oh, to teleport!
At a young age, I liked the idea of being able to teleport. I mean, wouldn't that just be awesome and incredibly convinient?!
I came up with the (not terribly original) idea that perhaps people such as myself could teleport, in the abstract, except that it was against the cosmic rules for teleportation to be proveable, therefore, I could only teleport when no-one could see me blink out of existence.
And if I locked myself in a closet? Clearly someone was watching the place I wanted to go. Great logic, missy.
By high school I realized that I couldn't even use it to get to class on time, since there were people with the knowledge that I couldn't possibly get there on time, thus they'd know by inference that I'd teleported, even if they didn't see me. Thus teleportation by those rules would be kind of useless.
I think of this occasionally. Like last weekend, as I was sitting on a train, on my convoluted journey to New York. I had to run from my house to catch the commuter train, and got there in the nick of time (despite the fact that this was the *second* commuter train, the one an hour after the one I wanted) and I'd gone all the way into town, and caught the T across to the bus station, so I could catch the 11:00 bus to New York... I was sitting on the T, at 10 minutes until the earlier 10:00 bus left, wishing that I could teleport across to the bus station. But of course, bus stations are the last place one could teleport to.
Here's my real puzzler: why don't I ever want to teleport far? Apparantly if I had the ability to teleport, I would only ever use it to catch trains and busses, and get places on time instead of 5 minutes late. Why don't I want to teleport to a beach in Tahiti? Why didn't I want to just teleport to New York, instead of spending money on a bus ticket? I dream too small.
I came up with the (not terribly original) idea that perhaps people such as myself could teleport, in the abstract, except that it was against the cosmic rules for teleportation to be proveable, therefore, I could only teleport when no-one could see me blink out of existence.
And if I locked myself in a closet? Clearly someone was watching the place I wanted to go. Great logic, missy.
By high school I realized that I couldn't even use it to get to class on time, since there were people with the knowledge that I couldn't possibly get there on time, thus they'd know by inference that I'd teleported, even if they didn't see me. Thus teleportation by those rules would be kind of useless.
I think of this occasionally. Like last weekend, as I was sitting on a train, on my convoluted journey to New York. I had to run from my house to catch the commuter train, and got there in the nick of time (despite the fact that this was the *second* commuter train, the one an hour after the one I wanted) and I'd gone all the way into town, and caught the T across to the bus station, so I could catch the 11:00 bus to New York... I was sitting on the T, at 10 minutes until the earlier 10:00 bus left, wishing that I could teleport across to the bus station. But of course, bus stations are the last place one could teleport to.
Here's my real puzzler: why don't I ever want to teleport far? Apparantly if I had the ability to teleport, I would only ever use it to catch trains and busses, and get places on time instead of 5 minutes late. Why don't I want to teleport to a beach in Tahiti? Why didn't I want to just teleport to New York, instead of spending money on a bus ticket? I dream too small.