Marlin Xie

I wrote my CommonApp essay about the fact that my sister is deaf and how growing up, my “superpower” was being her translator. As a brutally shy kid, the privilege of sound, and thus my voice, were ones I reluctantly learned to appreciate. Now, in my sophomore year of college, I’m still reflecting on how much I liked that essay and how it’s potentially sad that I still think about it.

Anyway, if I could choose a superpower, I’ve always said it would be time travel, for selfish reasons, of course. It’d be pretty damn cool to see your favourite dead artist perform live or what dinosaurs really looked like.

As time has passed, my answer has stayed the same, but I began to see it quite differently at its core, kind of mirroring how I began to think about myself. My reasoning grew roots based on fixing, reversing and erasing, nitpicking through a lens of criticism. I wanted to change the past and live in the moments that were good before they were bad.

I saw this theme arise in other places that are closely woven into my identity. By extension of sound, music is one of those essential threads. I do this thing where I hyperfixate on songs for about a month at a time and listen to them approximately four times a day. This month it’s “In Violet” (Searows). Similar to how I have never gotten over a single situation in my life, I rewind, replay and relisten just like I beat that dead horse until I’ve over-beaten it (Michael Jackson style).

I was in the shower the other day, and as “Drops of Jupiter” (Train) sprinkled out of the showerhead, I was transported back to eighth grade. When I got out and made my way to my desk, I did a reading for my Digital and Computational Studies class. It discussed how our listening and streaming have been taken over by AI recommendations that don’t give us variety within our music anymore. We then remain stuck in an algorithm.

Stuck is how I am. I’m like a broken record, dwelling on the what-ifs and longing for “Yesterday” (The Beatles) so I can go back and “Change” (Big Thief) it. Though these songs are mind-altering perfection, listening to them hundreds of times meant missing out on other songs I could’ve liked just as much and where they could take me.

Within that reading, former engineer at Spotify Glen McDonald stated, “If you’re given something new, it’s odd, in the same way being teleported to random spots around the world for three minutes at a time would not be a pleasant tourism experience.” I’m not sure I agree. What I’ve come to understand is that those three minutes can do much more than hours of the same old thing. It’s the new that’s impactful. Moving forward requires new. My response to him would be, if you venture out, who says you won’t gain something from every place? Who says you can’t choose to stay? Who says that the experience of teleporting isn’t so much cooler than where you’re going?

But then again, who am I to say? Here I am, reflecting on the essay that got me onto this college campus, critiquing the very rumination that I continue to participate in, while I force myself to listen to a bad country song. Nonetheless, I think my answer has changed. If I could choose a superpower, it would be teleportation.

Misha Alibhai is a member of the Class of 2028.