I just finished re-reading a children's book called The Girl with the Silver Eyes, by Willo Davis Roberts, and it brought back a deluge of memories. The heroine in this book is a 10-year-old girl with telekinesis, and when I first read it, I thought this ability would be about the coolest thing ever (second only to meeting that dreamy boy from Flight of the Navigator). So I tried to do it. I tried to move stuff with my mind. But the results were disappointing, to say the least. It just wasn't fair, I thought. Why couldn't my mom have taken a dangerous, experimental drug when I was gestating, so that I would end up with bizarre abilities that would make my classmates fear me? (Children have a natural Machiavellian sensibility, which is why they go all "Lord of the Flies" every time a bunch of them get stranded on an island together.)

Another trigger for this obsession with telekinesis was Star Wars. Growing up, my whole family was crazy about the movie. Every time we had an extended family get-together, all of us kids would flee to the basement and play Star Wars. The bed in the corner functioned as the Millennium Falcon, and the timer on the exercise bike told us how long until the Death Star exploded. My older cousin always got to be Darth Vader. Another cousin always got to be Luke or Han Solo. As for the girls, in the spirit of fairness we decided on a rather schizophrenic interpretation of the single female character, calling ourselves Princess Leia, Princess Leah, and Princess Lya. Secretly, of course, I wanted to be Luke, and so I tried to use the Force for real, sitting for hours in front of a motionless object, fingers outstretched, trying to get the thing to leap into my hand. When that failed, I'd recreate the scene from the Wompa's cave in The Empire Strikes Back. I'd hang upside down on the monkey bars, trying to reach a Milky Way in my school bag, or flip open my can of Tab without touching it. To my dismay, it never worked. The other kids just thought I was weird—they gave me the same look as when I tried to describe the interdimensional vortex I had built out of Legos, and how my little animal figurines (named Frodo and Sam) would traverse through it into a universe of water (in real terms: the bathtub).

Besides, the blood rushing to my head made me dizzy.

Somewhere during this period, I also became fascinated with Uri Geller, the Israeli spoon bender. Geller did demonstrations of his telekinesis and telepathy all over the world, and he studied painting with Salvador Dali in the 70s. He had beautiful, girl hair. You may have seen him hawking jewelry on QVC.

A word about my buddy, Uri:

When people hear someone has paranormal abilities, they like to say things like "if you're so psychic, why don't you go to Vegas and make a million bucks?" Well, Uri actually did this. Or so he says in his autobiography. He claims he went to Vegas, made a ton of pesos, and then got such a terrible migraine that he had to throw all his hard-won cash out the window, at which point the pain stopped. (In retrospect, it occurs to me that this may have just been a metaphor for having to spend way too much money on brand-name headache medicine. Pesky pharmaceutical companies.) Anyway, he took this as a sign from Jehovah and never did it again. What do we make of this? I don't know, but it seemed interesting at the time.

In his book, Uri explicitly said that everyone has untapped psychic abilities, so naturally I tried that, too. I was trying to bend spoons way before The Matrix told me they didn't exist, convinced that eventually, the matter would rearrange itself before my eyes (and I suppose I'd be right, if I could wait long enough, but modern medicine hasn't quite extended the human life expectancy to 100,000 years.)

Reading The Girl with the Silver Eyes again has renewed my yearning to be a Master of the Paranormal. True, I'm a little more jaded than I was as a child. But then, some of my convictions are still pretty whimsical (case in point: Howard Dean still has a chance, right?), so it just may work. Either way, if you happen to see me in the park someday, staring at some ducks or an elderly woman's flowered hat, just know that I'm not daydreaming, nor am I having a psychiatric crisis.

I'm just trying to bend the world to my will.