressed in her posts about work, and I would like to see if she wishes she could make people just disappear.

Dina, because I would like to see what she would do to the world with her superpowers.

Oh, and BTS asked when he tagged me, "so what did you write in your private diary today, Hannah?"

All kinds of fascinating things. :]