Getting nostalgic today thinking about a childhood occupied with Lego. Well, when I wasn't outside scrambling up trees and down ravines anyways, it was occupied with Lego.
I built cities and cars and spaceships and when all my friends started getting transformers for Christmas I was still getting Lego, ignoring the instruction books, and building transformable robots of my own design. Limbs wheeled and winged contorting bipedal robots into cars and planes. Usually less elaborate and more fragile but they came from my head and my hands and thus were far more special.
Playing with Lego is very tactile. The snap and click of the pieces coming together. The weight of the model in your hands as you turn it over looking for where to place the next piece. If a design is not structurally sound it is painfully obvious when the model falls apart in its test run. This is what I miss with my current profession. There is no tactility in computer programming. There is the click of the keyboard but it is too far removed from the thing I am creating. There is still something amazing about seeing your creation come to life on the screen but it's not the same as being able to drive it up and down hallways, under chairs, and over tables as I would do with each new lego vehicle.
When I get back from this trip I may have to dig into the enormous box of Lego I still have and see what I can come up with.
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