Light-up hacksack March 24, 2011

Hackysack. From my personal collection.

It’s a week of reposts, it seems. One of the first smileys I posted in this blog, back in August of last year, was of my beloved hemp hackysack. Today, I’m offering my other smiley hackysack.

This thing is a little more “smiley” because instead of putting the classic yellow smiley on a black background, this one turns the entire hacksack into the classic yellow smiley. It’s also a bit more fun: inside this hackysack is a little mechanism that lights up in a rainbow strobe when you kick it. The mechanism actually throws off the weight a bit and makes this thing almost impossible to control, so I wouldn’t use it for anything but the novelty of the flashing lights. But those lights do make me smile, which is always worth it. 🙂

Hackysack August 30, 2010

Hackysack. From my personal collection.

I was never any good at this, but like every college guy in the `90s, I spent hours and hours (and hours) hanging out in the quad, in my friends’ front yards, in the street outside my parents’ house–pretty much wherever, whenever–kicking around the old hackysack.  It took me a long time to find one that felt good on my foot, though.  Enter the hemp-woven smiley face, which was my constant companion for a number of years.  It became such a comfort item that I still carry it around with me–even when we moved overseas, more than 7,000 miles from our former home, I made sure I packed this hackysack, and it now sits on a shelf in our living room.  (Except this summer:  I actually packed the hackysack and took it back to the States during our vacation, just so I could kick it around with my brother for a while.  In the middle of the street.  In front of our parents’ house.  Good times.)

Hackysack is a great way to kick back and let go of some stress, and stress-free people are happy people.

A note on spelling: A lot of sources choose to spell “hacky sack” as two words, but I suspect none of these authors ever owned a hackysack.  No one who’s ever kicked one of these around has ever used the expression “I’m going to hacky,” and no one, period, would ever, ever say “I’m going to kick around the sack.”  No guys, anyway.  Trust me on this.  The morphemes “hacky” and “sack,” then, are utterly inseparable.  It is hackysack, one word, period.