“Okay so, I need you to just listen to me for a while. I don’t need any wishes just yet, you just have to listen first, because I have something really important to explain.”
The genie, still half-attached to the ancient pot that he came out of considered me with curiosity, but nodded.
“So I really really need your help here. Because I have to fix the entire world and all its ails and woes; that is- this world that we are on- Earth, with all its current and future inhabitants. And I really really gotta do that in one wish. Two max! And that’s because I have two other really stupid but really funy wishes I kind of wanna wish for- again, I’m not wishing yet, I’m just explaining. But the issue is that I would feel like a jerk if I wasted my wishes on my bullshit without fixing the world first, right?”
The genie blinked, probably confuse about how I managed to say all that in one continuous breath. But again, he motioned his hand in a way that showed me that I should continue explaining. So I did. I told the genie about my two wishes and about how incredibly fun they would be.
At which point the genie spoke, his words were wispy as if the wind itself had gained sentience. And he asked, “Who’s Sabrina Carpenter?”
“You’re a genie, aren’t you supposed to be like, all knowing?” I asked, confused.
So- and I probably should have expected this, turns out that this genie was last out of the pot during Ancient Sumer, which significantly hindered his understanding of current socio-political events.
If I wanted to do this, I’d have to start all the way at the beginning. Which, I guess is where this all started, really.
I decided to start with the Sabrina thing, because, really, it felt easier to explain that, than the entire impact of Tailor swift on modern society.
I first showed him some songs from Sabrina, which did require a brief explanation of pop music, but truly, that took only a moment in the grand scheme of things. Then I told him how tall she is, at which point he asked “is that an abnormal height for your people?”
So I guess I had to show him height charts and the average heights for different people in the world. He argued that she isn’t that small, really, which I had to agree with, seeing how we were just looking at heights distribution of humans. But that was kind of beside the point.
I told him as much, explaining that what really matters is how she and her fans managed to make a recurring thing out of her height, which is why it would be so funny if she suddenly begun growing.
That, is where the trouble begun, because, turns out (and again, probably should have anticipated this), the type of humor the genie was used to is much different from ours.
Teaching him about current humor, took more time than I really want to admit it did. I mean, I’m not a teacher, I was never too good at explaining things, but here I was talking about changing one’s expected behavior in ways that would cause a dissonance between the predicted and the observed.
The genie, for his part, truly, geniunely tried to get it, he did. But the ancient Sumer people, while apparently unbelievably funny, had completely different tastes in humor. And really, at this point, it was becoming a little awkward that I was the only one teaching the genie about things while he just listened.
So he begun teaching me the lost language of Ancient Sumer so he could explain a joke to me. Which took a while…
That, I suppose, is how I became friends with a genie- Through lessons in a dead language and conversation about the relevance of memes for shaping cultural understanding.
Some months in, when I was struggling with understanding verb-conjugation, the genie asked, kindly, if I wouldn’t want to just have him give me the knowledge I needed. He could do that, he said. It would be nothing for him, and he wouldn’t even have to count it towards my three wishes, because really this was for his benefit, not mine.
But I guess I was too stubborn to give up. Or maybe the back of my mind thought it was a trick. So I refused the offer. And he instead walked me through verb-conjugation two more times before I really got it.
By the end of this, the genie could tell me jokes from Ancient Sumer, which are absolutely hilarious by the way, and all of you are missing out! And I could finally convince him that gradually increasing the height of Sabrina Carpenter would be absolutely hilarious to modern audiences.
We did have about a week long debate about if it would be funnier for her to know about the change, or if letting her be absolutely incapable of noticing the change, therefore continuing to believe that she was tiny, would be better.
After that I moved onto Taylor Swift.
I unfortunately lost count of the number of detours I had to make so that the two of us could understand each other, but I think it was over five thousand? By this point almost two years passed, and frankly, the genie was much closer to a friend to me than a magic-trick creature.
He continued to tell me stories about his time in the ancient times, we laughed about the inaccuracies in history books we read together, it even turns out he absolutely adores Tumblr. I did have to explain it to him once saw me looking at the app, but really, I shouldn’t have been surprised. One of our favorite inside jokes is about forcefully misunderstandings color theory, while the common response to posts is to horrifically misconstrued the original context to the point of us making a meme out of our piss-poor reading comprehension. Really, this place is like genie heaven if you think about it. And I did think about it, quite a lot actually, seeing how I was practically living with one.
Then, one random evening, I was sitting at my sofa, while he levitated next to me, stealing my popcorn. We were having a deeply philosophical debate about the color of blueberries at that time- no okay but like they are white on the inside, blue on the outside, green if you peel them and kind of red-purple when you mash them, what on earth is up with that?
And he laughed, and I laughed and he agreed that that was simply an absurd amount of colors for one tiny fruit, especially when there are so many other blue berry fruits that would deserve the name of blueberry so much more.
And we were both a little drunk at that point, okay, we weren’t a little drunk, we were quite a bit drunk. So the genie snapped his fingers, and suddenly all the blueberries in the world had purple insides. I know none of you remember the reality in which blueberries were white inside, and I guess I’m sorry about that. But it just happened in that moment. You just had to be there, it was hilarious.
It was actually until the next morning when I finally realized what happened. And when I asked the genie about it, I think it was only then that he remembered that he did that. He immediately assured me that it wouldn’t count towards my three wishes, but I really didn’t even consider that. I just found it funny that blueberries were purple now.
But then I remembered the whole wish thing, and how that was the entire reason I called on the genie in the first place. But now that he was here and I kind of just saw him as my friend, I couldn’t help but feel ashamed. I didn’t want to keep the genie here just because of my wishes, I didn’t want to be selfish like that. So I told him as much.
We were both still hungover at that point, so the genie snapped his fingers and made that go away, because apparently even genies can’t think clearly when their head is in pain. And he asked me, how I could think my wishes were selfish, if the first one of them was literally to fix all of reality forever.”
I didn’t know how to answer. I stood there, staring at him blankly. I mean the hungover was gone but the sudden weight of his words settled itself in its vacant place. Because I never really thought of myself as a generous or good person. I mean, sure, I helped neighbors from time to time with heavy grocery bags, and I drove my friends to Ikea because I had a car and they didn’t. But everyone was supposed to do those things. That wasn’t very special. I never really contributed to charity for example. Sure, I had some money to spare but not that much, and even when I did give to some organization it was so hard to know that they did something actually meaningful with the money. And when I was giving to one cause, wasn’t there a different cause that needed it more? Even if I was just giving them five bucks? How was five bucks supposed to fix all of reality?
I told the genie as much. And he looked at me, his eyes suddenly carrying with it the weight of all eternity. Still, his face was kind, understanding, even.
I had never seen such tenderness before.
I didn’t want to cry before the genie, because he had become my friend and my mentor, but I didn’t know why else to do.
He took me into his semi-permeable arms, letting me rest against his ghostly shoulder. As I bawled my eyes out, he told me that in all the years that he was a genie, he has granted many wishes. Some people hoped for power, or money. Some, for more personal or circumstantial things- curing a family member, helping a friend in need. A child once asked him for a toy that wouldn’t break when his little sister played with it (she could keep playing with it, the child said, but it mustn’t break).
The genie explained, as I wiped my teary eyes, that in one way or another all people wish for the same. Each wish makes the world a little different, but always different in a way that the person behind the wish deems to be better than the one they had now. It was only that most people went about this through detours. Only some, limited few, could actually recognize the wish behind all the others. And admitting that one believed a miracle to be necessary to achieve a better world, was a difficult thing in its own right.
He said that he can’t do it. That’s the curse of the genie, he can make any partial success come true, but cannot fix the problem at its core. He would loose his job if he did that. And he’s bound by the laws of nature that created him to be incapable of making himself obsolete.
No matter how well I formulated my wish, no matter how many wishes I had, there was no way to simply fix reality.
I nodded. I didn’t know why else to do.
But the genie continued. My goal, he said, wasn’t unavailable. It just wasn’t a magic trick that did it. The reality was a bit more complicated, but nonetheless doable. Like he told me, it needed a good portion of us to just believe that it can be done. It doesn’t even need to be the majority of people, but the ones that do believe have to be stronger than the rest. They have to outlast the negativity and fear-mongering. That’s all.
He asked if I understood, and I didn’t know if I did. But I believed I was getting there. So I motioned for him to continue, and, in his infinite patience, he did.
Us, individuals, can’t do that much alone, he agreed. But every little bit does help. That friend of mine now has new furniture. Heck, they even have the cutlery-organizer that I specifically returned for two days later because we forgot about it on our first trip in favor of getting ice cream. (Apparently it helped them not get accidentally cut by a wrongly placed kitchen knife one time!) That neighbor’s back healed and she can carry her groceries again. And that charity did something small but meaningful with my five bucks, because I wasn’t the only one to think to give them five bucks.
Somewhere, somehow, despite it all, we kept coming together. And it kept amounting to something.
He said that if we keep trying, if we keep going, and if we keep being loud enough about it, that we can actually make it. That reality can be fixed. And that society can prevail. And that we can make it into the future we all hope for, if we just keep dreaming it up.
My friend then offered, that if I really really wanted it, if I wished for it with all that I am, that he could keep checking in on us. So that we wouldn’t be lonely on our journey towards the future.
And I nodded with all my will, and he snapped his fingers and nothing immediately changed. But somehow, somewhere, deep in my bones, I felt my hope clinging on. And I knew that it would stay there forever.
We spent the rest of the day talking. Not about anything important really- just gossip, and idle chitchat.
So it was only a day later when he asked me if I wanted to get my other two wishes.
And I laughed, and agreed. So I guess you’re welcome. Because it turns out that the only problem with my plan, was that all the Wikipedia editors were slightly too busy making the world a better place to be constantly updating Sabrina Carpenter’s Wikipedia entry about her height.
