I still feel the need to 'play'

I've been reading about children's fantasy play lately. It fascinates me. I have a book in my online google library called 'The House of Make Believe.' And today I was reading a news story about children's play.

It says there's a movement to restore children's play culture. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/06/garden/06play.html?src=me&ref=general Now that I think about it, children's play really is a 'culture.' There is children's culture, separate from adults' culture. Children have their own little songs and rituals, like that thing where you clap your hands together with someone else in a special pattern while singing a little song - I remember 'Say Say my playmate, come out and play with me, and bring your dollies three...' And 'Ring Around The Rosy,' that kind of thing.

So now I'm looking at these websites mentioned in the article:

http://usplaycoalition.clemson.edu/

http://kaboom.org/

I looked at the 'ultimate block party' website too, but I had to use special browser tricks to make it show up because the page was huge and it was all this big sky with clouds and I couldn't see what was written on it. I did eventually find some words and links but I gave up on that particular page.

Anyway the point is that I still feel a need to do imaginary play, but not sexual role-playing. Sexual role playing could be involved in it, but it's not the main reason for doing it. I'm thinking of the bonobo apes, and how sexual play is involved in everything they do, and I would want to model human society after them somewhat if possible. But I mostly mean adventure play, and story writing play.

Part of the reason I stopped playing was because my neighbor moved away when I went into sixth grade. Then I had a friend who was intelligent, but she didn't do the kind of play that I was thinking of. We still could get ourselves 'scared,' which was always fun, talking about scary subjects, and she was a great story reader - she loved reading my fantasy stories. But she didn't feel comfortable doing role play type pretending with me - it just didn't seem like the kind of thing she and I would do together. And she didn't play with toys at all. I remember in seventh grade, I guess I was about 13 or 12?, when I was sitting there with my dinosaur toys and feeling like I didn't want to play anymore, and feeling sad about it. I wanted to, but it didn't feel right somehow. And I had been having trouble thinking of ideas of what to play about. It seems like there could have been more support somehow. If the culture encouraged 13-year-old kids to keep doing imaginary play, if they gave suggestions, if other kids were still doing it, if I had a partner, I might have known what to do.

The article I was reading said that children's play wasn't happening because kids were using computers and video games and that kind of thing, instead of going outside. I can understand how it would be hard to play outdoors with other kids in the city. I always thought it would be boring to grow up in the city, always trapped indoors and never safe going outside alone. Where I lived, we could wander in the woods for miles and no one would worry about us. They might worry a little bit.

Sometimes it was hard for me to play with people who got into the pretending 'too much.' Some kids were much, much more imaginative than I was, and they were able to play much better than I could, and I felt that I was dull and boring next to them, and that I couldn't think of any ideas, and I couldn't get into it, I couldn't get involved as much. So that was sometimes a problem. There was a competitive feeling of not being good enough. But usually, it was the opposite - other kids didn't want to play at all.

I'd like to see a revival of kids' culture. Kids should have their own secret culture apart from the adults' world. It doesn't have to be 'secret,' but it can be. That gives kids a feeling of power when they feel powerless. They know something we don't know. Adults have all the power, but kids have their own world to live in.

I think that the brain and facial deformities might be involved in this - that maybe children's brains aren't developing the way they should. Weston Price wrote about the deformities - and every time I mention Weston Price, I have to give the disclaimer that it isn't safe to just eat some of the foods that they talk about, because I tried it - bone marrow, for instance - and some of these foods can cause severe food poisoning, not because they're undercooked or because they contain bacteria or parasites, but because animal organs contain hormones and chemicals that trigger vomiting, and it only takes a tiny bit to do it. Eating bone marrow did that to me, long story. But anyway, even so, Weston Price wrote about the deformities of skulls and faces and bodies and brains. So that might explain why many children just don't WANT to play or aren't able to think that way at all.

The other things that might explain it are food chemicals - the Feingold Diet - or electromagnetic pollution (if you aren't being targeted and attacked, you still get noise and interference from being constantly immersed in radio waves from cell phones, etc). There could be many other reasons too.

I'd like to go back in my memory and look at what I wanted and couldn't get. I remember wanting to do some things, but not having any help and no suggestions for what to do about it.