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kirei_dakara2010-01-22 02:46 pm
annapeace.livejournal.com) wrote in kirei_dakara2010-01-22 02:46 pm
Entry tags:
Recollections
I Remember kongki being the most explosively popular thing back when I was in seventh grade. All the girls played it, and some boys did too.
Korean jacks are different from American jacks in that the - jacks? stones? I'm not sure what they're called, really - are cuter, and there are no rubber balls involved. It is suitably complicated with different tossing techniques, pick-up techniques, balancing techniques, and the best part was that you could play it anywhere. If you had a bit of time and a small piece of flat surface, you could start a game. And the jacks really were cute. You could buy them in different colors and shapes, and my grandma even made me a set out of cloth and beans.
Most of my friends and I would gather at lunch to play. We'd sit on the concrete steps of our school's "amphitheatre" and play while we ate and talked. Sometimes, we'd put down a jacket or something so we wouldn't scrape up our knuckles while playing, but mostly we'd forget - and anyway, it was sort of like a badge of honor, having scraped up knuckles. It showed how hardcore you were.
I still have that complex, by the way. I still think having a scar/injury with an interesting backstory is cool. (Please note that I said interesting, after all, hurting yourself because you played kongki obsessively isn't actually cool.)
Kongki was mostly a girl thing though because the boys got their own thing around the same time: Magic, the card game. I never understood the game and I never wanted to, but I'm thinking it's where things like World of Warcraft picked up once the boys all got computers. So if you went to my school on any given day during seventh grade lunch, you would find groups of girls throwing what looked like brightly colored rocks around, and groups of boys playing a sort of RPG card game. We all gathered side by side in some kind of strange pre-courtship ritual, where neither group was quite ready to co-mingle, but neither did we want to stay far apart.
When I think about those days, I feel a little sad because with the advent of PSPs and cell phones and iPods, I don't think middle schoolers have that sort of social interaction anymore.
Korean jacks are different from American jacks in that the - jacks? stones? I'm not sure what they're called, really - are cuter, and there are no rubber balls involved. It is suitably complicated with different tossing techniques, pick-up techniques, balancing techniques, and the best part was that you could play it anywhere. If you had a bit of time and a small piece of flat surface, you could start a game. And the jacks really were cute. You could buy them in different colors and shapes, and my grandma even made me a set out of cloth and beans.
Most of my friends and I would gather at lunch to play. We'd sit on the concrete steps of our school's "amphitheatre" and play while we ate and talked. Sometimes, we'd put down a jacket or something so we wouldn't scrape up our knuckles while playing, but mostly we'd forget - and anyway, it was sort of like a badge of honor, having scraped up knuckles. It showed how hardcore you were.
I still have that complex, by the way. I still think having a scar/injury with an interesting backstory is cool. (Please note that I said interesting, after all, hurting yourself because you played kongki obsessively isn't actually cool.)
Kongki was mostly a girl thing though because the boys got their own thing around the same time: Magic, the card game. I never understood the game and I never wanted to, but I'm thinking it's where things like World of Warcraft picked up once the boys all got computers. So if you went to my school on any given day during seventh grade lunch, you would find groups of girls throwing what looked like brightly colored rocks around, and groups of boys playing a sort of RPG card game. We all gathered side by side in some kind of strange pre-courtship ritual, where neither group was quite ready to co-mingle, but neither did we want to stay far apart.
When I think about those days, I feel a little sad because with the advent of PSPs and cell phones and iPods, I don't think middle schoolers have that sort of social interaction anymore.