Svea Jones, Features Editor

As most of the campus knows, I am an avid fidget toy connoisseur. I have a plethora of toys, from geometric and methodical to free-form and squishable. I’ve had my fair share of testing done on these strange gadgets, and they’re great avenues for students to concentrate on tasks at hand… and the other task in my hand, the squish. 

My favorite toys thus far have been liquid fidgets. Ones that have a component of a synthetic liquid, glycerine, or foam. Other fidgets that have characteristics with sharp and solid sides or metal rings give my fingers the smell of pennies or are downright not enjoyable to me. I like to feel the warmth of a fleshy subject underneath my fingertips, the sound of a squish or gush when I contract my hand around it. Though I get ahead of myself sometimes and push the fidget too hard, I’ve broken many toys more recently. Some of the breaking of my fidgets haven’t been from my doing tho. Example A from a recent time before spring break was when my friend Kalee gave me this round purple fidget whose shape insinuated a rabbit. When it looked like a sphere with ears, it was filled with this synthetic liquid white material that made a ghastly wet fart sound, and it was fun to squish to disgust the people around me. 

It was a staple in our house because it was passed down from generation to generation, from Kaela to Kalee and then Kalee to me. Once it was in my possession, anyone had free reign to let it rip, and people did. Until one horrid night, the night before spring break, when Kalee exclaims, “Hey, Svea—wanna see what I used to do with this thing last year?” and goes to slap its vulnerable squishy body against the hard floor, and it exploded in a splash of foamy liquid that made us cough to clean up. Another instance of fidgets losing the battle of inevitable death was a clanky purple glow-in-the-dark slug. The free reign of its joins would make a satisfying click, much more than what you could get from the clicky clacks of a really good keyboard. But one day, it was thrown underhand by a friend and crashed to the ground, splitting in half. A blue and white slug with stiffer arthritic joins later replaced it. He wasn’t fun to play with but filled the small slug-shaped hole in my heart. Then, two nights ago, he, too, had the same fate; the zip tie that held his poor body finally broke, and all of his shell-shaped joins crashed to the floor, an end to the slug era.

Another instance was the woodman’s ¢98 boba fidget, a clear square fidget with Orbeez inside. The minute it was squished in my hands, the Orbeez inside mush and became this gray muck. It lasted a few hours until I got greedy and tried to pop the last few Orbeez, and it bursted out of a pin-sized hole in the body of the toy and rained clumps of orbeez onto most of my Logic homework and dried into multicolored crusty boogers on each page, front and back. Although I have my fair share of bad luck regarding these squishy miracles, they satiate a feeling I could not imitate with other structurally sound and less messy toys. In other words, I’m in love with the ush and the gush, it does me wrong every time, but I’m married to the madness.