So I have a couple nice stories to tell about Pokemon right now.

I wasn't obsessed with it when I was a kid, but I was into it and my cousin who I was close to traveled to compete in tournaments all the time. So pokemon was a decent part of my life as a 9-12 year old child I'd say.

First- I currently live with my sister right now and I came home from work today to find my 8 year old nephew (who is normally sucked into playing video games most of the time) very intently watching the first season of Pokemon. He watched 3 episodes in a row before he had to go to bed and that was just a very proud moment for me.

The Second- I work with children. In the AM I teach a preschool class and then in the afternoon a school age program. The school age kids are from K-5th grade. I get to show them movies sometimes and the place I work at is a small business that doesn't make a lot of money. We have old bulky TVs and VCR players, so most of our movie stock consists of VHS tapes, and we have hundreds of them. A few months back I found several Pokemon tapes. Some have a few episodes and some were movies like The First Pokemon Movie, Pokemon the Movie 2000, Mewtwo returns, and a few others. So I decided I'd show them to the kids once in a while and soon they were all begging to watch it whenever it was a movie day. Now most of them in the class have started bringing binders full of pokemon cards and stacks of them and trading them with each other. It's just so great and nostalgic for me to see them doing something I did when I was a kid instead of them being sucked into their cell phones and tablets now, which most of them have.

It's just something that's made me think back to the innocence of my childhood. Kids these days are too mature for their age and lack imagination. It's nice to see parts of my own childhood happen once in a while.