Cy RobinsonFollow

Date Collected

Winter 12-7-2018

Place item was collected

Logan, Utah

Informant

Cy Robinson

Point of Discovery/Informant Bio

Myself, Cy Robinson. Sired and raised in southeast Idaho in the town 11,000 strong of Blackfoot. 19 Male, current college student, Caucasian, second oldest of 4 with two parents and a special needs adult who is just as much family as anyone else. No religious ties currently but raised LDS, currently unemployed but seasonal summer work at Cowabunga Bay Waterpark in Draper, Utah, 4 years strong. I live and work in Utah in the summers with my great Aunt and Uncle. I just declared my major as Communication Studies and English with an emphasis in creative writing and a minor in folklore. I went to high school and had lots of “friends” but only a small group of 4 that I considered my own friends.

Context

In middle school my best friend Devin and I had nearly every class together and rarely were we seated together. Devin and I were known to be the jokesters and loud students in our grade. We weren’t bad students just extremely distracting to everyone around us. Since we were rarely allowed to sit next to each other we would always try to make each other laugh in class so we had numerous games we would play with each other at a distance. This was before smartphones were easily accessible to middle school students. The best we had was Ipod touches. So we were creative and came up with a harmless albeit amusing game.

Text

The spouse game. My friend came up with this game during a biology class in 7th grade. The game is played as such. Each participant looks through the textbook that both students have, usually one provided in class. Each would sign to the others a page number containing an “attractive” person and then make eyes as the other flipped to the respective pages. The other person would try not to smile or make eyes back to the other person as they signed the next page back to them. The game started off really juvenile until we realized that the less attractive the person was perceived to be to a middle school student the harder it was to keep a straight face. So we would go back and forth on pages of moderately attractive people and then one of us would signal to a page with a grandma or something on it and then make the most flirtatious eyes that said “yeah, I think this ladies the most hot thing in existence, prove me wrong I dare you. I love her”. The game once again evolved, in a weird way, when we started running out of attractive people to send back and forth, we would sometimes send pictures of animals or science equipment just to keep each other on our toes. So the game could be pretty normal, cute lady, cute lady, cute lady, decently attractive lady, cute lady, cute lady, beaker of chemicals. You truly never knew what in the world you were going to get.

Texture

The game was a great way to bond between my friend and I in classes. The senselessness of the game was super amusing. We played the game until senior year of high school, so the books got quite…interesting. Human anatomy text books went to so really strange places. The game between us was well known amongst our peers so often times we would see them flipping their pages along with us to see what we were laughing at. Reflecting on this game made me really happy and a bit nostalgic. Its really a numbing game just because its so ridiculous but it was important to me regardless, its something the immediately takes me back to childhood.

Course

ENGL 2210

Instructor

Lynne McNeill

Semester and year

Fall 2018

Theme

G6: Socializing Games

EAD Number

3.1.80

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