I happen to live in a world that’s saturated with the preoccupations of a seven-year-old girl. No, they’re not mine.

While my own excitement over action figures, robots, Legos, squid, sushi and pretty women is mostly moderated by the overbearing fist of my superego, there’s no such restraint in the excitements of a child. They’re beings of almost pure id, and they’ll infect you with it. If they like dinosaurs, they want to have a pet dinosaur, be a dinosaur, eat what dinosaurs ate, ride a dinosaur to school, wear dinosaur shirts, learn everything there is to know about dinosaurs, and legally change their name to ‘Dinosaur D. Dinosaur’. The ‘D.’, if you weren’t sure, is for ‘Dinosaur’.

This much is apparent when my darling niece goes on and on about what her and her 2nd grade friends are all talking about. I date the title of this entry because, well, these things will inevitably shift faster than us fogeys can even grasp them.

Among these things are Webkinz, Hannah Montana and High School Musical (a proclivity that I also see expressed by some of my high school students), Bratz (or, as I like to call them, ‘Barbies of Ill Repute’), Club Penguin, and Uggs boots – but only the pink, classic ones, and NOTHING ELSE. Most recently, the preoccupation has centered on one thing : Animal Rubber Bands.

It wasn’t long ago that I was sent on a web-quest to find out where to buy these magical, amazing Animal Rubber Bands that all of my niece’s friends apparently had, while she was cruelly deprived of any at all. While it’s true that these Rubber Bands are nothing new, they just seem to be making their rotation around this area. Other adult bloggers lamented the skyrocketing price of trendy rubber bands as early as 2004, and the urgent need to keep their young’uns abreast of all of the newest rubber band trends.

Animal rubber Bands are this : rubber bands that retract to the shape of animals after they’re stretched. Pigs, ostriches, rhinos, turtles, and a menagerie of other elasti-animals. They’re not especially strong, and prone to easy breakage. They come in all manner of colors, sold in packs of 24 for roughly $8 per pack. Girls wear them like bracelets. They’re otherwise inutile.

This slow crawl of Animal Rubber Bands across this great nation has taken quite a while, but it brings to mind one of the great unisex fashion collectible crazes from my youth : the Snap (or sometimes, Slap) Bracelet. If you were or had a kid in the early 1990s, you’ve probably had a Snap Bracelet enter your life at some point, and it may or may not have left a scar.

Snap bracelets were this : thin strips of spring-metal that could hold two shapes – flat and coiled. They were covered in colored and decorated spandex, and when you slapped the flat, extended piece of metal onto your wrist, it would coil instantly and become a bracelet, which could then be re-flattened into an extended shape. This was back when fashion still didn’t really oppose young boys wearing neon orange or zebra-patterned wrist decorations, or parachute pants. Dark days indeed. The tragedy of snap bracelets is that these strips of metal were essentially razors, and wouldn’t hesitate to slice you once the spandex had worn away, or was slapped on a wrist wrong, or was yanked from someone’s hand. They were banned from schools around October of 1990. Almost a decade later, they made a brief comeback in a plastic, but still injurious, form.

I’m not suggesting that rubber bands of poor strength pose any danger whatsoever to these collecting girls. It’s just another fad, somehow stoked in the fires of oblivious urgency. My niece, who got a handful from a generous friend, believes that the blue turtle and the rhinoceros rubber bands are extra-special. We’re just glad that they make her happy, and are a whole hell of a lot cheaper than pink Uggs.

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This entry was posted on Saturday, March 15th, 2008 at 2:00 am and is filed under collecting fyi. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.