Playing Outside
BY LISA STEMMONS
Yes, I am nostalgic of the idea of coming home from school and rushing outside to start a pick-up game with the neighbors. I grew up in a predominately male neighborhood and as the boys grew older, they slowly began choosing Xbox over the great outdoors. I missed playing outside then, so it’s no surprise that I crave it even more as a college student.
In today’s world, the lack of children playing outside is alarming. My most cherished memories of my childhood and pre-teen years involved an outdoor setting. Even on rainy days, we would retreat to someone’s garage where we would make up a smaller-scale game.
It wasn’t until junior high that I even saw the inside of most of my neighbors’ houses, because being stuck inside was boring and we avoided it at all costs. Needless to say, Chicago winters were not welcomed with open arms and were the equivalent of the plague.
Our neighborhood clan would go through phases, spending weeks at a time only playing kickball or hockey, only to decide one random day that it was time to move on to the next sport. There were also non-traditional sports that became regularly occurring games. Running bases, wall ball, 500 (with a football or large Frisbee), ghost in the graveyard, capture the flag and red rover were my favorites, just to name a few.
My competitive nature stems from those very games that were frequently played in a backyard or our cul-de-sac. There was a never-ending list of options and non-stop opportunities for spur-of-the-moment fun.
I would choose backyard games over drinking games any day.
MySpace
BY JAYLYN COOK
Can you believe there was a time when people actually thought MySpace was cool?
Sure, it had “cool-ish” qualities, but for the most part, the site was an absolute mess of bad coding and teenage angst.
Everyone’s profiles were offensive to the eyes, as they either contained a poorly animated background or color/text combinations so ugly you could write an essay in Comic Sans and it would look like a work of art in comparison.
Why would you give teenagers who grew up during the peaks of Ed Hardy and Lisa Frank the ability to completely customize their own little chunk of the internet? That’s like playing Jenga with a hammer, because now everyone else has to deal with the mess that one person brought upon the party.
Speaking of that one person, whatever happened to Tom, everyone’s first friend on MySpace? Every social media account that he has still uses that same old picture of him in his white t-shirt as the avatar.
Maybe Tom was just a made-up figure the real “brains” behind MySpace created so the public had someone to scapegoat for all of the times their email accounts were phished because of the site.
I, for one, personally blame Tom for all of my embarrassing pictures, design choices and profile playlist selections that were left out for everyone and their grandmother, including my own, to see.
I know that all of those things are pretty much my own fault, but if Tom hadn’t brought that wretched “place for friends” to life, then maybe I wouldn’t shudder every time I hear the beginning to “Party Like a Rockstar” (my profile song for at least two years).
