So I had the most delightful self discovery during our 4th of July gathering. One of my six year old little buddy colleagues, helped spur me on in what seems to be a fun culmination of some journal entry prompts and my personality test result conclusions. (ENFP Campaigner)
It Started out as me trying to get him to shut up and stop talking about snakes, because I hate snakes. He was a factoid animal planet smarty-pants expert, well versed in the little boy universe of Marvel and critter biology. I simplistically just didn’t want to face nightmares of snakes later on. I tried to bump him onto another topic by suggesting the scheme of him sending me any dead garden snakes he finds, so I can plant them in my mail box to teach my mean old lady mail delivery person a lesson.
His eyes got as big as inter galactic moons as his larger than life spirit was so offended with, “That’s so mean! Why would you do that?”
I quipped back with, “Because she is too lazy to get her butt out of her mail truck when guest’s cars are parked anywhere near our mail boxes and she leaves nasty notes on your Aunty and Uncle’s car when they are visiting me! (growl)”
Mr. Little Professor quickly concluded, “Whoa! She deserves that! (processing, processing…) You’re like an anti-villain!”
(Pee my pants eruption of evil cackle laughing) My wicked plan to distract him was working way better than I had planned! The topic table swerved swiftly right! All of a sudden we were traveling at warp speed to my universe.
Focused on bumping him to another, less scary topic, “Who’s your favorite villain?”
Mr. Little Professor, “Venom.”
No! Stay clear of slithery, venomous snakes!
After establishing that he knew a solid definition of anti-villain, We proceeded to debate for quite a bit over if I could be both an anti-villain and an Aunty-Villain simultaneously. Six year old logic, all be it profoundly brilliant, takes an incredible effort to steer and negotiate to a mutually beneficial conclusion. I had to supernaturally germinate and grow to maturity within minutes, the idea of puns. He caught on quickly.
So I further galvanized my distraction by hatching the next level manifestation by asking him for his highly respected opinion of whether or not he thought my super hero/ anti-villain name could officially be, “Aunty-Villain.” And if so, could he help me design a costume? (Snakes? What snakes? Are snakes even a thing?)
For a spilt glitchy moment, I swear he blipped into Edna Mode.
Before I sent him into mental creative hyper orbit with costume design ideas, I reinforced the intent, “Wait, what are my super powers?”
The Professor, “You play practical jokes on people who deserve it.”
Buwhahahahaha. Oh this is on!
Before he could morph back into all boy-wanna be man mindedness with all of it’s poor fashion coordination, I grounded him in the direction of my preferred cool winter color analysis and reminded him that Grey can be another angle on puns, in that it’s sort of a moral grey area when anti-villains think they can be the judge of who deserves what. There. I had anchored my Aunty protective moral compass, guard and shield. And the side benefit, the growing grey skunk stripes at my temples won’t clash with typical little boy primary colors. OOOh, but as he was yammering on about how to disguise my true identity, I threw in that when I morph into my suit, my grey hairs can turn purple! Purple goes with grey! Then I won’t look like Storm! And then The Professor came up with the pièce de résistance, “You need gloves, so your finger prints can’t be found.”
Being an ENFP, it is the duty of my niche 7% of the population in the world, to indoctrinate creativity and out of the box entrepreneurial thinking, so in true ENFP fashion, I lit the flame and poured fuel on this little genius collaborator subject of mine. All disciples need commissioning.
“Mr. Professor, when you’ve finished sketching your design, can you digitize it on your mom’s ipad and have her make a T-shirt of it in her online store and then I’ll buy it from her, and you can negotiate a deal with her to make some of the money off of it?” Bam! Pow! Bang!
Just when I thought his inter galactic moon eyes couldn’t possibly get any larger, he respectfully checked with his mom, who was witnessing how our swirling galaxies collided in magnificent orchestration. The professor very respectfully checked to see if the branding would fit in her Mombie T-shirt shop. The Professor had this look of both revelation and confounded suspicion, ‘is this lady for reals?’