Using Your Imagination

As I've said in previous blogs, as a child, I was a Barbie girl, all the way. I even have collectible Barbies that I couldn't play with and that I just had on pedestals on my bookshelves. No joke. But when I played with my Barbies was when my imagine ran wild. I didn't play with only my Barbies. Oh no. Like many other little girls, I was also obsessed with horses. I took horseback riding lessons my entire childhood and still love it to this day. So when I played with my Barbies, I also played with my toy horses. Did you know that the two go perfectly together? Barbies fit perfectly on plastic horses. There was one Barbie in particular who always got to ride a horse because she was a ballerina Barbie, so her knees were bendable, making it easier for me to make her ride a horse. At my childhood peak, I probably had as many horses as I did Barbies. Which is a lot. My horses and Barbies had all kinds of adventures together. Sometimes I would send them back in time and pretend my Barbies were the Tudors and of course, my horses would play a huge part in their royal processions. And, as any good child would, I made my horses talk. Not to the Barbies, but to each other. And just because I was playing with one didn't mean I had to play with the other. Sometimes I just played horses, sometimes I just played Barbies. But those hours of my childhood were definitely some of the most imaginative and creative.

I've been sitting here for about 15 minutes trying to come up with how I have creatively solved a problem in the recent past. The only thing that is coming to mind happened last week, and it's not especially creative, but it worked. I have a tendency to always be the person who does dishes in my apartment just because I hate to see them sitting around and taking up the sink. However, this doesn't mean that I should always be the one to do the dishes, especially when they're not mine. So I didn't do the dishes last week. I let them accumulate and as they did, I would put coffe grounds in some of the cups that were soaking. I even added a little vinegar and some other stuff I found in the fridge to the mix. When my roommates smelled the dishes that had been sitting there for almost a WEEK and saw all the stuff in/on them, they totally freaked out. They thought the dishes were getting moldy and they HATED the smell. The dishes were immeidately done. And now they do their own dishes more. A little conniving, I know, but also creative. And it got the job done.

The first thing that came to mind of a superhero thinking on their feet was an example from the "Superman: Earth One" that we read. The villain lets slip that the only thing that can harm his almsot indestructible ship is Kryptonian metal. When the spaceship that Superman crash landed in as a baby comes to his aide soon after, he realizes what it is made of, and commands it to go through the enemy ship. It punctures a hole through one side of the larger ship and zips out the other side of the ship with barely a scratch. This ultimately leads to Superman defeating the villian, of course. But he thought on his feet and used his aircraft the way it could best serve him. Of course Superman is always going to win the day, but it's more fun to read when he does it in a quirky or interesting way.