It's inevitable. I will try to write blog posts about various topics, but the heart wants what the heart wants, and there were just too many gems from my childhood to not take another walk down memory lane. Like playdoh oozing out of Mr. Playdoh's head, These various items helped shape and mold our childhoods.

Pound Puppies

We all had beanie babies. But the precursor to those $5 nightmare "collectables" was a pregnant basset hound. This gift came with an added bonus of "How many mutt babies is your dog going to have!?" None of the puppies in the litter ever looked alike, which was a casual way of showing that mamma was a bit liberal with her morals. Also I vividly remember that if you got a premature puppy or 5 puppies you'd virtually won the pound puppy lottery. God forbid you just get 2 puppies in your litter. As for the absentminded friend that forgot to put all the puppies back in the mother's velcro womb, and one got lost? Insta-uninvite from my sparkles roller skating party. That was my favorite puppy Jamie. Now I'll never find it.

God forbid it if a child nowadays is called anything other than perfect. The Anti-bullying movement is going too far. Yes don't push someone over the edge with it, but forgive me if maybe I told a certain someone I grew up with that he had noodle arms and now he's a personal trainer, you know what I mean? Bullying to a certain extent wasn't only funny, it was required for a hit sitcom. Lest we all forget Clarissa's snotty red-headed brother Furg-wad. Killer name. Or the chunky freckle-faced Donkey Lips. Did anyone ever actually know donkey lip's real name? You didn't see him lose his mind over it. Or really the whole purpose of the character Urkel in general. You know what it taught us? How to take a hit. All three of these characters never gave up. My nickname was Anus-ley Fartwright. I made it though.

Everyone I know that is my age knows A) how to make a fortune teller and b) that whatever MASH says, goes. I literally just played MASH with a coworker at a meeting. She is staring down the barrel of having a pet giraffe and 16 kids, driving a "rape van" and living in a mansion. Real mixed bag she's got headed her way, but to be fair, if she'd stopped me on the swirly thing a second sooner, things would have been different. Also, sign of a best friend: rigging the MASH game so that your BFF lands on the guy she likes to be her husband. Or if you weren't that smart, simply skipping sections or making up impromptu rules so that she really DOES end up with Brandon. And then screaming with joy and saving the paper as later proof at the wedding.

I remember taking my SWEET time making fortune tellers in class. Color coding them, thinking of eight whole fortunes someone could have... In the end did anyone hide theirs well enough to even fully finish a round before it got taken up? Still, worth it.

Irrefutable comebacks. The 90's really started the movement on shutting people down. Someone says something obvious. Response: "doi". You say something stupid and you'd like to pretend you didn't mean it. "Sike". And the quintessential comeback is when someone even feigns over interest in ANYTHING: "If you love it so much why don't you marry it". At no point was anyone's answer "that's the dumbest thing I've ever heard". My recollection was that 100% of the time that landed the recipient of this question in utter defeat. The only, and I mean ONLY possible comeback to this was "I'm rubber, your glue. Whatever you say bounces off me and sticks to you". Game. Over.

Pogs

Who did this. Who was like "let's take cardboard disks and slam coins onto them to flip them over". It was a revolution. It wasn't even about how many you had really. As long as you had a full sleeve of them you were fine, but it really mattered how cool your slammers were. And this game required clean up every round. Your slammer would fly off into oblivion, pogs flipping every which way. My mom, understandably, wasn't interested in investing in paper-themed toys or fads of any kind so I had the minimum amount to even form a stack really, but one day in the Kroger parking lot fate shined down on me. I found on the ground someone's pogs complete with a grateful dead slammer. Yes I felt torn about taking it into the store and dropping it off at lost and found or not. Yes I absolutely kept them. I utilized the rule "finders keepers". Haunts me to this day.

Candy that actually hurt

There is no doubt in my mind that the painful candy I ate as a child has done permanent, irreparable damage to my mouth. War Heads were so good but would actually make me cry, and my my mouth cramp. My mouth would literally cramp in the back.

Also need I remind about fireballs (appropriately named). As in keeping with making a game out of everything, we'd see who could put a fireball in their mouth the longest. No you can't hide it under your tongue either, so don't even try. You always knew when I'd eaten one because my hand was also red from spitting it out every 5 seconds. Sometimes you'd try to wrap the gum from a blow pop around the fireball to create a buffer if you will. That gum was never big enough. Also did anyone enjoy the blistering, Lysol-themed pain of a lemon head? Sick.

When I think back on these experiences, the underlying theme here is "where in the world did I get access to this many pieces of candy simultaneously?" and "Did my mom ever let me go back to this person's house?". There must have been an underground ring of torture-candy drug lords running Addison Elementary.