The symbol was making another emergence into current teenage trends. At Claire's, looking for smiley face accessories to wear with my smiley face shirts, I found a pair of earrings emblazoned with the yin yang. What had started as a mild interest in the expressive yellow form quickly turned into an all-out obsession once I figured out that exaggerating a new interest could diminish my previous reputation of being obsessed with cats, which now, at 12 years old, seemed babyish and embarrassing. 'Disgusting,' I thought, and quickly (though unintentionally) lost all my Pogs in a swift recess time defeat 'for keeps.'īy 1997, I had begun my collection of smiley face T-shirts. There was probably more to it, too, that I didn't understand because I was too young. The interior shapes depicted two bodies interlacing the circles on either side representing those bodies' holes. The sexual imagery was much more obvious to me now, as I was more mature and worldly. The set also included a silver slammer engraved with a yin yang. Many of the Pogs were 'sexy skeleton' themed: skeletons in bikinis, skeletons posing like pinup girls, skeletons caught in the act of dropping a hanky and, randomly, skeletons playing golf. Not every uncle is creepy, but the fact that you usually want to specify whether or not an uncle is is a pretty solid indicator of how many creepy ones there are. The yin yang then wallowed in obscurity until 1995, when my Uncle Drew gave me a set of Pogs for my ninth birthday. The yin yang, I deduced, was a symbol of sex, something dark and mysterious I should stay away from. The cobra could be a sexual metaphor, since penises were snakes.There was another yin yang design in the sticker machine, this one with a cobra slithering out of the two smaller circles.A single sticker was ejected from the sticker machine between two pieces of cardboard.There were lots of symbols in the world that I didn't understand.

The yin yang was an odd, eye-catching form made of starkly contrasted shapes that were familiar and also foreign: a circle with an S shape inside, separating a black side from a holographic silver side, then additional, smaller circles within those shapes, in opposite colors as the side they were on, creating more contrast. The now iconic yin yang symbol originated in 1991, when it presented itself to me in holographic-sticker form in a pizza parlor sticker machine.

History of yin yang symbol