Toys
Grownups Like Toys Too by Christian Farmer
[Oct 05, 2006] Last week I sat in my apartment - playing a video game - Kingdom Hearts 2. It's a video game that mixes Final Fantasy with Disney characters. I can hear you laughing, "Disney with Final Fantasy? What's next - Looney Tunes and Star Wars?" No - really - it's an excellent game. So there I was playing it, when in walks a girl, "WHAT are you doing? Playing a video game? But you're 28 years old! Grow up! Be serious! Get a life! Go get a real job!" And she left, leaving me in peace with the relaxing glow of my PS2.
People often expect you to grow up and act serious once you start getting old. The truth though is that grownups like toys too. If you took the most grumpy old man, like say a 75 year old English professor, and left him alone for 3 hours in a room full of Slinkies, Legos, a Sand Pit, Virgil's Aeneid, and the complete works of William Shakespeare, you'd find him in the sand pit surrounded by 15 foot tall Lego towers and 20 foot tall sand pyramids with Slinkies racing down the sides. And yes, the professor would have used the books, but only because he wanted to make his Lego buildings an extra 6 inches taller.
Work is what grownups must do! Work work work! All day long, with nary a fun thought in mind! The grownups trudged back and forth, writing documents, stapling them, rewriting documents, and stapling those too. And then grownups discovered that it's not work itself that's important - it's the appearance of work. As long as they can say they're working - it doesn't really matter if what they're actually doing is playing.