If only I could do as fast as I think. I have always wished for this particular super power. I would forego extraordinary strength, or the ability to shape shift, although that sounds like fun. I have NO interest in reading other people’s minds, and living with any kind of super hypersensitivity sounds like an incredible burden. Perhaps I would enjoy being able to control the weather, but I’m afraid I would only screw it up for somebody else. But if I could execute an idea as fast as I could think it, now that would be something.
Even as I say it, I sense the fatal flaw. I can see how my “see how it goes” approach to so many things would instantaneously become “see how it went”. Fine, perhaps, as I’m screwing together shelves and racks in the new workspace upstairs. Not so fine as I take the top off a two hundred year old fiddle.
In my work life, there are two kinds of “busy”.
One kind of busy involves lots of phone calls, emails, client visits, adjustments, bow rehairs, seam glueing, general maintenance and repair work that has to happen before the dress rehearsal/recital/audition/studio session.
The other kind of busy is when the traffic through the door abates and I am able to get on with everything else – the larger restoration projects, work on instruments that I own, business projects that require a more expansive brain wave, including designing and building that new workshop. Balancing “Busy 1” and “Busy 2” has been one of the more difficult things that I have had to learn, as an independent violin restorer.
Lately, I’ve been riding a wave of Busy 1 and only thinking about Busy 2. I have no real superpowers, but I have the ability to sit at my bench and, while I work, think hard about what does and doesn’t work for me in a workspace. For instance, things that I require include, in no particular order:
1. Access to tools, priority given to those I use all the time.
2. Clear horizontal surfaces where I need them.
3. Ability to move about freely, without tripping over things. I HATE tripping over things.
4. Orientation toward natural light, without being subjected to glare or intense shadows.
5. A means to store tools without compromising their care and maintenance.
6. Ability to readily sort through parts and material especially repair wood.
7. Adequate electrical sources
8. Ability to shut the door on the workshop.
Things that will make me crazy and so are to be avoided at all costs:
1. Not being able to see what’s at the back of the shelf.
2. Having to get down on my knees.
3. Backing my chair up into an open cabinet door.
4. Having to get out a flashlight.
5. Tripping over things. I HATE that.
6. Having to remove screws, as in having to access something that’s dropped behind the bench.
7. Not being able to readily sweep out the corners.
8. Having to move X, in order to set down Y.
I don’t mind getting out the step ladder now and then, and I don’t mind the occasional trip to the attic to pick through the wood pile. And the occasional trip to the basement to use the big band saw or the tool grinder is just fine with me. But I don’t like things that land on the bench top because they have no other place to live. I dislike clutter, but I like a happy, reasonable mess.
Probably, by the time I actually post this, I will back in the Busy 2 groove, which will place me upstairs finishing some cabinets and hanging a door. My clients, with their freshly maintained and adjusted instruments will be in the throes of their own Busy 1 cycles. So it goes.
restorersmind 
I share both your choice of superpowers and your second thoughts about that choice. I can see so clearly my intentions for a particular task or project; it should be possible for that clear vision to materialize. On the other hand, sometimes the process of working it out, or making it work, is so full of serendipitous discovery that in the end I have something quite else, but also quite better. Maybe the superheroes don’t know what they’re missing.
On another note, I have to say how much I enjoy reading this blog when I get the chance. I studied violin for 13 years; my hectic adult life has moved me away from opportunities and time to play. But seeing your work, I can again feel that satiny wood, the sensuous curves, the live box against my collarbone, the pull of the horsehair through the rosin, the physicality of music. VERY grateful.
Hello RAB –
Once in love with a violin, always in love with a violin! Perhaps you will get back to it someday, and be surprised.
As for super powers, be glad Do-woman doesn’t really exist, for surely her middle name would be Oops!