The space that's in between insane and insecure

I remember when I was six or seven, I watched children's network television a lot and at one specific time I passionately wanted a Ribbon Dancer, a product that basically consisted of a stick with a really long ribbon at the end and whose commercial was constantly on TV. Now that I think about it, any one of my family members could have probably made one from everyday supplies fairly easily. But I begged my dad to order me one, and I agonized over the 6 weeks of shipping before it came. When it finally arrived, I enjoyed it constantly for a good two weeks and then hardly ever broke it out again.

I really think threads of behavior in childhood can continue on once you get older. I do the exact same thing now, but not with toys. Now, I'll desperately pursue something, and not long after, or even just before I acquire it, I'll talk myself out of everything and withdraw. I guess that kind of thing could be explained on the consideration that I only go after things just to see if I can do it, and when I find out I can, I lose interest. But that doesn't explain the fact that sometimes after backing out, I want it back again.

It's childish, flighty, and doesn't make any sense.

This train of thought brought to you by a conversation I had with my dad during dinner, in which I pretty much started tying to think of how much I could remember from my dad's old townhouse. It's interesting, because I can remember doing things that made perfect, logical sense at the time, but in hindsight, make about as little sense as ramming your head against the wall.

For example, my sister and I had this game (and I use the word "game" loosely, as "game" connotes that it had some sort of point, which it didn't). In the downstairs of our house, there were three different types of flooring: hardwood, carpet, and tile. Now in our game, if you were on the tile, it was "snow" and was too cold to stand on. The wood was "lava" and was too hot to stand on, and the carpet was "quicksand," and could not be stood on for obvious reasons. The premise of the game was: you can't be on any one surface for any length of time (i.e. "run around a lot"). This entertained me for hours. We were bright children.

Those weird things you do as a small child are kind of like waking up and remembering a dream. The things you did in the dream are totally logical at the time ("Of course my best friend is a talking giraffe and we're on a quest for dictionaries"), but upon regaining consciousness, you wonder what you ate to cause such lunacy.

Other things I specifically remember about that house:

- Watching black and white reruns of I Love Lucy and Bewitched on the little TV in my and Cathi's (then Cathy's) room.

- Cutting myself on a Swiss army knife on Christmas when I used the dull edge to try to slice open a box and the sharp side closed on my finger.

- Happily entering one of those little pastel plastic houses that we had in the backyard during the summer, only to run out, screaming, when I found it infested with bees.