Webbish6

Hey everyone! A quick service announcement – if you’ve sent me any mail from my webbish6 site contact form in the last month, I just found out it was being automatically deleted without any notification to me – so I wasn’t ignoring you on purpose! Please re-send your messages. I’ve switched how the form is being delivered, so it should be working now. Sorry about that!

Doing the happy dance…because my poem “Wonder Woman Dreams of the Amazon” is up on Verse Daily today!

Having lately been enmeshed in dealing with the tedious business of attending to my many, various, and “surprising” (see previous post) health problems, I have started looking for the upside. Remember the character Mr. Glass, played by Samuel L. Jackson in “Unbreakable,” the supervillain with brittle-bone syndrome? Perhaps I too am destined to become such a supervillain. Then I started thinking, researching – what are the basic requirements for becoming not just a villain(ess), but a supervillain(ess)? I mean, these bizarre phsyical disorders I’ve been born with must mean that this is the next glamorous career route I should be looking at. Let’s see, besides these surprising defects of anatomy I just learned about (including something called a horseshoe kidney!) – I grew up next to secret nuclear weapon testing site, had an eccentric robot scientist father, and I love spandex. Just kidding. I really hate spandex. I do have the requisite collection of high-heeled boots, however. Also, supervillains are obsessed with superheroes. Remember Mr. Glass’s comic book art collection? And I have a chapbook devoted to female comic book superheroes. See the similarities?

OK, here’s my list of job requirements for a supervillain. Do you have any to add?

Job Requirements for Supervillain-dom

1. Growing up near secret nuclear testing site.
2. Father (or mother) eccentric scientist of some sort.
3. Isolated childhood, possibly due to dangerously high IQ (preferable: someone at sometime in your life has referred to you as a “super-genius,”) exclusion from childhood activities due to physical limitations or appearance-or-personality-oriented prejudices, etc. Multiple traumatic incidents welcome.
4. Physical limitations such as a serious disease or deformity, due to mutation, or, just as acceptably, an accident involving the creation of powerful new scientific weaponry and/or interaction with superhero, preferred.
5. Adult antisocial behavior and unwillingness to participate in group activities, such as religious, civic, or therapy meetings.
6. Dangerous lack of respect for authority figures, especially physically-extra-capable authority figures, such as superheroes, police and world governments.
7. A fashionable knack for skin-tight costumes, accessorized with masks, hooks and utility belts for men, masks, high-heeled boots and long nails for women.
8. Evil laugh and/or flamboyant criminal signature (branding, flowers, lopped appendages) optional. Ability to deliver lines like “Beware my Doomsday Device” without giggling a must. Unless it is an evil giggle.

Frankly, there have been far too few memorable supervillainesses imho. I always liked Poison Ivy because of my previous life as an orchid-cross-fertilizing, tomato-cloning botany student. If you were a supervillain, who would you be?

In the words of my favorite animated robot, “Bender’s back, Baby!”
Note to self: check for rare bleeding disorders BEFORE undergoing surgery. That saves time and effort for all involved. Life is a learning process! Also, it’s very bad to surprise your surgeon. You don’t want a surgeon saying something like “I’ve never seen anything like that before!” However, I’m mostly just happy I woke up. That is the most important part of any surgery.
Finally mentally alert again, getting all the scopolamine and anesthesia out of my system, though still low on physical energy. Fashion mags and poetry blogs were my sustaining entertainment for about three days, along with various episodes of Futurama (home of my favorite animated robot) and the Simpsons. Got the new issue of Poets and Writers and vow to read the whole thing today. Am totally behind in work-work (you know, the paying kind) and my MFA homework right now, but those things can wait until I’m better. Husband Glenn has been great, feeding me soup and ginger ale and jell-o. Overall, I’m feeling…thankful. Besides the angelic nature of the husband, many good friends have been writing and praying and thinking good thoughts and lending me family heirloom chaplets and doing remote Reiki and giving me medical advice and all kinds of overall good things. Thanks to everyone!