When I was really young, it was probably fairies and poetry, but that's not very interesting. My dump-truck when I was 8 was the United Nations. I read everything I could get my hands on about the League of Nations and the development of international leagues. I read the official purpose statements of departments within the UN. I was the most enthusiastic trick-or-treater for UNICEF out there. For my birthday one year, I had my parents take me to the UN headquarters in Manhattan. Eventually, I created a national flag for the climbing tree in my front yard, along with a currency (dried leaves), holidays, and banking credit system (dried leaves are a bad system for storing and transferring value). I allocated branches as fiefdoms for my family and friends and then began working on an application for membership status in the UN, in colored pencils. Once I got into computers, I didn't have another dump-truck like that until I was 12 and filled an entire shelf just with books about Balkan history.