How to be a Superhero in Real Life - Part Two

Advice on How to Become a Superhero in Real Life.

Pad your clothing.
Muscles give the impression of strength. Plus everyone likes checking out a muscular bod.

Once completed, engage in a feat of strength.


Feats of strength

Break Things
Make common household items out of cardboard or plywood and routinely break them in front of others, clumsily explaining you don’t know your own strength.

Lift a car or a school bus.
Nothing says power like holding a heavy object over your head. See Superman. Find a crowded car park (shopping centres are a good choice) and scout out a suitable vehicle. If lifting a vehicle proves difficult attempt to push one forward. If you are unable to do so, crouch behind a car and wait until the shopper returns. When the driver releases the handbrake push the car into forward motion and celebrate your victory in front of impressed onlookers. Note: Watch for reversing lights when crouched in the push position.

Alternatively you can spread positive rumours about your superhero-ness through the use of a civilian identity (see below).


Heroic Activities

Run down the street with someone unconscious in your arms.
If you can’t find anyone unconscious, someone sleeping will do but you will have to move quickly so as not to wake them in front of witnesses. If they do wake, claim they have amnesia from the accident you just rescued them from. Practice deploying a sleeper hold for unruly ‘victims’.

Make public declarations
Stand amongst a crowd and stare wistfully into the horizon. Proclaim a little too loudly “the city is safe again…but for how long?” Narrow your eyes as if you are thinking really hard.


Achieve Flight
Nothing says cool like flipping gravity the bird. Employ the following techniques to demonstrate flight.

• Make sure people see you 'land'. Jump out of trees to achieve this effect.
• Hang off of buildings.
• Adjust your tie as you exit alleyways.
• Always enter a building through a window. The higher the floor, the more dramatic the entrance.
• Wear a cape

Civilian Identity
A civilian identity is the perfect way to learn information in an undercover fashion or just get a bit of down time from the stresses of hero-ing. A neat pair of glasses or parting your hair on the other side can work a treat. For those more inclined towards precociousness, hiding in plain sight is also a novel means of diverting attention away from your heroics.

Keep an air of mystery about you civilian identity with the following conversation tactics:

• Always arrive a little late and blame it on there being a “disturbance”.
• React as if an alarm bell has gone off in your ear. Run away mid-conversation while yelling “something’s come up!”
• Accidentally on-purpose mention your homeworld.

Tackle a Villain
A superhero is only as good as the villain he defeats. However unless you are a trained fighter it is not advisable to attempt to pick a fight with a burly opponent. Instead, let your intelligence be a weapon. Tackle the elderly or very young. Explain to witnesses that your villain has the ability to change shape and is actually as powerful as an elephant. This will no doubt impress, as not only have you conveyed strength, but a keen sense of perception.

How to be a Superhero in Real Life - Part One

It is clear that the idea of the superhero not only thrives within society but also serves to benefit it.

We are currently seeing a proliferation of superhero stories at the box office. Comic book heroes are a virtual goldmine for money hungry movie studios – Iron Man, The Incredible Hulk, The Dark Knight to name only a few. A well-crafted superhero story draws flocks of nerds out of the shadows and allows them to bask in the glow of mainstream society. For even a brief moment, long held claims that “Batman is cool” are validated by people other than a nerd’s comic book dealer. Thus the nerd is given the opportunity to make a connection with a non-nerd. Furthermore, through the superhero’s explosive infiltration of the public consciousness, the nerd finds himself (fact: 97% of nerd are male) with a sudden wealth of cultural cache. The hours of comic book reading and Internet scouring now function as well executed research to be deployed into intelligent conversation. Knowledge of a superhero is considered cool because it allows people the sensation of feeling closer to the superhero. Therefore we can conclude that the superhero proves to be a cultural unifier.

So why not skip the hard work and transform yourself into the source of cultural coolness? Read the following information for advice on how to become a superhero in real life...

Who I am

Who Am I?

I’m Spiderman
I am Jack’s raging bile duct
I am the Walrus

I am a bricolage of pop cultural references. Mostly lame ones. And they burst out of me at inappropriate moments. Like singing to my boss that he’s killing me softly with this workload. Not that there ever really is ever an appropriate moment to do that.

But I honestly get uneasy that I know Paris Hilton has created a new superhero with Stan Lee. I get more concerned that this knowledge sits in the forefront of my mind, ready to spring into conversation; a dirty secret that may unleash itself, like when the person next to you on the bus sees you queuing up Britney Spears on your iPod. And yet for some reason I can’t help but angle the conversation towards a Paris Hilton related topic... which really isn’t too hard these days.


******

I am a product of my parents…
…unfortunately this means I am destined to become as hairy as a wolverine. Thanks Dad. I mean the guy has hair sprouting out from under his collar even when wearing a turtleneck. No doubt I’ll wake up sometime in the next few years to find my teenage years were leading to a seminal teen-wolf moment. And while I still struggle to grow a fashionable beard, I’ll sport a full body pelt the envy of any game hunter. This does not bode well for me in modern society. I mean it was Ok in Dad’s generation. Sean Connery would light a cigarette and the latest Bond girl would twirl his chest hair. Probably even weave some design into it for a sexual thrill. Women would swoon at this. Men would rub their chests with hair-grow lotion. That was cool then.

Daniel Craig doesn’t have chest hair. You see my problem.

In the shower today I noticed burgeoning shoulder hair. I also realised that no one can tell if you’ve been crying in the shower.

Not to worry, I’ll most likely be shot before I reach fifty. Some Good Samaritan will heroically take out the hairy beast-man allegedly mauling some hapless older suburbanite when in reality I was just offering to help an old lady carry her groceries.

*******

But internal anxieties are not all who I am. In fact I’m more so my external anxieties. This is basically defined by the shoes I wear. I own three pairs, each rated from one to three on a scale of casualness to classiness. Most often I wear the pair rated number two – retro Adidas kicks that can be worn to uni and most restaurants, but not nightclubs or weddings (definitely not weddings my Mum has confirmed). This is comfortable mediocrity with neat jeans and shirt to match. In this state, I am expected to be relaxed yet social, approachable and affable; the kind of guy who stops for a conversations and impresses upon others a strong sense of direction in his life. He’s the kind of guy who will one day wear only number three shoes. This puts a lot of pressure on me as I have no real sense of direction and no real interest in full commitment to number three shoes. Sometimes I think it would just be easier to wear number one shoes but then I remember they have holes in them and my feet would get wet if it rained and no one likes wet feet.

Concrete Dialogues

The Applecross Dome Coffee Shop

11:53am. Having rolled out of bed only ten minutes ago, I’ve timed my breakfast escapade perfectly. A civilised sleep-in for a cold morning and access to the best seat in the wood-panelled café; an armchair nestled by the doorway, its leather warmed by the sunlight seeping in through the window. A sullen jazz singer broods over the speakers as a crabby teenager plonks a latte on my table. I sit alone. All my friends have been at their desk since 9am, ticking off their objectives: a job, a house, a wife, a boat. But I don’t regret my late start to the day because these are the waking hours.

Twelve o’clock ticks by. The doors of outside buildings open with increasing regularity as people stumble onto the sidewalks. Risely Street is swollen with more pedestrians than cars and the short skirts bobbing along with the tide to distract me from a now cold drink.

I am a one-man welcome party for the lunch crowd. Business suits and gaggles of Mums steering prams are eager to share a smile. They all pause on the creaky floorboards to scout a table or spot a friend. Customers rise in waves to attract and greet their friends and draw them in with a flurry of handshakes and polite kisses. The air becomes laden with coffee and the growl of the coffee grinder. Conversation bounces off the walls at fever pitch. And I realise someone has changed the music to an excitable flamenco guitarist as heads seemingly bob along with the music. Each table is an island of matching work uniforms or family resemblance. Middle-aged women become immersed in frumpy armed conversation. The suits raise eyebrows over frothy contemplations. An elderly couple study a shared menu. And the crabby teenager spends her lunch break in the corner glued to her mobile phone. I lean into the pool of light flooding my table and the armchair wraps around me.

When I look up again the tables are strewn with the skeletal remains of salads and burgers. The coffee grinder has dulled to a drone. The elderly couple pick over scraps on their plate and there are more cars than people on the street. The teenager closes her phone and switches the music back to the wounded singer. I assume she’s grumpy because she just slept through the waking hours.

New Territory!

Excellent. So I'm online now. Maybe that drawer full of random ideas I have on scraps of paper can now become random ideas in digital bytes.