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Everybody does resolutions. Nertz to that. Wishes are way more interesting, I think.

Think about every movie, TV show, or story that deals with somebody getting wishes. What happens? The wishes always backfire somehow and the person either has something horrible happen or learns some sort of important lesson.  Even Fox Mulder on The X-Files, after a long process of checking and double-checking his wish to make sure there was absolutely no way it could be taking out of context or misconstrued wound up making everyone on earth but him disappear. That’s just how things go: you can’t have wishes.

But that doesn’t stop people from thinking about what they would wish for if given the chance. Popular choices include world peace, unlimited money, and the chance to relive your life with the knowledge you have now. There’s a reason those are the popular choices – there’s a lot to like there. But, as all the stories, shows, and movies have taught us, all of those choices end up horribly for everyone. And forget about wishing someone back to life – The Monkey’s Paw, anyone?

Anyway, I know it doesn’t do any good, but just like every one else I’ve thought about it, too. I’ve probably put way more thought into it than is healthy, really. I’ve always found it a good mental exercise, I guess. Plus, it would be totally sweet if these came true.

So, in order of desire (meaning: if I only got one wish, it’d be the first one; if I got two, the top two; and so on), here are what I finally came up with.

The ability to understand, read, write, and speak any language. I can’t really explain why I would want this, other than I really, really like to know things. It would be SO cool to see pictures of hieroglyphics and know exactly what they meant. I would love to be able translate things perfectly into other languages. Still, I look at that wish written out and it makes me laugh a little. I mean, I took Spanish for a year and a half, but had no desire to do more than that. Part of it was that I knew I wouldn’t ever really understand it fully and the other part was that I wouldn’t have many opportunities to practice it, so I’d lose it. I guess it seems so much easier to just know it. It still looks weird to me, that wish, but it’s something I’d really like.

Wolverine’s healing ability. Man, how great would that be? I mean, he still gets hurt, but he heals right up, really quickly. No heart disease, colds, cancer, nothing. I don’t do dangerous things as a general rule, so it seems like maybe this one would also be wasted on me, but I wonder if maybe the ability to heal would spur me on to trying things I wouldn’t normally.  Maybe this one is only good if you can also have an adamantium skeleton?

Ability to time/space travel. I wouldn’t want a machine, just the ability to do it. Kinda like Christopher Reeve in Somewhere in Time where he just kind of goes to sleep and travels back in time, but more specific.  I’d love to travel back and see some of the great moments in history, but I’d even be interested in seeing some of the not-so-famous moments. It would be neat to see just day-to-day living in Ancient Rome, walk with Israelites as they wandered in the desert, see some dinosaurs, that kind of thing.

These kind of play into each other, of course. Conventional wisdom says if you were to travel back in time, the food would kill you because your body is unaccustomed to it. A healing factor would take care of that issue. Knowing how to communicate in any language would also come in handy to a time traveler, I think.

Go ahead and X-Files my ideas. I’m sure there are all sorts of holes in them that would cause Hitchcock levels of ironic lesson-learning or horrific endings.