from the mouths of pokemon

From Spongebob I learned to ride the Hasselhoff. From the Fairly Odd Parents I learned that even the animation world is not without hideously selfish and neglectful parents. And when I overheard a particular line on one of the countless episodes of Pokemon (that my children could watch over and over again without regard for life or limb--like some kind of pre-tween Clockwork Orange), I stopped and replayed the line in my head several times. I thought it sounded dangerously close to trite, and yet uncommonly profound. So for you poor adults who actually have lives and (coincidentally?) no children, a pokemon is one of 400 types of various stuffed animal looking creatures that kicks ass like Bruce Lee and lives in baseball-like shrinking sphere--big hit. A trainer is a child who beats up, then captures these creatures, training them to battle other pokemon on command, like some kind of extraterrestrial cock fight. Who says kid's TV isn't morally enriching...So anyway, a trainer is complaining to his pokemon that they can't do the one move that would get them out of the random dramatic situation, because the pokemon isn't trained for it and blah blah blah. And the pokemon says to his trainer, "IF YOU BELIEVE IN ME, I CAN DO ANYTHING." I ran through that again. "If you believe in me, I can do anything." Not, "if you believe in yourself..." or, "if I believe in myself," but if YOU believe in ME, I can do ANYTHING. I thought hard over this while clearing the family room around the nintendo addicted children. I pondered it over loading the dishwasher. If YOU believe in ME...there was, I realized, a requirement for such a leap of faith in that statement, a trust in that believer...that you are putting yourself in their hands, depending on them believing in you. You are giving them the absolute control over your access to strength, giving yourself over to the validity of their faith. IN WHOM could you possibly invest that much trust??? And why does it still seem so hard to do so, when the second half of the statement is so crystal clear...I CAN DO ANYTHING. I will succeed. If I place my trust in the fact that this person believes in me, I can do anything. Sounds awfully like letting go of the steering wheel to me...those wise old pokemon. Oh, and from Scooby-Doo, I learned that smart girls are geeks.