Category Archives: Game

Bubblegum, Bubblegum rhyme

Nationality: American
Age: 7
Occupation: Student
Residence: Los Angeles, CA
Performance Date: April 16, 2012
Primary Language: English
Language: Spanish

Bubblegum, bubblegum rhyme

Collection Context:

The following folklore was collected from during a Joint Educational Project assignment (volunteer program) at an elementary school.

Text:

Informant (I): Someone needs to count…because first we put someone’s foot in it

Collector (C): Put someone’s foot in what?

I: Well first we be like…like…um…put your foot like this (she puts her foot out to indicate those participating form a circle each with one foot in the middle of the circle), and there are like some words, and then who gets out and the other one and who’s left is gonna…is gonna count.

C: Ok. What are the words? Let’s pretend we’re doing it right now. What would the words be?

I: Bubblegum, bubblegum in the dish, how many pieces do you wish? If we…if I touch you or me we need to say a…a…an number like ten. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10.

*Informant indicates that with each number the counter points to a foot in the circle. The foot pointed to is not random but goes in a circle*

*Informant lands on her own foot on the last number*

C:  And so you would go out? (Meaning she would remove her foot from the circle because her foot was landed on/pointed at for the last number counted to)

I: And you…you need to count.

C: And so I would be it?

I: uh huh

C: What do you do, so if there’s more than one or whatever people you just keep doing the bubble gum game until there’s only one person left?

I: Um we don’t play…we…huh?

C: So if you’re doing…you know if you’re trying to pick who’s it, and there’s…let’s say there’s four people here, do you keep playing until there’s only one foot left in?

*Informant nods*

C: So you’ll do it four…you’ll do multiple rounds of the bubblegum game?

*Informant nods*

C: Do you do that for every game?

I: um, I think.

Why does she thing they do this?

The informant stated that they play bubblegum, bubblegum to decide who is it and they always use this to decide. She also stated that this is something that she learned from people at school, but she cannot remember who taught it to her.

Analysis:

I agree that this is a means for the children to decide who is it and it is a way which they all can agree on. They have some control over the game because they are able to pick the number that is counted to, but they never know exactly who is going to be out. This makes it a fair way to decide and no one will be ganged up against. It is a way for the students to be in charge of planning their own activities in a world where they rarely have such an opportunity.

Friendship Bracelets

Nationality: American
Age: 20
Occupation: Student
Residence: Los Angeles, CA
Performance Date: 4/4/12
Primary Language: English

The informant is a sophomore at the University of Southern California. She is twenty years old. She is also the Jr. Helenes chair for the USC Helenes, which means she works closely with the girls at 32nd Street School and other Helenes to create a mentoring system.

The informant let me interview her about a friendship bracelet making activity that took place between the Jr. Helenes and the USC Helenes:

“Some Helenes and Jr. Helenes were at our regular meeting place, at 32nd Street School. I taught them how to make the bracelets. It’s fun to teach other people to make the bracelets and it’s just a good way to bond. I don’t know why friendship bracelets are popular but they’re symbolic and meaningful. And simply making the bracelet together is a good bonding experience…For me, it’s my way of showing someone that they’re important to me—but it’s not like everyone who’s important to me has a bracelet; it just depends who I have that tradition with. I guess I also like the idea that other people can see them and ask who it’s from. With the Jr. Helenes, it’s nice to have a sort of bonding exercise so we can become really close. That way we’re more than mentors—we’re friends. I got started with friendship bracelets when I went on a month long trip to Hawaii during high school. We were making so many new friends, it was a good way to celebrate that, I guess. I ended the trip with like 7 bracelets. I also like giving them to people because they know I care about them. I like to let them choose the colors and have them hold on to the end while I make it so that it’s a process we’re doing together, and the finished product is something that will make them think of our friendship whenever they see it. I also am kind of superstitious, and I like to have them make a wish on the bracelet, because supposedly the wish comes true when the bracelet falls off.”

I agree with most of what the informant says about friendship bracelets. They are definitely symbolic of a friendship and a way to celebrate that relationship. She also made a good point about the process of making the bracelet serving as a time of bonding. What really struck me about my informant’s experience with friendship bracelets was the superstition tied to them. This was new to me, but it really adds another element to the bracelets, making them even more of a shared experience between two people.

Annotation:

Friendship bracelets can be found in the movie Napoleon Dynamite (2004). In this movie, one character goes door to door selling the bracelets and later, Napoleon and his friend Pedro hand them out when Pedro is running for class president. Instead of being made from thread, these bracelets are made from plastic.

Napoleon Dynamite. Dir. Jared Hess. Perf. Jon Heder, Efren Ramirez, and Jon Gries. Fox Searchlight, 2004. Film.

Law & Order SVU Drinking Game

Nationality: American
Age: 21
Occupation: Student
Residence: Los Angeles, CA
Performance Date: 4/23/12
Primary Language: English

The informant (21) is a Junior at USC. She transferred to USC for her sophomore year, and before that, spent her freshman year at Bennington College in Vermont.

The informant is my roommate and she wanted to contribute a drinking game to my folklore collection. This game is known as the Law & Order: SVU Drinking Game:

“The rules are pretty straight forward. You take a drink when you hear the “dun dun” sound, when a weapon is drawn, someone hits on Mariska Hargitay’s character, when there’s a celebrity guest, or when Ice T says “that’s messed up.” Whenever B.D. Wong is on the screen, you drink half your beer and when Stabler worries about his daughter, you take five drinks. Sometimes people make up other rules, but those are my standard ones. I learned this drinking game in Vermont, when my roommates and I got really into the show and watched pretty much every episode. By best friend there had learned the game in high school from another friend of hers. It’s a fun game and I play it because it’s an excuse to watch more L&O SVU, which is the single greatest show of all time and there are a million episodes so you can change things up during different ones. Also, drinking is the single greatest thing ever and can be done a million times even if you know that the outcome will be the same each time.”

Having watched Law & Order SVU, I agree with much of what my informant says. The game is a great excuse to watch more episodes and there’s a lot of freedom with the rules so things won’t get boring from episode to episode. Depending on the specific rules, sometimes the game is designed to get a person to drink a lot in a short amount of time, or even to prolong it. Drinking games that involve TV are also a great bonding experience because everyone’s watching the show at the same time, looking for the same things, and no doubt, as episodes go on, the side-conversations get more and more hilarious.

New Year’s Eve 7-11-Doubles Game

Nationality: American
Age: 21
Occupation: Cook
Residence: Santa Barbara, CA
Performance Date: New Year's Eve 2011
Primary Language: English

When visiting my brother for New Year’s Eve while he was an undergrad at UCSB he showed me this drinking game. He explains the rules of the special New Year’s version:

“7-11-Doubles is played with a big chalice cup. For this one [New Year’s] we used the Pimp Chalice but you can use measuring cups, big slurpee or anything that size.

You get a case of champagne or depending on the [number of] people a few.

You fill the cup with what you think someone can chug in like 10 seconds.

Everyone rolls the dice until someone rolls a 7, 11 or the same number on each die. Then the person who rolled picks someone to drink.
That person has to chug the entire thing before a 7,11 or double is rolled again by the same person.

The person rolling the dice can’t go until the person drinking touches the chalice. You can fuck around and touch it with your cup or make someone else touch it. But soon as it’s touched you chug & the other person rolls.

If you don’t finish drinking before a good roll, you gotta do it again until you beat the roll.”

The game is played gathered around the chalice in a haphazard circle. Everyone playing has another cup with beer or champagne which they drink from while they’re waiting for their turn – but you never know when you’ll be chosen to drink next. The person who is chosen to drink can be saved by anyone in the circle. The person saving the drinker (‘saver’) just has to snatch the chalice before the appointed drinker touches it and chug. If the ‘saver’ beats the roller they get the dice next. If they don’t they have to take on the chosen drinker’s responsibility until they manage to chug before a 7,11 or double is rolled.

The New Year’s version was characterized by a high enthusiasm for saving the appointed drinker, tricking the roller, and distracting whoever was rolling by forcibly kissing them.

The game was interrupted at midnight when the person who happened to be the roller had to pick someone to make out with for the duration of the roll. The person chosen to kiss had to continually pour champagne into the chalice while everyone else attempted to get a turn at chugging before an 11 or snake eyes were rolled.

交換日記 — Exchange Journals

Nationality: Japanese
Age: 20
Occupation: Student
Residence: Naha-shi, Okinawa, Japan
Performance Date: 4/3/12
Primary Language: Japanese

「交換」(koukann) in Japanese means exchange, and 「日記」(nikki) means journal. Together they mean exchange journal, although, in fact, it is more of a sharing journal than anything else. In Japan, girls in the later years of elementary and early years of middle school often participate in a game of sorts, where a group of about three or four pass around a journal amongst themselves. One girl would have it in the morning, write something about her day, and give it to the next girl during lunch, who would pass it to the next girl after-school, and so on.

My informant has spent her entire life in the city of Naha in Okinawa, Japan. Okinawa, among other things, is known for its stationary residents; my informant barely knows anyone that has moved houses at all in their entire lives. Because of this characteristic, she said, she spent her school years, from elementary to high school, with approximately the same group of people.「グループきつくて、友達とかも大変だったよ」are her exact words, which translates roughly to, most times, friendships were (for good or bad) claustrophobic and exclusive. In this environment, which perhaps mirrors the environment of most Japanese schools in an intensified form, my informant had 交換日記 with two of her best friends.

The 交換日記 was used mainly to tell secrets they were too afraid to say out loud, or to refer to inside jokes and stories that cemented them closer together as a group. For instance, said my informant, one of her best friends only ever openly gushed about the boy that she liked in the 交換日記, never breathing a word about it out loud. That was an unspoken rule about the 交換日記, in fact–the journal and real life existed, essentially, in two separate realms, and by some unwritten law they all knew that they couldn’t actually talk about anything that was mentioned in the journal, unless the person who wrote it brought it up herself. There were a lot of unspoken rules like that, my informant said, to make them feel like they were participating in something secret, a covert organization of some sort, although every girl around them was doing the same thing.

The style and content of the 交換日記 were highly ritualized, she said. The journal was always the same standard, seventy-page school-use notebook, the one that basically every Japanese student used, and still uses. The cover was always decorated to the utmost; in their case, they had glued sequins and glitter all over the front, and an applique of a butterfly, making it shiny and girly and unrecognizable (the butterfly, she said, was because they had inside joke about it which she has since forgotten). On the inside of the cover they had written down the rules for the 交換日記, as all exchange journal groups did. Their rules dictated that each girl had to at least draw one picture of something detailing their day in their journal entry, no girl could withhold information about a crush or a potential crush, and each entry had to be at least a page long. The most important rule consisted of having to hide the actual physical exchange of the journal from all others. Other groups made other rules, but these were theirs, and it defined their 交換日記. My informant went through six notebooks with the same group of friends before they decided to stop. She said, however, that she knew girls who would get in fights with their friends because they were participating in more than one 交換日記 with different groups of friends. The one thing about the 交換日記, she said, was that it exhibited all the drama and self-consciousness of being a pre-teen/teenage girl in Japanese society.

The 交換日記 is indeed largely reflective of the school life of girls in their elementary and middle school years. My informant grew up with the same group of people, and for the most part, the same group of close friends, as do, it seems, most Japanese children still. The 交換日記 illustrates the girls’ desire to define themselves away from the rest of the school population, to create a distinct, close-knit little society governed by its own rules. It also indicates precisely how claustrophobic the school environment can be; with these close-knit groups and their secret journal societies, how is a newcomer supposed to integrate into the school? My informer said, in fact, that it must have been very difficult to be any kind of an outsider. Get on the wrong side of your friends, and you were out–and being out meant you had to find a way into another group, which was always extremely difficult, especially with girls, my informant said, who were very territorial about these kinds of things. This seems to make sense in a homogeneous society like Japan’s, where students, eager to distinguish themselves from the crowd, create friend groups as foundations for their identity, relying on these friendships to set them apart because, in all other aspects, everyone is usually relatively similar. There were prestigious 交換日記 groups that everyone wanted to be part of, for instance. And then there were ones like the my informants’, created merely for fun and for advancement of their friendships, but still possessing an intense, intimidating undercurrent of exclusivity.