Incredibly Worthless Superpowers

Faster than a speeding bullet, more powerful than a locomotive, able to leap tall buildings in a single bound?

Pffft. I believe we've all been blessed with superpowers. Some are just a little more super than others. And some, like the ones which have been bestowed upon yours truly, are absolutely worthless.

As much fun as it would be to be able to read minds or grow long indestructible Adamantium claws out of my knuckles (hello, bumbling-stumbling Costco shoppers, get the eff out of my way), there's something to be said for having extremely unremarkable abilities. We aren't constantly getting into epic battles, bad guys aren't trying to kill us and we don't have to come up with alter-egos in order to "blend in".

One of my worthless superpowers is the somewhat creepy ability I have to remember not only the names of the 700+ kids at the school I work with, but I have a 95% success rate when it comes to telling you who their teachers are, too. And about half of them, I know the parent's names. This power loses all strength once the kids graduate 6th grade and leave for junior high, though. When they come back to visit all I can see is the little baby face on top of a gangly young adult body and I'm forced to sit there and think of a polite way to say "Tell me your name again???".

My hair is another amazing thing. No, it's not beautiful but guess what? It doesn't get dirty. Scratch that. It does get dirty but it never looks like it. I could go weeks without washing my hair and I'm pretty sure it would just look better the longer I put it off. Of course the same can't be said for the rest of my body. If you've ever walked through the Beauty aisle at Walgreens and wondered who in the world buys those awful pink frilly shower caps...it's me.

Unfortunately I didn't procreate with another non-dirty hair person and only two of my four offspring "in-hair-ited" my hirsute abilities. The father of my kids had the kind of hair that looked greasy a couple hours after washing it, and actually left head-prints on our pillowcases. Prints of his head made from hair oil. One of the first things I did after he left was get all new bedding. #IkeaDivorceStory

Here's another worthless power I have: I can look at a pan or dish of leftovers and accurately gauge the exact size of plastic container we're gonna need to store it. Like, fish that little tub out of the Tupperware sea and every last bit of edible goodness will fit, right up to the brim. And I can find the corresponding lid in mere seconds. If I die tomorrow, it gives me some peace knowing I'm not leaving behind a drawer full of containers without lids that fit. We will talk about the horror that is known as "the last drawer on the left" in my bedroom at a later time.

It took a contest at work for me to fully realize another gift of mine: finding doppelgangers. We had a celebrity-lookalike thing and turns out I really do have a particular set of skills and if you give me a martini and an uninterrupted hour with the internet I will find YOUR celebrity twin. Here's mine:

This is me at work. Telling a parent it's okay. Whatever they're worried about, it's okay. Just drop their lunch/trumpet/boots/inhaler/backpack off and we'll get it to them. Promise.

Word of this talent spread, and before I knew it, throngs of teachers and staff were lined up next to my desk, begging me for assistance. Okay, maybe not throngs. But at least three people asked for my help. I found Partridge Family-era Susan Dey (there was absolutely NO indication of the timeliness of the celebs) and a couple more that I can't remember now. But believe me, they were dead on. Sometimes we play this game with the kids at school (on the down low, of course). We have a little Tori Spelling, a pint-sized Robert Pattinson (thanks Renae), Quentin Tarantino Jr., an even ittier-bittier Aziz Ansari and yes of course a miniature Shemar Moore (I actually dubbed that kid "Eyebrows" in honor of Derek Morgan/Criminal Minds). Find Your Doppelganger...it's fun. And I'll help you.

Do you need a little down time? A little chunk of the day where you are actually forced to stand still and just be? Come grocery shopping with me then, and I promise you I will find the slowest checkout lane. There, you will have generous amounts of minutes to check your Facebook, scroll through the Groupon deals and maybe just maybe perfect the art of the disapproving sigh/eye-roll/foot-shifting. It doesn't matter if the person ahead of me only has two items vs. the lady next door with the overflowing cart. Odds are, the person I chose to get behind will be using their credit card for the first time and can't understand all the buttons to push and/or the cashier will accidentally input the wrong price or maybe they will run out of register tape. Meanwhile, Full Cart lady is laughing and on her way out the door. On the bright side, I did have time to delete all of those emails from Groupon.

And the last superpower I have to share is one that I no longer claim to excel at...that honor goes to my best friend Danielle. For a long time I was reigning queen of WebMd, the diva of self-diagnosis, the high priestess of pairing symptoms with ailments. Many nights were spent in bed, laptop burning the tops of my legs while I dug through the internet armed only with the search terms "bloated stomach" and "thigh pain". I dubbed that mysterious abdominal pain "pancreatitis", my disappearing eyebrows as "hypothyroidism" and a throbbing ear as "spider laid eggs in there". In reality the real culprits were "half a tub of artichoke dip", "middle age" and "cracked tooth". Only one of those scenarios ended with medical intervention and vicodin.

Oh but did the tables turn on me when I turned to my BFF for medical advice. It was then that I learned of her magical medical prowess, and believe me when I say she put my Quincy MD abilities to shame. During a flurry of late night texts wherein I described my symptoms (cramps so bad I spent the night in the fetal position, crying), my homie sent me a malady I'd never heard of: Twisted Ovary. Oh how I wish I'd taken a sreenshot of that text...it probably glowed. Since then, she's been my go-to when I have a list of symptoms and my hypochondria is raging. Dr. Oz? Nah. More like Dr. Danielle. (of course, it wasn't really a twisted ovary, just perimenopausal menses and half a tub of artichoke dip, both treatable with time and self-loathing)

One thing I haven't added to my repertoire of worthless skills is knowing exactly when to stop writing. So I'm going to go out on a limb and end this post right here...but not before asking: