What is your mutant power?
And I don’t mean that in some corny self-help “everyone has a super power, like being really good customer service” sort of way.
I mean it literally – what is your mutant power?
I’ll go first:
I make it rain.
It all started at Burning Man 2003 – the night I got there it rained at Burning Man for the first time in years. I didn’t think much of it at the time, but it was memorable.
In spring of 2004, I went to Europe. It rained everywhere I went. This wasn’t necessarily notable – it was spring time. But a weird thing in particular happened – at one my point my traveling companions and I split up. I went to Copenhagen to check out Christiania. They went to Paris. I spent a few days in Denmark then headed south to meet up with them. The day before I left Copenhagen, my friend Mark told me that Paris was beautiful – it had been sunny the entire time they were there.
They day I got there, it rained.
So after the trip to Europe, I moved back to Wyoming. I spent some time saying fairwells to friends in Seattle and Olympia before heading back, and called my dad before I left. He said something to the effect of “Bring some of that Seattle rain with you, we need it here!”
I told him it rained wherever I went. He told me that was depressing. “No, no it’s literally true!” I said.
The night I got home to Sheridan, WY it rained. And it turned into one of the rainiest summers in years.
A year and half later, in January of 2006, I moved from Laramie, WY to Portland, OR. Of course it was raining. But it was raining hard and mean. I found myself wondering if it had always been like that in the northwest and I’d just forgotten what is was like. Nope. I found out around the time I got there torrential downpours started – Portland was experiencing record rain falls.
Since then I’ve just sort of assumed it would rain wherever I go. A couple examples – thunderstorms in Casper, WY the night I got into town from Portland last summer. Rain in the desert around Riverside, CA last November while my wife and I were visiting.
I don’t know if they is a particular useful mutant power. I could try to capitalize on it by getting hired by places with droughts to visit for a while. But I don’t have that much faith in my abilities. And there do seem to be some limitations – if I travel only a short distance, for instance, it doesn’t necessarily rain.
And really, I feel silly even talking about it. Mutant powers. Seriously?
But I know there are others. My college roommate Mark (mentioned above) has a really weird one: he opens doors just as people are arriving, without knowing someone is about to arrive, before they knock or anything – sometimes just as they are pulling up in their car. He just gets some sense that he should go open the door. And someone will be just getting there, or the cat will be there wanting in or something. I’ve seen it happen many times, on both sides of the door. He doesn’t hear anything or see anything, he just somehow knows it’s time to open the door.
My wife has a power that she says is dissipating, but I’ve seen this happen several times: cats just walk up to her. We can be walking down the street and a cat will just come out from under a car or something and run right up to her and meow like it wants her to pet it.
So. What’s YOUR power? (Useful or not).
(Communist Mutants From Space image via Danny Chaoflux, city photo by Burning Image / CC)
March 24, 2010 at 9:47 pm
Well, I used to be pretty decent with fooling around with dice and doing stuff with auras, whatever those are, though I haven’t really kept in practice. Some people think I have a knack for finding things. Mostly, though, I have a power similar to the Shadow’s ability to cloud men’s minds, only it is limited to myself.
March 24, 2010 at 10:02 pm
I’m going to have to think on my super power for a bit.
Yours reminded me of this short-story featured in Rudy Rucker’s Flurb:
My Only Sunshine by Emily Skaftun
March 24, 2010 at 10:02 pm
http://www.flurb.net/8/8skaftun.htm
and add an apostrophe ^^
March 24, 2010 at 11:27 pm
You are awesome with the rain power 🙂
Ok so well I see the future..as in I see people I meet like 20 years before I will meet them. I see a lot of things that happen before they do in fact I am never surprised by much of anything. But a lot of people are psychic…
I blow out streetlights, break computers, watches ( when I used to wear a non wind up) cell phones go wonky…yeah but a lot of people have that as well…electricity and me we have a odd relationships. I can drain batteries like a room full of ghosts.
The one I think that surprises me the most is how total strangers tell me everything. I start talking to someone and they start to spill their most intimate details to me. And I mean everyone from all walks of life. I used to want to be a spy to make money with this ability.
But I always use my powers for good always to help folks..so I listen
and I try to use my most favorite superpower …kindness
and this one is getting harder to find in almost everyone these days…
March 25, 2010 at 1:08 am
Time slipperiness. Prophecy. Raveling. Slack. These are all tied together with an invisible thread. Can you feel it?
March 25, 2010 at 7:43 am
I break electric things like nobody’s business, unless they’re MY electric things. Computer labs cried when I approached in college.
March 25, 2010 at 9:12 am
A mutant power I notice regularly is hyper-precision in interacting with certain systems. For example in rewinding an audio tape that i don’t know the timing of and stopping the rewind (intuitively) exactly on 1 second space before the song i was looking for, or walking into a room, not looking at a clock and thinking about a certain show and turning on the TV exactly when it starts, or filling a large cup with water (to what seems an intuitively right level) for transfer into another random size container, and having it be the right amount down to a drop or two. It’s like whatever part of my brain does unconscious estimations works really well if i’m in a zen state.
March 25, 2010 at 3:12 pm
I can usually make toilets flush, even when they don’t want to, by sort of pushing the funnel of the water down with my mind (and pulling up on it at the same time).
Sometimes I get distracted and I accidentally make them not flush when they should (as in, empty bowl, no reason not to flush, but I find myself kind of holding the surface tension of the water up in a flattening kind of way, and the full flush never happens).
It doesn’t work all the time, but there’s a certain state of mind I have come to recognize. If I happen to be in that state of mind, then it’ll work. 🙂
Occasionally, I can kill those little dust cloud whirl winds. And even more occasionally, I can make them start. But I have to be feeling really manic and loose for that to happen.
March 25, 2010 at 5:48 pm
I don’t know if it’s a power or a mutant defense against mnemonics, but songs never get stuck in my head.
March 25, 2010 at 7:27 pm
The door thing I experience quite frequently – but it is not limited to doors. It’s mostly modes of communication or interaction.
Like, I will take my phone out of my pocket, or walk up to the phone seconds before it rings, without the device giving any indication of its imminent ringing.
March 26, 2010 at 2:35 am
I don’t have any superpower myself, but I had a friend who demagnetized things. It was eerie. If she carried a subway card, it would stop working. Her electronics malfunctioned all the time. I had to carry all her magnetic stuff around with me to keep it from going nuts.
March 26, 2010 at 10:43 am
Streetlamps switch off as I pass them. Or, if they’re faulty, they turn on temporarily as I go past. Not all the time, but well above randomness.
I also have a kind of invisibility thing. I can tone down my presence to the point of passing unnoticed almost anywhere. An extreme example was one time at work – I was standing in the middle of a small room, and people were rushing around looking for me and shouting my name without seeing me. More ordinary examples involving passing unnoticed on the street, in subways, shops, so I just don’t register with people. I can also amp up my presence so that I become the center of attention if necessary.
March 26, 2010 at 5:52 pm
People do not need to tell me their feelings; I can sense them.I can practically all but see the emotional energy surrounding them.Since emotions are so closely intertwined with their state of mind,and what the are thinking,it is nearly like mind reading to most.Fortunately for most people,a wide range of things trigger the same emotions,and vary from person to person.I’m usually preety close to home regardless.If that person has a longterm personal fear they are burdened with,I can feel it beneath the other cover up emotions and worries blanketing it.Also, i’m unusually sensitive to sounds and vibrations,see well in the dark,can manipulate people to give me answers when I want to(teachers,usually.it breaks up the monotony of particularly boring lessons)I also can use the same energy feeling technique to find where someone is injured or off balence.I had heard of healers who use the flow of energy in a persons body to detect illnesses and heal. I wound up trying it out on one of the staff.i felt out her energy,and there was something up with her knee.I got her to give me the info I wanted, and it turned out she recntly had sugury on her knee.
March 26, 2010 at 10:10 pm
My aunt had the rain thing. She ended at least two major California droughts by visiting from Florida. She lived in Japan for a while, and apparently, “rain ladies” are well-known there.
SOMEONE in our family, possibly my oldest sister, had the same thing with FOG. Any major landmark would be wholly obscured by fog when we visited. Particularly memorable were the Grand Canyon and Crater Lake, both of which were filled to the brim with pea soup on our initial visits.
My father sends digital watches haywire; he has to wear a mechanical wristwatch, though in recent years, he’s affected a railroad-style pocket watch. I’m the opposite: an electronic watch on my wrist will run for YEARS longer than the rated life of its battery. When it’s finally time to REPLACE that battery, the innards are a corroded MESS, and it’s time for a new watch.
In one instance, my father gave me a watch that had died on his wrist — and it ran non-stop for the next five years on mine.
March 26, 2010 at 11:35 pm
I see auras. Spots, or tight collections of spots if the person is focused. Blurry area if they are not. I see it with animals too. Of course I work with horses, so it’s part of the skill set there. Once, as a child, I remember laying on the porch and watching an ant. Suddenly it stopped crawling and this little cone of awareness started waving around with its antennae. Then there was the time I was thinking of a certain red-headed girl and this red spot appeared in front of me, with a line running through it, drawing it toward me. The effect was a perfect valentine heart. I think early abstract language developed from these effects, because some of the symbols seem quite similar.
I also come up with philosophical observations which make sense to me, but don’t seem to appeal to the professionals. Here is an example of several reenforcing thoughts which are edited down to a short essay:
Breaking the Big Mold: Untangling Time, God and Money
The earth doesn’t travel the fourth dimension from yesterday to tomorrow. Tomorrow becomes yesterday because the earth rotates. Time is a consequence of motion, not the basis for it. It is not the linear narrative along which the present moves, but the changing configuration of reality by which the future becomes past. It is not one clock, but many. All recording their own cycles. This is relevant because as individual points of view, or collective histories, we travel against the larger context, but as generations rising and falling, life is integral to context, with the future as potential and the past as residual.
This is not deterministic, as one influences the context as well as being influenced by it.
Monotheism is similarly reversed. The absolute, as universal state, is basis, not apex. A spiritual absolute would be the essence of being and elemental consciousness from which life rises, not a moral and intellectual ideal from which it fell. Good and bad are not a metaphysical duel between the forces of light and darkness, but the basic biological binary code. Amoebae are attracted to the beneficial and repelled by the detrimental. What is good for the fox is bad for the chicken, yet there is no clear line where the chicken ends and the fox begins. Life is a constant process of creation and consumption, bootstrapping itself up out of the muck. The future rises as the past crumbles.
Between black and white are all the colors of the spectrum, not just shades of grey.
We may all be branches of the same trunk, but the result is that we all point in different directions, so viewing one’s cultural idiosyncrasies as anything more or less than what purpose they serve is delusional. Meaning is what’s left when all that is meaningless is distilled away, but we all view the results from different perspectives. Remember it was the polytheists who invented democracy, since multiple gods(memes) required a need for conciliation and cooperation. Whereas monotheism mostly validated monarchy and other forms of top down rule.
Without motion, there is void, but motion destroys what it creates. Only what has existed forever, will exist forever.
At this point in time, on this little blue planet, we are suffering the effects of a collective delusion, as our bubbles of notational wealth evaporate. What we have forgotten is that the laws of supply and demand also apply to capital. Since the supply is infinite, it is demand, those willing to borrow and able to pay this capital back, which determines how much wealth can be stored in the financial system. The bankers just feed our desire by creating artificial demand of those willing to borrow, but not able to pay it back. As well as by manufacturing enormous bubbles of extraneous circulation.
What if we were to simply accept money for what it is, drawing rights on community productivity, rather than the delusional notions of stored value we dream it to be? That would make the monetary system a public utility, much like public roads. You own your house, car, business, etc, but not the roads connecting them and no one cries socialism over that.
Since it is the attempt by everyone to hoard as much of these drawing rights as possible which both destroys the monetary system and seriously distorts the economy in service of it, treating it as public property would make excessive hoarding socially irresponsible and necessarily illegal, much like being a road hog and driving recklessly is not acceptable.
It would also have a far more conservative effect on the financial system as well, since everyone would be far more careful what value they drain out of social and environmental resources to convert into currency in the first place. We all like having roads, but there is little inclination to pave more than we must. This would open up the space for all sorts of organic social and economic mediums of exchange to develop.
A publicly supported currency requires a public banking system, which, like democracy, must be bottom up. With local banks investing funds back in the communities that create the wealth in the first place and serving as boards for regional banks and currencies.
Growth is bottom up, not top down. Leaders are those who understand it is their responsibility to manage this growth, not assume they should be the primary recipient of its fruits.
March 26, 2010 at 11:36 pm
make that early writing.
March 27, 2010 at 3:36 am
time dialation, though i had more control in my youth on that one.
I effect probability curves to an unnatural level, as many a night playing board games with other people who can verify, i would routinely roll unnatural sequences of numbers
Computer scrambling/ electronics scrambling, i fried a friends computer once by touching it, routinely froze or crashed the computer system at my old work, and have nothing but difficulty with anything more involved than a light bulb, which means anything with a circuit in it, well we won’t get along very well…
inane prophecy as i call it, sometimes i get a flash and watch the next 5 mintutes or so of my life unfold then i have to live through the same exact 5 minutes again…it’s never proved usefull though i do seem to be able to make choices as opposed to what occured in the vision, but the events seem to play out the same way regardless
March 31, 2010 at 4:05 am
Never mind on my previous comment.It seems that I’m a psychic vampire,so technically,that’s normal.
April 4, 2010 at 4:28 pm
There are no doubts that there are statistical anomalies that occur and why should they not be clustered around people as they are around places. this is a purely scientific explanation. it does not explain it , it only aknowledges it. If it happes then there is no dispute. similar to the debate on what was global warming , now correctly called climate change, the arguments do not change the outcome. G G Prigmore BSc (Hons) MSc Environmental Protection & Management
April 23, 2010 at 1:58 am
i have a power that i can dream of the future and can make people stop fighting one time i stopped my friends from fighting
July 25, 2010 at 9:34 pm
Ok there a few things that I can do. I guess its from having such a diverse family (When I say diverse, I mean ability-wise not ethnically or religiously even though my family is diverse in those senses too).
This is kind of depressing but I can foresee death. It has happened a total of ten times where the night before someone that I’ve met dies, I have a dream about them and in these dreams they tend to tell me something somehow related to either how they died or what they wanted to say. The first time it happened was in the ninth grade. My nana had lung cancer, and the night before she died I had a dream that she was telling me that everything was going to be alright. Three years later, it happened again. I had a dream that my friend Glen asked me to tell his girlfriend that he was sorry for everything. He got hit by a drunk driver the next day. Turns out he had been cheating on his girlfriend. The list goes on.
My other abilities have not been put to much use as of lately because for some reason I can’t use them when I really want to. I can hide in plain sight. On several occasions, I have been walking down the halls or down the street with one or two of my friends and we’d be talking for a while and then for some reason I would shift my position whether it be behind them or on the other side of them. Even if they were looking right at me when I moved they would suddenly not know where I was and think that I walked off without them. This has caused issues because my friends sometimes think that I was being rude and just walked off in the middle of a conversation. One of my friends has even sworn on her life that she saw me walk away from her when I was right next to her.
My last ability is my least practiced one. I can project my voice as if its coming from somewhere other than from me. It tends to mainly affect particular people, and its only when I call their names. As an example, when I was at one of my friend’s house I said his name and he walked over to the window, opened it, looked outside, then said “I could have sworn someone said my name.” When I said “I did dufus” he totally freaked out and said that he didn’t realize I was in the room.
August 12, 2010 at 11:17 pm
i have the power of rain and lightning and today i made it rain and i made lightning ok call me wierd but i did.
August 18, 2010 at 7:31 am
I can tell where the bathrooms are in any building instantly upon entering. I think I just notice the patterns of where rooms are usually placed in the common current style of building in the US, but it’s apparently really useful to people I go out with.
August 23, 2010 at 3:15 am
I have a power but it’s different I take peoples energy oway am it’s real am a mutant your r talking to one of them am not a faker that said he’s or her is a mutant people say there not real but they r there everywhere u just can’t see.
August 24, 2010 at 8:35 am
brodix, I have drawn the same conclusions from a similarly fluid sense,but with words and language.
You may have realised that you can expand that concept your talking about to pretty much explain everything.
So I do agree that that is a mutant power.
April 17, 2012 at 11:26 am
You might think I’m crazy but throughout my life when people touch me they say I’m freezing, even in the summer and all of a sudden one day I was freezing in the night a headache and fever I touched water and it froze I touched my cousin. He got really cold ,then I got hot he said he’s like some kind of mutant and I believed him because on the same night when I was sleeping he was so hot shouting, so yeah I think I’m a mutant I don’t know how to control it a lot.
August 9, 2012 at 8:17 pm
I have freakishly large feature like hands and feet I’m also pretty hairy. Not saying I’m blue like beast but I have some of the characteristics he does I’m also not too had at being crazy accurate when throwing or shooting things
August 9, 2012 at 8:19 pm
Also I am able to dream something that happens in the future. I have these dreams that come true. Conversations I haven’t had yet. Situations that happen that I have dreamed about objects in my dreams I see in places in real life that i’ve never been too. I might be crazy but it only happened the past few years since I stated in grade 8
August 9, 2012 at 8:22 pm
Also as weird as it is I has a sonic clap. When I clap I can’t control the volume of it and sometimes it causes people to get headaches or there ears start ringing
September 8, 2012 at 3:34 am
I can sense danger and short out electronics. There is this strange field, like an invisible tingling sensation, around my hands. When I sense danger, the field flares up and the sensation becomes stronger. I can make the field stretch outward to short out electronics. When I clench my fists and then open it again, a humming noise comes from my hands. It is a low frequency sonic wave, and one time a moved a pen with it. I also have enhanced speed. Not like the Flash, but i am faster than everyone else.
November 8, 2013 at 3:14 pm
I can absorb energy and make my self stronger with it
November 8, 2013 at 3:18 pm
its cool but its kind of strange at the same time