THEN
The toys I loved,
I guess like many other boys I loved playing with my toy cars. My favorite used to be a huge tonka. But I also played with many smaller cars. Apparantly I could do this for hours and hours. I can't remember what kind of stories I was imagining or in what kind of scenarios my cars played a rol. I recently saw my nephew playing with cars the way I (supposedly) did. It made me wonder what the particular attraction is hidden in those little objects.
And with what where little boys playing before the invention of the car?
The other favorite was, of course, LEGO. I wasn't a big fan of 'Technic' Lego my classmates used to like but I was into the little bricks. Building villages, imagining cities. When a village was done (= when all the bricks were used) I lost my interest and handed it over to my younger brother who was happy to play with it.
The toys I hated,
I never liked jig saw puzzles. And never understood the joy of "solving" one. How exciting can it be to solve a problem if you already know the outcome? Even worse: the outcome is presented on the cover. You don't even have to open it to know what's gonna end up after hours of putting piece to piece together. For me jig saw puzzles are the ultimae symbol for extreme boredom
NOW
Do I still own toys?
Well I own a Wii... but it doesn't really feel like a toy. I guess a toy, for me at least, has to possess some tangible qualities as well. A toy is also something you love to hold (like a kid sleeps with his favorite toy). Probably in that way my phone might be the closest thing to a "toy" I own right now.
Ofcourse it has a lot of functionalities that I use, but I often find myself playing with my phone. playing with the camera (making close up of my lunch so that it looks like some alien landscape), playing with the GPS function it has (just the fun of seeing on your phone where you are right now, even if you are in your livingroom) or just having it in my hand.
