Shopping for groceries is always an interesting trip for me. I tend to go to places like Target so I can get everything at one time, like food and toilet paper, which go hand-in-hand, of course. After I finish shopping for the necessities, one thing crosses my mind: Toys?! It is not just any toy section: it is always Legos. The quintessential children’s toy that can bring happiness no matter what age you are. What is it about these magical assortments of plastic bricks? Part of the joy is the final product, but that’s just the breaking point for me to bust open the wallet. Legos go beyond the cool centerpiece of my coffee table, currently a Super Star Destroyer (there’s not a lot of room for coffee), but it is a various amount of factors that fulfill many human, or just my, desires.
12 hours of pure awesome. My finger tips disagree with me
I have been playing with Legos for practically my whole life. I built my latest masterpiece a few weeks ago, a Millennium Falcon, Han Solo’s infamous starship that can run the Kessel Run in under twelve parsecs and shot down Darth Vader’s Tie-Fighter during the attempt to blow up the Death Star (Fun fact: I am also a huge Star Wars fan). After finishing, I started to wonder why, at the extremely mature age of twenty-three, was I still playing with this so called “children’s toy.” As I look upon this majestic Lego starship, I thought about the previous five hours it took to build it. Sure the final product looked awesome and I can point at it when my friends come over and say, “Impressed? I know.” The journey to build it was actually quite spectacular, a feeling that I never had as a child. While building the Millennium Falcon, I got excited when I realized I had built the chess table where the gang plays holo-chess in “A New Hope” or the gun turrets that are used to fight off a speeding squad of Tie-Fighters. A combination of nostalgia and accomplishment fills the nerd-mind as I stack these seemingly simple blocks together. There is a sense of pride after finishing a cool starship but even beyond that, it becomes a trip down memory lane.
Whether Lego knows this or not, they are definitely making a ton of money off nostalgia, or maybe just me. With the increase in exciting brands like Harry Potter, where someone can actually build Hogwarts with Harry Potter and wands and all that magical crap (I am not as big of a fan. Don’t hate me). Children will build these now and years down the line. Lego will probably re-release them, and those children will grow up and fall into the same nostalgic, carbonite-freezing trap that I have been imprisoned into. Lego has become more than simple four-by-four Lego bricks: they’re a mirror to our lives. As we grow older, we gain more complex and interesting facets, just like Legos. Everyday is a block that we add to the Lego sculpture that is our life. We can look back and see how things come together to create aspects of ourselves and yet we may not know how today’s brick will affect the final masterpiece (Things just got real!). Maybe I am looking too deep into this, or not deep enough. Regardless, one fact still remains: Legos are fun and whether or not these feelings are true for you, it will put a smile on your face, just like screaming your lungs out to 90’s boy band songs (I personally like the Backstreet Boys), the wonderful artificial flavors of drinking Squeeze-its (red was my favorite, it tastes like red), and fighting with the Might Morphin’ Power Rangers (red was not my favorite, he does not taste like red). Too bad life does not come with instructions, but I guess that is also half the fun.
Reasons I Am Broke 