@robmandu: wow! That was so cool! When I first made them up, I was just randomly putting concepts together. I had no idea there really could be such a thing. However, I imagine mine to be hollow in the middle. The ice bulbs are magic, and they contain something marvelous (why has no one taken a crack at that yet?)
The clicking, I imagine, is like those toys you used to see where there were two hard balls on a string, which you held in the middle and bounced the balls together.
I think that using any kind of artificial machine to click ice bulbs (instead of doing it yourself) gets you artificial marvelousness. The marvelousness is a living, magical kind of thing, and it is personalized to you. You receive your icebulb at a random time (not yearly) and when you do, you celebrate it with a big party. The icebulbs appear like Santa, or the Easter Bunny brought them, and there is a myth about the Icebulber, but no one knows if it’s true or not.
You must nurture the icebulb, like one of those Japanese robotic pets that gets sad or dies if you don’t take care of it properly. The nurturing is easy in the winter, but in the summer, people have to fly to a place where winter is, or they might lose their icebulbs. To get a summer icebulb is kind of the equivalent of getting coal in your stocking. It causes problems, and makes people feel bad about themselves. Their friends generally talk behind their backs, and there is no party thrown.
There are two dates a year—the time when the weather is always above freezing, and the time when the weather sinks below freezing. There are festivals on these days to mark the biginning and end of good icebulb nurturance seasons.
In tropical climes they have an equivalent thing, but I don’t know what it is, nor what the rules are for nurturing it. It’s possible that volcanos are involved.
Ice bulbs can’t be nurtured in refridgerators. Well, they can, but then you get an incomplete form of marvelousness. Icebulbs seem to need freedom, and outdoors, and connections with snow in order to mature properly.
I don’t know how to tell if an icebulb has matured properly. But then, I didn’t grow up there. However, I do know that each icebulb has a different maturation rate, and the person must form a bond with the icebulb. It is said that if you form a proper bond, the icebulb itself lets you know it’s time to click it.
Clicking, itself, is a somewhat mysterioius process. When the icebulb is mature, you have to go off by yourself somewhere, and then figure out how to do the clicking. It seems there are many kinds of clicking, but the advice given through experience doesn’t really help others. There are too many ways to do it, and you can’t learn all the possible ways. It’s better to establish a good relationship with your bulb, than to try to figure it out in other ways.
Bulbs, as I said, come at irregular intervals. A person might get one each month of a couple of years, or they might only get one in their lifetime. It is not know what this signifies, but having a lot of icebulbs can be wearying, even if they contain some super kind of marvelousness. Sometimes people who are “blessed” by many icebulbs are actually nurturing several at a time. It’s like having triplets. Exhausting. And of course, you can’t get help at it. Well, you can, but then the marvelousness is deformed in some way.
In some communities, you get time off work to nurture your ice bulb, but in others, you are expected to continue working until you feel the bulb is about to mature. People with multiple icebulbs generally take time off, anyway, but they are not guaranteed their jobs back. There is some rumbling about this in the parliament, but so far, the Ice Bulb Equalization Act has not gotten enough support to pass.
Rich people often ignore their ice bulbs. They seem to think if you’re wealthy enough, life is marvelous enough anyway, and they don’t need to bother with it. It is said that some very rich people who have a mean streak will have others nurture their bulbs, and then they capture the deformed marvelousness and perform horrible experiments on it. No one has ever been proved to do this, but there are still rumors.
Anyway, I probably could go on and on about ice bulb lore, but I don’t want to bore you any more than I have.
I still don’t know what the marvelousness is like. I don’t know how long the experience lasts,nor what it feel slike. Do you? I also would love to here about clicking experiences. I am clueless as to how you know when they are ripe. I’ve never done it myself (sometimes I get depressed about that), but I’m doing an ethnography (to try to get my bulbalaureate, third rank), and am looking for experiences in clicking.
Anyway, that should help you understand. I hope you can help me. Any experience is fine. I know we all have different ones.
Daloon
Composing members:
0
