[UA] UA Junior.

[Timothy Toner]

----- Original Message -----
From: "Greg Stolze" <holycrow at mindspring.com>
To: <ua at lists.uchicago.edu>
Sent: Tuesday, February 20, 2001 8:17 AM
Subject: [UA] UA Junior.


> I had that dream again last night.  The one where I'm back in high school
or
> junior high and am, of course, messed up in the head and miserable.  This
is
> not the first time, which leads me to wonder if (1) I left behind some
> unprocessed baggage there or (2) whether adolescense is simply scarring
> whatever way you slice it.

Oh, "that" dream.  You mean the one where your best friend tells you to
kneel, places a gun to the back of your head, tells you that it'll be over
soon, and then pulls the trigger--only it's not over.  Your skull hurts like
someone hit it with a hammer, but a pleasant warmth is flowing out of your
body in the region of the pain, and more than the warmth, the sense of _you_
fades steadily, until it's all but gone, and you hear the voice of your high
school crush say, "You moron...you missed his medulla oblongata!"  And then
nothing.

Oh, is that just me?  Sorry.  The worst part of the falling dream is,
indeed, when you hit bottom, and the dream doesn't end.

>
> Someone earlier this month mentioned "UA Jr." and the idea that late
> childhood and early adulthood are really perfect times to tell UA stories.
> This dream has knocked me into thinking that might be a very strong idea.
> But how to work it?  A separate game in which all the PCs have to be kids?
> That would take some AWFULLY strong RP skills.  Or just a specialized
> scenario book?  Or is the whole idea just misguided?

I think we all have demons to exorcise from high school, and even before
high school.  We roleplay to learn, and we watch others roleplay to learn
how to interact (what are Mom and Dad doing, except playing the roles of Mom
and Dad in your own personal story?)  Any betrayal makes you question those
fundamental values.  Most child psychologists say the WORST time to get a
divorce is often the time when most people conscientiously choose to part
ways--when the kid goes off to college.  The problem there is that the kid
has just watched you as the primary Lab Rats in his relationship laboratory,
and just when it's time for him to start his own mature relationships, the
two primary rats announce they're really a labrador retriever and a vole.
Beyond divorce, there's a thousand petty tyrannies we unwittingly inflict on
kids in the interest of doing it "for the kids."  I think the truth is that
there are two types of children:  your children, and Other People's
Children, and fuck other people's children.  The kids know a lot, but they
don't know what it all means.  It's why little kids will pester you with
"Why?  Why?  Why?" all the time--most of the time, they don't know what
_why_ means!  Think about it.  All the other questions have fairly
straightforward properties.  Who refers to a person or something we
personify, what is a thing that is not a person, where is a location, when
is a time (which comes later than the rest, due to time binding), and how is
an understanding of causality.  But why--what does it mean?  Why has the
property of being infinitely recursive, ended only by the dread word,
"Because."  The real question is, did you ever really figure out what why
meant, or did you settle for a reasonable "because"?



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