THE definition of impossible is not making a constitution that will make everyone happy, no matter what you may think.
It is keeping a three-year-old child's head from jerking around long enough to transform its face into a tiger.
Or a bunny. Or an alien from outer space.
For reasons that escape me, small children like to have things painted on their faces and are willing to pay money for it at fundraisers and bazaars.
For perfectly good reasons which will never occur again if I have anything to do with it, I know this because I was doing the face-painting at a bazaar just last week.
I use the term 'face-painting' loosely. There was more paint on me, my clothes and the surrounding environment than ended up on most faces.
I tried. But it was unfair to partner me up with a professional artist and make me look bad. That was just the first mistake.
Second mistake was to bring about 30 wonderful colour pictures of stunning face designs of the cute, pretty, incredibly intricate kind.
Third mistake was to peg them up and let the littlies choose the face they wanted. It all went downhill from there.
Not only do they disregard the degree of difficulty of the design they are demanding, but they all decide they want the same thing. I blame the modern movie culture — if I had one aspiring Spiderman, I had a hundred.
"I want Spiderman" lisped the first infant, followed by a chorus of "me too" down the line.
I think it's possible to develop repetitive strain injury from drawing spider webs on little kids' faces. Finally I got a child who didn't like red or something. He picked Batman. O joy — Batman is done all in blue and looks really good when you get it right. My partner, the professional artist, got it right and I got it less right, which led to a lot of odious comparisons.
As painting a blue bat on somebody's face more than once is about as exciting and easy as painting a red and black spider's web 700 times, I don't think it was all my fault.
Apparently Batman and Spidey are not only picky, they are stubborn creatures and will not be persuaded to change their look and go more for the avatar, African warrior or even Dracula style.
I was good at Dracula, I used to do that one for our daughters for school library character parades.
I was really good at witches but that was banned after the youngest daughter and her mates frightened the Class Ones into hysterics.
But if the boys were a teeny bit boring in their choices, the girls were enough to send a feminist down in flames.
They all wanted to be beautiful butterflies. Batwoman wasn't in it, Spiderperson wasn't to be considered, aliens, avatars and occult creatures were out. There is clearly a shortage of female role models of the hero type.
Xena Warrior Princess has nothing going for her in the way of a painted face, the Wicked Queen from Storybrooke has a cool face tattoo but apparently isn't popular, and Crouching Tigers, Hidden Dragons don't do animal appearances.
The girls weren't even interested in a rock star with tatts.
I tried to turn a couple of butterflies into killer wasps, but they weren't having it. Some chubby bees and a rather roguish puppy was as good as it got.
In about 15 years these little blossoms will be getting the vote. Going on current trends they'll be electing a sweet, delicate, fluttery little female for prime minister and then where will we be. Then again ……
* Seona Smiles is a regular contributor/columnist to The Fiji Times.