Saturday, August 25, 2007
13 Things I Miss from my Childhood
I'm sure you know those fond memories you have of certain aspects of when you were younger, things you can never really recapture, even if you revisit the places and things that caused them. Here are 13 of mine.
1. GI Joe toys. I still buy a new one every now and again (mainly Snake Eyes and Storm Shadow, for you aficionados), but mainly what I want to be able to do is make them fight or, occasionally, play football.
2. Touch football. I was probably better at baseball, but football has stayed my favorite sport, and I really miss going out and playing with four or five other people. I've mentioned this on here before. Note that I don't miss tackle football, which one year resulted in me having bruises the length of both arms.
3. Computer game all-nighters. So many games: Civilization, Warlords, Jagged Alliance, etc. Games with multiplayer hotseat were the best. Funny that one would get in more trouble for this as an adult than as a kid.
4. Roleplaying games. Man I was a dork, in case I haven't communicated that to you already. AD&D, GURPS, Shadowrun, etc. We were rarely sophisticated about it, but it was potentially great fun and another thing great for all-nighters.
5. Fantasy stories, good and mediocre. The Lord of the Rings is still surely one of the three or so most important formative books for me, but there were so many bad imitators I ate up: Robert Jordan, David Eddings, etc. And good books too: The Jungle Book, the Tripods trilogy (more children's SF), Madeleine L'Engle, Narnia, and more.
6. Dinosaurs. I was going to put pirates here, but then I realized that liking pirates is one of the few childlike things I still pull off pretty well (I have skull-and-crossbones t-shirts, a skull tattoo, a book on pirates, Treasure Island, the Pirates of the Caribbean movies, and numerous mentions of pirates in my poems, plus I was playing Sid Meier's Pirates last night), so instead I'll mention my dinosaur obsession. My favorite was Deinonychus--think Velociraptor but bigger.
7. Uncontrollable giggling fits. Okay, I still manage these once in a while, but they were a lot more common back then. Most of the other things on this list could cause them.
8. Quiz bowl. My quiz bowl days run into my college undergraduate as well as high school and junior high, so this is about as recent as it gets for this list. Now, I still know lots of trivia, but I'm not really proud of it, exactly. I am proud of it inexactly.
9. Drawing maps of made-up worlds. This is still pretty cool, but I hope if I did it now, the maps would be both more plausible and more creative. I think a poetry project in this vein would be interesting too.
10. Baseball statistics. Here's one that I'm actually still quite close to, but neither baseball cards nor baseball simulations hold quite the same magic. I still want to create the all-time teams for every franchise though.
11. Standardized tests. Yes, they're tedious and often pretty lame. Nonetheless, I rock the house at standardized tests. ACT, SAT, whatever those other ones were... Two years ago, the GRE turned out to be much the same way.
12. Inventing stupid games. There was one game we played where we wrote prizes on slips of paper and took turns drawing them randomly. Some of them were great prizes like cars, and some were terrible prizes like "used Kleenex." I don't know if the "game" really had rules per se.
13. Fishing. I wasn't even that good at it, but I did like it. I even got to fish in Alaska twice with my dad. Now I haven't been fishing in over a year, and when I am outdoors, I'd rather find other activities or even just admire the scenery.
1. GI Joe toys. I still buy a new one every now and again (mainly Snake Eyes and Storm Shadow, for you aficionados), but mainly what I want to be able to do is make them fight or, occasionally, play football.
2. Touch football. I was probably better at baseball, but football has stayed my favorite sport, and I really miss going out and playing with four or five other people. I've mentioned this on here before. Note that I don't miss tackle football, which one year resulted in me having bruises the length of both arms.
3. Computer game all-nighters. So many games: Civilization, Warlords, Jagged Alliance, etc. Games with multiplayer hotseat were the best. Funny that one would get in more trouble for this as an adult than as a kid.
4. Roleplaying games. Man I was a dork, in case I haven't communicated that to you already. AD&D, GURPS, Shadowrun, etc. We were rarely sophisticated about it, but it was potentially great fun and another thing great for all-nighters.
5. Fantasy stories, good and mediocre. The Lord of the Rings is still surely one of the three or so most important formative books for me, but there were so many bad imitators I ate up: Robert Jordan, David Eddings, etc. And good books too: The Jungle Book, the Tripods trilogy (more children's SF), Madeleine L'Engle, Narnia, and more.
6. Dinosaurs. I was going to put pirates here, but then I realized that liking pirates is one of the few childlike things I still pull off pretty well (I have skull-and-crossbones t-shirts, a skull tattoo, a book on pirates, Treasure Island, the Pirates of the Caribbean movies, and numerous mentions of pirates in my poems, plus I was playing Sid Meier's Pirates last night), so instead I'll mention my dinosaur obsession. My favorite was Deinonychus--think Velociraptor but bigger.
7. Uncontrollable giggling fits. Okay, I still manage these once in a while, but they were a lot more common back then. Most of the other things on this list could cause them.
8. Quiz bowl. My quiz bowl days run into my college undergraduate as well as high school and junior high, so this is about as recent as it gets for this list. Now, I still know lots of trivia, but I'm not really proud of it, exactly. I am proud of it inexactly.
9. Drawing maps of made-up worlds. This is still pretty cool, but I hope if I did it now, the maps would be both more plausible and more creative. I think a poetry project in this vein would be interesting too.
10. Baseball statistics. Here's one that I'm actually still quite close to, but neither baseball cards nor baseball simulations hold quite the same magic. I still want to create the all-time teams for every franchise though.
11. Standardized tests. Yes, they're tedious and often pretty lame. Nonetheless, I rock the house at standardized tests. ACT, SAT, whatever those other ones were... Two years ago, the GRE turned out to be much the same way.
12. Inventing stupid games. There was one game we played where we wrote prizes on slips of paper and took turns drawing them randomly. Some of them were great prizes like cars, and some were terrible prizes like "used Kleenex." I don't know if the "game" really had rules per se.
13. Fishing. I wasn't even that good at it, but I did like it. I even got to fish in Alaska twice with my dad. Now I haven't been fishing in over a year, and when I am outdoors, I'd rather find other activities or even just admire the scenery.
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My God, Steve.
Were ever in/around/near North Florida during the late 1980s?
I'm pretty sure that we must have hung out, so close is your list to mine. I can't even make one. You've stolen all my answers.
Didn't you find Shadowrun needlessly complex?
Me, I was an AD&D 2nd edition dude. That & DC Heroes.
Okay... occasionally Chaosism's Cthulhu games.
Were ever in/around/near North Florida during the late 1980s?
I'm pretty sure that we must have hung out, so close is your list to mine. I can't even make one. You've stolen all my answers.
Didn't you find Shadowrun needlessly complex?
Me, I was an AD&D 2nd edition dude. That & DC Heroes.
Okay... occasionally Chaosism's Cthulhu games.
I find a lot of similarities on my list too. Dinosaurs, touch football, fantasy stories, baseball statistics, drawing maps of made-up worlds... You didn't mention comic books, but them too.
I was a kid before computer games and roleplaying games, but my friends and I played lots of strategy-type board games (chess, Stratego, etc.)
I wasn't into GI Joes, but grew up with lots of plastic toy soldiers. I made up all kinds of stories with them, that often had nothing to do with army stuff.
I was never much into fishing though. And although I didn't find standardized tests very difficult, I did find them borrrr-ing.
(A few years ago I paged through a couple of pages of a sample GRE test book, the test for English literature, and the first ten or twelve questions were all about Victorian novelists, none of whom I've read. GRE bad, baaaaaad.)
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I was a kid before computer games and roleplaying games, but my friends and I played lots of strategy-type board games (chess, Stratego, etc.)
I wasn't into GI Joes, but grew up with lots of plastic toy soldiers. I made up all kinds of stories with them, that often had nothing to do with army stuff.
I was never much into fishing though. And although I didn't find standardized tests very difficult, I did find them borrrr-ing.
(A few years ago I paged through a couple of pages of a sample GRE test book, the test for English literature, and the first ten or twelve questions were all about Victorian novelists, none of whom I've read. GRE bad, baaaaaad.)
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