So... hmm, let's try something. What has everyone been listening to lately? I find that with the coming of spring, my tastes change quite a bit. I've put away the Radiohead and Modest Mouse and am breaking out the Built to Spill, Pixies, and Beatles. At night, I've also taken to listening to the all-classical university station here, mixed with the birds and crickets and rustling leaves outside my window. It's nice.

i'm going to live everywhere and do everything and be famous and be better at everything than everyone else is.

at least, that's what the soda commercials tell me.

So, many of us are pissed about never really doing anything(or at least anything we really want to be doing), right? (Ok, so maybe not Rabi, but she gets to just jet on over to Chile on a whim and whatnot when she gets bored.) So... what the heck should we be doing? What do ya'll want to really do with your lives, before your time is up? Or, perhaps more importantly, what can we do, right now? Let's figure that much out and then fuckin' get to it.

I've been putting off my ode to toys for a few weeks now, being as I am so very lazy and all. But now, what with the papers due and the stories due and the essays due, I'd say the time has come for me to stop ignoring gangbang and start ignoring school. (As if this is really the "start" of ignoring school.)

So let me tell you about Rob and toys. I had a pretty great childhood, gifting me with an active imagination, a pleasant outlook on life, and an inner happiness that makes ignoring responsibilities so very easy. I had a best friend from age one next door, two older siblings old enough to spoil me rotten, and grandparents overseas who could only send their love in cash denominations. For me, being a kid kicked ass, much like a silent ninja.

So, yeah, I was a happy kid, but the happiest moments of my childhood were when I was creating Lego worlds, imagining Smurf Village, or leading the G. I. Joe team up and down the Stairs Mountains. These imagined adventures became more than just battles before Robotech came on or excuses to destroy Lego models... they slowly stretched out into epic tales of man's inhumanity to man (or smurf's insmurfousity to smurf). For instance, my Lego people colonized Mars after Earth was invaded, established a government that could bring together the Castle Legos and the Space Legos, and eventually banished the Sectaurs from Earth. The entire ordeal took place over three years of playtime. Those were good times for me, but bad times for the brave crew of the S.S. Police.

I spent weeks creating battles and wars and bar fights for the G.I.Joes, as well. Once I got tired of Zartan infiltrating the Joe's headquarters again and again, I would give each Joe figure a new identity and would create adventures for my own characters. It was with those G.I.Joe figures, with their pivoting arms and kung-fu action grip, thatI first decided that I wanted to be a writer. In fact, now as a 24 year old slacker with no discernible career path ahead, the only career requirement I have for myself is that someday I'll be paid to use the imagination I enjoyed as a kid. Writing will be nice, but I think I'll be happy coming up with commercial jingles, too.

While Lego and G.I.Joe pleased my creative side, the Smurfs pleased my sentimental side. As a kid, I was fascinated with the whole concept of the little blue guys. I collected as many figurines as I could, and watched the cartoon pretty religiously. I was a smurf for Halloween, my mom made me smurf pajamas, I gave my kindergarten girlfriend my only smurfette figure, and my friends and I would have all sorts of adventures with the smurfs, the sandbox, and big buckets of water. For years, I collected the figurines, until I finally put them away in elementary school, only to dig them back out in high school. Now there's something so magical about them for me... I've started collecting a few smurf items, and have a pretty sizable collection, as Alison and Ryan can attest to. (Attest.) But it's not a hobby or a sick obsession. They just remind me of something so magical and special from my childhood, and I want to share them with future generations... It's a silly dream, but I really want smurfs to be around to captivate future kids.

So, yeah, I'm a freak, but I'm a happy guy. I know who I am and what I want to do (sorta) and it's all because my toys kicked ass. So we know how G.I.Joe and Smurfs and Transformers and He-Man and Star Wars affected our lives, what about today's toys? Do you think kids will be remembering Pokemon so fondly ten years from now?