pegkerr | 52 Card Project 2022: Week 34: Fun (Reply)

I went alone to the Renaissance Festival. It wasn't quite the same as when I go with Fiona (the other RenFest fan in our family), although I stuck to the expected rituals--I started the day with a popover with cinnamon butter, visited some of our favorite booths, and swung by the vendor selling apple dumplings when I was ready to leave.

It felt both familiar and unfamiliar. It felt as if it has been so long since I did something like that. Something purely for fun.

As I was pondering this, I ran across a New York Times article "What Is Fun? Can I Have It? Will We Ever Have It Again?" (you can also read it here, where it isn't behind a paywall). I found this to be the food for much interesting reflection:

In his book Fun!: What Entertainment Tells Us About Living a Good Life, Alan McKee, an Australian media studies professor, defines fun thus: “Fun is pleasure without purpose.” In other words, the same qualities that seem to make it so hard for me to have pure fun — I need purpose! — make it hard to optimize for; put it under a brain scanner, and it has a tendency to disappear.

My experiment, in other words, was fundamentally flawed. Fun is supposed to get you out of your head. I was trying to think my way into fun.

In researching this story, I spent weeks cataloging different ways that people in my city had fun — barbecuing, block partying, riding motorbikes, playing dominoes in the park, dancing, hula hooping, stargazing, picnicking in the nude. All of these people were just out living their lives and having fun while I sat at home reading essays and self-help books, dissecting how to have it.

She has some thoughts about the impact of the pandemic on fun, as well as the squelching effect of the constant cavalcade of unsettling news (she noted that her attempt to keep a fun diary fell apart when Roe vs. Wade was overturned).

While pondering this, I thought back to a couple of Christmas gifts exchanged in our family right before the pandemic started: Fiona and Delia and I gave each other the Adventure Challenge Friends edition and I gave Eric the Couples edition. We'd looked forward working our way through the books, laughing a lot, and experiencing tons of fun.

Then Covid hit. The books are still in their shrink wrap.

I want to get back to having fun. Figuring out how to accomplish it. Doing it with other people.

Fiona and I plan to go to the Renaissance Festival together, sometime in September. And I am going to be traveling soon to Eau Claire to pick up Delia and her boyfriend Chris. From there, in company of a bunch of twenty-somethings (they are graciously allowing this sixtyish mom to tag along), we are going to spend a day at Wisconsin Dells, where we'll ride the Duck Boats and look in on Wizard's Quest, something that our family did together years ago. It's a cooperative quest/exploration game, and it was one of the most fun days we ever had together as a family.

What are some of your favorite things to do for fun? How has that changed with the pandemic? Has fun been missing from your life? What are you doing to get it back?

Image description: Background: semi-opaque pink confetti. upper center: a swing carousel carnival ride (people suspended from chairs on chains). Lower right: Peg in Renaissance Festival costume. Left center: apple dumpling. Lower right: the word 'Squee!' in hot pink.

Fun

34 Fun