At that same age, my only friend was this psycho chick from California who would ask me to go to movies with her, but really we were meeting up with her 18-year-old "boyfriend" in the military. We were 11 at the time.
There were a lot of "wild girls" in my elementary school, and by "wild girls" I of course mean "victims of pedophiles." When I was 16, a friend and I ran into a girl we'd known until 5th grade, when she disappeared from school. She was happy to see me, and asked what I was up to. I told her about my laboratory job, choir, theater, etc. Then she introduced me to her five-year-old son. Because in Kansas, when you have a baby in 5th grade, you've got to be prepared to raise that baby.
OMG! I'm sure I would run far far away and hide rather than play such a game to this very day.
I always wanted to play those games, but came to the conclusion they didn't exist.
Sorry -- 1 is a downer story about pedophilia! What I meant to say is, I didn't get around to playing spin-the-bottle-type games until I was in college. I totally missed out on early pubescence.
3,4: I guess I missed out on early pubescence too, but in the Cryptic Ned way, not the AWB way.
Never encountered games like that in the wild myself, but never particularly wanted to. I was the poster child for the Freudian latency period, though -- I don't recall having any sexual interest at all until about fourteen. Oh, I was interested in romantic/sexy bits in stuff I was reading, but not in a terribly personal way.
I still get kind of thrown by people talking about making out when they were eleven or twelve -- not that it seems terribly uncommon, but it seems completely alien to what I remember of being that age.
I think the critical component for something like this is that you're being supervised by someone who's young themselves. Camp counselor, older sibling, etc. No supervision and the games don't materialize, or they're more explicitly sexual, like spin-the-bottle, (which I never played.) Older supervision and the games aren't so ludicrous.
I always wanted to play those games
There are risks, Ned.
I was the poster child for the Freudian latency period, though -- I don't recall having any sexual interest at all until about fourteen. Oh, I was interested in romantic/sexy bits in stuff I was reading, but not in a terribly personal way.
Pretty much ditto. I wasn't even sure I liked girls, in that sort of way, until 13 or 14. And then it was like a lightbulb being turned on. I actually ended up being earlier than most of my friends to get into dating and relationships with girls, but the rest of them had been faking it for ages whereas I hadn't.
I do remember games of that type, but older, aged 16 or 17, when there was alcohol involved, and much more of an edge, since the people involved were largely already having sex.
I don't even have a latency period.
Seriously. It was a bummer.
I thought a boy in my third-grade class was very handsome. In fifth grade I had my first all out crush. In middle school I had tons of crushes, getting progressively more excruciating, and peaking in sheer emotional torment in 9th-10th grade.
Yes, 11! I was tortured by love at that age. It was sad to me that, by the time I finally lost my virginity, I was too emotionally exhausted to love that way anymore.
I was too emotionally exhausted to love that way anymore.
Or just grew out of it? Don't we all just sort of get used to things that used to be super intense?
I remember my first "boy-girl" party was in 4th grade. Truth or Dare, Seven minutes in heaven, etc. Pretty chaste smoochie face stuff, except that the girls convinced me to take my shirt off. "It's ok, we've seen you at the pool" says the Alpha. The girls were much"faster" than the boys at that time.
We played this game. At church camp in particular, which made the sitting on laps and such (in order to make the other person crack first, you see) rather .... well, what they say about church camp is probably true. I can't testify to it myself but it seemed that way for everyone else. (Probably because I wasn't actually a congregant.) However, I think ours was actually something along the lines of "I want to marry you baby, but I just can't smile."
13: I couldn't handle it. I had super-strong feelings, and even tried to act on them, and got rejected a lot. I think it made me realize that just because you love someone--even if you think you love them a lot--doesn't mean they ever even think of you. It wasn't worth it. Maybe I "grew out of it," but now I'm sort of pathologically cold in my relationships. I'm not mean--just 100% lacking in a sense of romance. I knew what it was when I was 12!
except that the girls convinced me to take my shirt off
It was mere happenstance that your chest was oiled-up.
I think these games were kind of designed to weed out the kids who take themselves too seriously from the ones who are cool, man. Somehow I wasn't exposed to them much, which was good, because (surprise!) I was in category A. We played a few of them the few times I went to temple youth group stuff, and we did have this game "psychiatrist" that we played at the dorkwad parties I went to. I don't know if that one was something we made up or not.
10: For god's sake, Alvy, even Freud speaks of a latency period.
I nwver knew this was a boy-girl game (and that has nothing to do with being a tiny protolesbian at 11) but simply an acting game, though that probably says more about the few people who were friendly to me in junior high than anything else. It was the sort of game we'd play on the bus on the way to science camp, y'know.
(Oh but wait, I'm thinking of teen years, not tween years.)
Oh Knecht. We know how you pine for the thin girls with the see-through shirts and no bra.
18: We played a few of them the few times I went to temple youth group stuff, and we did have this game "psychiatrist" that
Today's stereotype is brought to you by Mister Smearcase.
"Psychiatrist" rings a bell. What was the deal with that one, Smearcase?
I went to temple youth group stuff
Every once in awhile the effects of growing up around a Mormon population rather than a Jewish population becomes clear to me; I just had a moment of going, Mister Smearcase is Mormon! I didn't know that! And then realizing that's not what that meant at all.
Please substitute "thinking" for "going" in the above sentence. My inner Valley Girl is trying to emerge.
Ha, no "psychiatrist" was not about enculturating young Jews to the couch and the 50-minute hour. It was played among an ecumenical set of geeks.
You'd sit in a circle around one person who had never played. The people who were in the circle knew the two rules to the game, and the person in the middle had to ask questions to people in the circle and try to guess the rules. The questions usually devolved into that other dreary teen ritual of self-representation, the purity test.
9: I am ttaM. Well, to the extent that that was my experience as well.
It occurred to me last night as well in the prom, and dances in general, thread, that nothing like slow-dancing or 'dating' at age 11 or 12 was in the cards personally, as I'd just relocated to a new town then: I was the New Kid in a town full of kids who'd known each other and/or each other's families since kindergarten. There was no way anybody was going to dance with me, and having coming from a background (military) in which moving around and making new friends regularly was normal, it took quite a while for me to stop freaking out over these weirdly clannish and suspicious people.
So no spin-the-bottle or If You Love Me Baby games. Either that or I was slow to develop in that regard.
25: Until last year, I'm not sure I knew a single Mormon. And then in the last year I have fixed that right up.
I do hope 29 doesn't sound bitter or angry in some way: not at all. I don't want to derail the thread with that tone. I just keep having this reaction in threads like this about what people were doing with their peers at ages 11-13 or so like: wow, really? It sounds like a movie!
20: Me too, exactly. And not just the little girls in my daycare. I remember getting funny feelings down there from Daphne on Scooby Doo. Also during Batman and robin when the giant clam was eating Robin, but, well.
32 gets it exactly right.
I think the critical component for something like this is that you're being supervised by someone who's young themselves. Camp counselor, older sibling, etc. No supervision and the games don't materialize, or they're more explicitly sexual, like spin-the-bottle, (which I never played.) Older supervision and the games aren't so ludicrous.
Oh, I meant games like this one OR spin the bottle or seven minutes in heven. Seem to be in the same category.
I did play spin the bottle at a party at college. I was surprised that some people had actually done it as kids since it seemed like "let's do this thing that only happens in movies, but for real" to me, like the slow clap.
29: Oddly enough, that's also right around the period during which I was yanked out of the familiar environment of friendly multicultural diplomat/aid worker kids and UMC Tswana and dropped into an insular little place full of people who'd known each other since forever. The closest I got to anything along those lines was being pinned against a wall by a girl bigger and stronger than me and forced to choose whether I would take her or her friend to the dance. She wouldn't accept "I'm not going" so I picked her friend and then just avoided the both of them until after the dance.
The upside is that when we returned to Botswana everyone had already gone through the worst of the awkward phase (including myself, somehow), so I dropped back into a familiar situation in the position of being the slightly exotic and new guy who managed to fit right in without a hiccup. That was awesome, except I was still to shy to make much of it. That and I hadn't yet figured out that just because someone is serious about their religion and it forbids extramarital sexual activity doesn't mean they won't fuck your brains out. I still have difficulty with that, actually. Not just realizing it, but also once realized it leaves me feeling like I can't trust the person. If they'll cheat on God how the hell can I trust they won't lie to mere me?
Spin the bottle in college seems a little, er, retro or something. By college age, people were just going straight for their crushes, without any note-passing or spinning of the bottle. Again I'm thinking that there's a, um, group-think here -- maybe some kind of processing of the crush(es) through the group's mill first? -- that I wasn't privvy to, or just bypassed. To this day I become somewhat incensed if people try to crowd in and adjudicate my affairs relationships people.
We were big on playing "I Never" during my first year in college. We were kind of immature and conventional but what the hell, it was fun.
Lynda Carter playing "Wonder Woman". Angie Dickinson as "Police Woman".
Eartha Kitt as Catwoman. Diana Rigg as Emma Peel.
35: I still have difficulty with that, actually. Not just realizing it, but also once realized it leaves me feeling like I can't trust the person. If they'll cheat on God how the hell can I trust they won't lie to mere me?
I'd have trouble with that as well. I tend to avoid people who profess to take their no-extramarital-sex religion seriously in the first place. Either they're going to take that seriously, in which case they're not for me, or they're going to cheat, and what the fuck is up with that? That sort of false consciousness (to grace it with the most courteous name I can come up with) is not for me.
Eartha Kitt as Catwoman
Julie Newmar was my catnip of choice.
how the hell can I trust they won't lie to mere me?
Everybody lies. That's what you can trust.
Well: Ginger or Mary Anne?
Did a quick but fearless inventory for childhood tv crushes. There was an outlying, theoretically-latency-age thing about Lt. Uhura, and then I dimly recall I maaaay have wanted Charles in charge of my days and my nights, albeit in some fairly formless way.
44: Sorry. Maybe you could just choose to believe I'm lying in 42?
Julie Newmar was my catnip of choice.
Racist.
The less said about my childhood crushes, the better.
47: My hippie self finds that agreeable.
David Lascher is one of these guys who played a fourteen year old for about 20 years. At one point I was watching Hey, Dude (ie, the most painful, terrible show ever) at a friend's house and I decided he was so, so fine. Then he showed up in Blossom, 90210, Sabrina, and a ton of other stuff, perpetually playing a 15 year old.
Really, I think he played a 15 year old from 1989-2002. That's an amazing range.
Mormons play the game described in the OP through college and sometimes beyond, I'm told.
I love you heebie, but I just can't make eye babies.
"just can't" should probably be "can't just"
I'll see 42 and raise--
Everybody lies, but not everyone knows they are lying.
I've never heard of this game, but nothing in this post strikes me as especially weird other than the description of this as "one of the most intense adrenaline moments I've ever experienced."
Really?? I'll completely buy that "you can't top tweenage years for emotional intensity", but I'd have surely thought that plenty else in your tweenage years would have topped this.
(Or maybe you forget to mention that all of you were naked at the time?)
I played a version of Heebie's game in my early twenties as a drinking game (in the sense of a game to be played while drinking, rather than a game with penalty drinks) called "Nice Kitty." The person who was It pretended to be a cat, crawled towards their chosen target, and meowed, rubbed themselves against the person's legs, tried to crawl up into their lap and such like. The goal was to get the target to crack up before they could successfully stroke your head and say "Nice kitty" three times. Despite the beer and the face rubbing, it was a much more innocent game.
I could never have played "I Love You Baby" as a tween. I would have fled the scene in premptive mortification.
||
This from E.D. Kain at Balloon Juice is an exceptionally good piece on health care reform as the changes roll out.
Per the WSJ, McDonald's is seeking an exemption from the portion of the new insurance regulations that requires that 80-85% of premium revenues be spent on actual medical costs. Kain walks through a comparison of the McDonald's plans with a typical new plan under HCR, and finds the former egregiously wanting.
Worth a full read, and dissemination. McDonald's is attempting to strong-arm here; I expect we'll see a lot more of this kind of thing.
|>
Lynda Carter playing being "Wonder Woman".
Fixed.
Further to 62: Comment 39 (by Martin) in the linked thread is very informative, if you're interested in getting into the weeds of how all this is rolling out across the states with various kinds of health insurance plans. What I've heard on local radio here with our state insurance head honchos is of a piece: there's a great deal of regrouping going on, and the shitty, exploitative, or at least troublesome, plans are tending to be exposed.
Really?? I'll completely buy that "you can't top tweenage years for emotional intensity", but I'd have surely thought that plenty else in your tweenage years would have topped this.
I'd say it was more intense than my first kiss, which was itself rather dramatically intense. But it wasn't on display for fifteen peers. And it wasn't embarrassing. For some reason, the idea of everyone watching me select a boy was the heart of the matter. I had to pick someone and they'd infer that I liked them, or they wouldn't, or who knows, but if the game selected contestants by algorithm, it wouldn't have had such a wildly intense effect on me.
We played this at Girl Scout camp as 8 or 9 year-olds, but without any sexual overtones. It was called "Honey if you love me will you please just smile?" and mostly involved pretending to fart.
I definitely ran with a fast crowd, though, and most of us were getting nekkid or thereabouts by the time we were 13 (though it was mostly with the opposite sex).
I'll read the thread once I get to the train, but Becks-style I shall respond to the initial post first. In those tween years, I was so, so painfully awkward. I had no real crushes, having just changed schools. I was so, so unattractive. My self image as awkward and ugly was cemeted at that age (but smart!). Had drinks with a colleague tonight who reminded me of immediate post-divorce Di and how astonished I was at the suggestion that I was beautiful. And I thought, this was beacause I still saw myself as that late-blooming lass with a boyish body, an unfortunate haircut, and I. Disastrous do-it-yourself bleached mane. Middle school wasn't exactly traumatic, but oh did it not do good things for my self image.
pretending to fart
Related, sort of, I learned today that, for no additional charge, my phone can talk to a satellite in the sky and, mere seconds later, have on it a big picture of a button, which button when pushed offers forth the sound of a human fart. This application is called Big Fart Button, and I'm pretty sure it represents a cultural high-water mark of some sort.
The "on display intensity" part really resonates for me. I faked being sick on the last day of school in first grade, because we were supposed to do a dance for the parents or something. In some way, I don't really remember how, it had been decided in advance who would be next to whom (the dance was basically just all of us holding hands in a circle and perhaps performing one additional movement). I knew I was going to be holding hands with the girl I had a crush on, and was positive that everyone in the school would see on my face exactly what I felt for her. So the morning of that day, I convinced my parents to let me stay at home.
I have never played any of these sort of tween/teen games, and now that I'm in my thirties, it seems unlikely that I ever will. Stupid boring nerdy childhood! Even temple youth group was pretty tame.
Eartha Kitt as Catwoman. Diana Rigg as Emma Peel.
Wilma Flintstone?
http://technorati.com/videos/youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DzKy8CzX4TEU
Oddly, my daughters mentioned this game yesterday. I asked them where they'd played it (at a girls only youth group they go to) and said I'd only just heard of it here, and that heebie had found it excruciating. They said it was okay at Girls Brigade because it's all girls, but then the 13 year old agreed that it was much more awkward and embarrassing when she played it at her (mixed) drama group.
Somewhat related:
I play a similar game with my kids: can I make you smile in under 10 seconds. I try to make my son smile in under 10 seconds, no matter what is upseting him. Ive never lost.
That darn autistic daughter of mine beats me about half the time.
Nothing is off limits. Howling like a crazy wolf and mock biting her is my most successful method with my daughter.
and that heebie had found it excruciating.
I'd say it was excruciating but also exhilirating. Just very, very intense.