I enjoyed the content of the video we had to watch from what I remember. I never really thought about how much my mind has changed since I was young. It seems like at some point using my imagination to it's fullest potential and having fun that way transformed into the reckless abandon of high school and college life. I think I need to regain some of the childlike freedom of mind that I once had. Other than that, and I don't know if it was his voice or the way he carried himself, I kind of thought he was a total douche bag and I lost interest. Oh well. It was only a half an hour. Then it was play time.
Since my sister gets the whole summer off of work (she's a high school English teacher), I conned her into doing some of the things we used to do as children. I never really had cool G.I. Joe's and all that fun stuff, as I usually just went over to my cousin's house and blew them up with firecrackers. I did, however, have my sister's Barbie collection at my disposal (maybe I AM suppressing my childhood memories...). Amazingly, we still had the whole stupid (and dare I say hot) Barbie family in the storage room. We played with them for about a half an hour (about 25 minutes longer than I enjoyed), but most of the stories and lines I came up with were more mature than anything I could have possibly came up with when I was a young lad, so I decided to try something else. I also found Guess Who? in the storage room (no, not the amazing Canadian rock group from the seventies, about which I would have been infinitely more stoked on, but the annoying board game from back in the dizzay). We hadn't played it in a while, so I thought we might as well give it a shot. I must say it is a much easier game than I remember, and the people on the little flip-up tabs were rather hideous looking. I hadn't noticed this before. Anyway, that lasted about another half an hour (it didn't take me that long to figure out who the hell had blonde hair and glasses, we just played a few rounds of it). Then I decided I probably spent a large amount of my time outdoors frolicking in meadows and catching butterflys, so we went out to play catch. I remember playing catch with my dad way back when, and I haven't played catch in forever. Surprisingly, I still had the reflexes of a gazelle, so this was a fairly enjoyable venture. Then it started to rain after about 45 minutes of just playing catch and occasionally playing with the dog. My first instinct was to go inside because rain sucks, but rain did not, in fact, suck back then. So for the next half hour I chased the dog, the dog chased me, and the dog and I chased my sister in the cold rain and the mud. Needless to say, I haven't done that kind of thing in a long while, and it felt good to realize that I still have a little bit of the mind of a child in me, no matter how bad I try not to show it sometimes. Then for about 20 minutes, I hosed myself off and sat on the back deck thinking about what I had just done.
There were several times during this experiment that I felt stupid for acting like a kid again, but at the same time, it was kind of liberating. In these days of advanced technology, it seems like imagination goes out the window. At the same time though, the same technology allows people to make movies and video games involving things I would have imagined as a child. It just isn't the same. The things I used to imagine seemed so real at the time (unless I shot my cousin in a blazing war of cowboys and Indians and he claimed that I missed him...asshole), and seeing the same kinds of things in said games and movies just doesn't hold a candle to it. And as far as limiting my ideas to avoid embarassment...
It doesn't happen very often.
And as far as Guess Who? goes...
Yes, in fact, he does. They ALL do.
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