Centaurs and other such nonsense

When I was 5, I loved My Little Ponies. Glittery pink and purple madness galore. We played with them so much that a huge Tupperware box of ponies will prove that half of them had missing tails and bad homemade haircuts, and the other half were dirtied beyond belief. And of course when there a toy as popular as this one, people try to make them seem so much cooler than they are by making bad movies and ghetto tv shows that only air after the Price is Right at 10:00am on Tuesday mornings. Being 5 and not understanding the stupidity of their marketing tactic, I fell in love with the first show, "Escape from Midnight Castle." I ate the thing up. I laughed when they met the scatterbrained wizard, danced with all the seahorses under the sea, and cringed when the bad guy (a centaur) released the Rainbow of Darkness.

However, with my completely sporadic 5 year old mind, I thought that meant all bad guys must be centaurs. I remember my mom sitting me down one day and explaining what the Gulf War was. She showed me pictures of some people on the Iraqi side (only their heads and torsos, mind you), and what did I do? I didn't wonder about the definition of war, the location of Iraq, or what this has to do with me or America as a nation. I wondered what they looked like, automatically assuming that the bottom half of them was shaped like a horse.

Nonsense, I know. But then it got me wondering what it would be like if I still had the mentality of a 5 year old. Magic was a part of the fabric of my life. I don't think I would have second guessed myself if I saw a fairy in my yard, a centaur walking down the street, or if my favorite Nintendo characters randomly popped out of the tv. Experience is great, don't get me wrong. But where do you draw the line from being a believer in magic to a cynical skeptic? Sometimes I think I put myself in the latter category way too often. I expect the worse in people, assume the most terrible things will happen to me, or that life is one big round of hatred, boredom, and cynicism. Why are movies either ridiculously magical or tragically realistic? What ever happened to thinking that life is still magical, even though it's marked with thistles and thorns? I think there is still an element of magic in life, and the only thing stopping me from discovering a taste of it is my grown-up self.