Thursday, December 08, 2005
I Dream of Genie or Be Careful What You Wish For
Everybody always talks about getting 3 wishes granted. Often this fantasy involves a genie who grants the wishes. Well, I have recently made a very important discovery. Brace yourself (hold on to your monitor, if necessary), here it is:
There really are wish-granting genies.
Do not get too excited. I have a friend who recently encountered one of them, and her summary of the experience was, quote, "I hate your damn genie!"
She has good reason to feel this way. What the genie had done to her was to make her quite sick twice within about a three-week period. She had made the mistake of wishing not to work a full week for the last five or so weeks of the semester. She thought she would accomplish this by a combination of holidays and perhaps taking some personal time, or maybe one "mental health" sick day.
But her wish was granted, in classic, overly-literal fashion, by a genie who was hanging around. It turns out that everybody gets three wishes granted, at some point in their lives.
Unfortunately, it also turns out the genies are just as lazy and malicious as the rest of us, and they get to pick which three wishes to grant. So they ignore all the "million dollar" wishes, and the ones involving movie stars, sports cars, and careers that don't actually involve doing any work. (All of this is probably for the best, really, but that's the subject for another blog.) But when we come up with a relatively small wish that they can grant merely by screwing up our lives, then they're johnny-on-the-spot.
So as the old saying goes, be careful what you wish for--a genie might be listening.
There really are wish-granting genies.
Do not get too excited. I have a friend who recently encountered one of them, and her summary of the experience was, quote, "I hate your damn genie!"
She has good reason to feel this way. What the genie had done to her was to make her quite sick twice within about a three-week period. She had made the mistake of wishing not to work a full week for the last five or so weeks of the semester. She thought she would accomplish this by a combination of holidays and perhaps taking some personal time, or maybe one "mental health" sick day.
But her wish was granted, in classic, overly-literal fashion, by a genie who was hanging around. It turns out that everybody gets three wishes granted, at some point in their lives.
Unfortunately, it also turns out the genies are just as lazy and malicious as the rest of us, and they get to pick which three wishes to grant. So they ignore all the "million dollar" wishes, and the ones involving movie stars, sports cars, and careers that don't actually involve doing any work. (All of this is probably for the best, really, but that's the subject for another blog.) But when we come up with a relatively small wish that they can grant merely by screwing up our lives, then they're johnny-on-the-spot.
So as the old saying goes, be careful what you wish for--a genie might be listening.
