The stupidest things you said/thought when you were a kid.

I thought the bingo call 'Doctor's orders number 9' meant that you were pregnant (woman would go to the doctor for results of pregnancy test and doctor would say "It's a number 9, madam").

My childhood best friend (and subsequent first snog)'s mother said you could tell when a person was lying because they'd have a big black line down their tongue. "Stick out your tongue! You're lying!"

I was firmly in the potato camp, of course.

"Officer, yes it's another habitrail incident. I have the perpetrator red-handed"

"I'm just a patsy, I tells ya!"

Oh my god! Me, too! My dad worked at Jodrell Bank and would come home with all these stories about interstellar disasters. So of course, I was terrified that our sun would go supernova and turn into a black hole, like, next week. The other thing I was scared of was the expanding universe. That we would become separated from the rest of the universe, and our planet would die cold and alone, a barren rock by itself. Yeah, like Earth would become separated from the Sun, and the Sun would become separated from the Milky Way and everything would get cold and we'd die.

Cause kids have no concept of time, and don't realise that there is a difference between a million billion years and, like, next week.

Traumatised by science! That should be a new thread!

(just kidding on that one...)

Youthful members of our family believed my grandfather's fake plastic Xmas tree TALKED (it was really my uncle on the intercom from the kitchen, urging the kids, 'FEEL MY BRANCHES...OOHHH...MUUUUCH BETTER!'in paedo voce while the adults tried not to wet themselves from laughing too hard).

Madchen's Narnia one reminds me of how my family used to tell me my Grandma was a witch (a good one of course) which was why she had 2 cats and why her old house was called the Coven. We had a besom in the garden shed and thinking it was one of Grandma's cast offs I used to get it out from time to time and sit on it reciting every magic word / phrase I could think of hoping it might take off but of course the fucker never did. bah.

I thought clouds skidding across the sky were a result of the rotation of the earth and not the wind.

I used to pray to the Little Baby Jesus to protect me from volcanoes and tornadoes. It was my bruv showing me a map of tectonic plates and fault lines and how relatively safe the UK was that lead to my departure from the Catholic church.

There, I've said it

His mother asked him, "Put more coal on the fire, Jimmy, it's going out . . ."

"All fires are going out, mum" he responded deadpan.

I'd've given him a slap if I was his mother.

http://www.raven9.freeserve.co.uk/witchway/pictures/broomstick-1.jpg

As for the tooth fairy, I think I've told that story before... Basically, I left her a note in a drawer (cuz I mean, if she was real she would just KNOW to look there, right?) telling her to meet me at my pop's house that afternoon as I'd be there for dinner. She was supposed to meet me back in the tv room when I was in there alone to prove she was real. I told her if she didn't show up, I wouldn't believe in her any more. My mom found the note and kept it.

In grade school, when we were studying the 50 states, I insisted to the teacher that my aunt's name was Maryland. My teacher said, "Oh, Sarah, your aunt's name is probably Marilyn, not Maryland like the state. But I insisted she was lieing and that I was gonna tell my mom.

Oh my god. I have too many of these stories.

In kindergarten, I refused to participate in the Halloween singalong because I said it was evil and I was a Christian. The teacher made me sit right off the mat and wait while everyone else sang together.

Similar to the black hole stories, I was afraid the world was going to end. But it was because I watched a video with my mom on Nostradomas (spelling?) and they simulate the end of the world - major monuments being blown up and people screaming. When my dad came home, I burst into tears and hugged him for a long time and then he yelled at my mom for letting me watch the show with her.

My brother once asked a rather portly nurse if she'd tried slim fast.

I tried to make a hole in the trunk of a small tree in our front garden thinking it would lead me to another dimension. It would have died if my dad hadn't sealed up the hole with tape.

The mind boggles...

I used to pronounce the word "polo" "pole-o" instead of "po-lo". IT took years to realise I'd been doing this wrong. Strangely, my sister also pronounces it like this. My best friend says "melk" instead of "milk" and when we tried to teach him to say it properly it came out "meeelk".

when meeting a childhood friends grandmother, who i had been told was from wales, apparently i just looked at her and demanded "wheres your hat?"
i have no recollection of this, of even a vauge understanding of it, and i am reminded of it by said friends mother at every visit. IT'S BEEN *13* YEARS.

I once saw a black woman with her baby on the bus and asked my mum what the woman was doing with a monkey. Stevenage is a very white town :(

Honestly, Jerry...

??? These are pronounced the same!

You cheeky wee broom does not have the same ring to it really...

It does in estuary English. "pole-o" sounds a bit like "paulo" and "po-lo" is more "p'oh-l'oh". Or summat.

"Is Darth Vader Luke Skywalker's father?"

"Yes"

"Well they look nothing alike . . . "

Also one time when I was about 6 I took a headache remedy of some kind (I can't remember the brand name), and I was wondering why I didn't start to float in mid-air. The reason for this was because said headache remedy's TV advert featured a man who, upon drinking the medicine, floated some six inches up in the air. I kept standing on my tiptoes in an attempt to start the floating.

my mother has never ever worn a wig in her life

she didn't ask me to tell you that bit either.

I've always been a cunt

I thought you pronounced it Girl Cheese sandwich.

I put this in the AI thread, but I just realized 3 weeks ago that the lyrics to What A Feeling are "Take your Passion/ and make it happen" NOT "Take your pants down/ and make it happen."

When I was little (4 or 5) I hung out in my mother's chinese restaurant where she worked and the owners were always asking me if I wanted a boyfriend and who was he going to be and whether or not I wanted a colored boyfriend. To which I replied "YES" because in my mind I though this meaned that he would be purple and pink and green. What girl wouldn't want a colored boyfriend!

When I was 5, in response to the "what to you want to be when you grow up?" question, I said I wanted to be a fire truck. Bless my parents for not dashing my hopes by pointing out the impossibility.

My younger sister actually wanted to be several barnyard animals when she grew up. (You read enough Richard Scary books as a kid, and pigs seem really cool. Actually, so do fire trucks.)

Yesterday my sister completed her PhD in Chemistry.

My dad still reiterates this story about me from when I was about 3. My entire family was staying in some cheap-ass hotel overnight because of my grandmother's weddding, and I guess I was asleep and my dad was gazing at me like "awww, cute kid.." My eyes snapped open and I glared at him and yelled, "GO TO SLEEP!!"

I think my little sister had better/stranger childhood antics. She thought until she was about 18 that the word 'album' was actually pronounced 'alvum'

I took it as an obvious fact that kids at school who got sent to the Principal's Office were doomed to spend eternity in Hell. When I was in the first grade my teacher caught me talking in class and told me to go to the Principal's Office and my sense of utter and irrevocable doom cannot be described. I fainted -- and got sent to the Nurse's Office instead! I felt as though God himself had given me a reprieve.

Oh, and I thought my dog had super powers that only I could unleash, by trying to teach him to do things like talk, skateboard, or land gracefully like a cat when I tossed him off a 5-foot-high retaining wall. But alas, my dog was a pathetic failure.

There are so many more ... I was a spazz.

I used to pronounce "secretary" "sek-yuh-tary"

My son does this now "there's a cloe, and here's another cloe... now I can get dressed, I found clothes!"

I'm told I once asked my mother at a restaurant whether the grizzled cowboy-type at the next booth was a "horsey-ridin' man"

Oh, and my five-year-old self once carried around the collection plate at church (my dad was the pastor). Halting in front of a man who was making no move to put anything in, I was filled with righteous indignation and declared "It's for JESUS!" Needless to say, he contributed.

Odd. I mean, how did you refer to your secretary? You...had...a secretary, didn't you?

I thought that everyone had sex when they turned 15 and I was really really looking forward to this. (I have no idea where the idea came from or what my idea of sex involved at the time).

I did the trying to get to Narnia or suchlike through the walls too. I believed very strongly in witches. One would come to get me some nights but she wasn't able to take me away if I was gripping the bedsheets.

For years and years ('til age 11 or 12) there was a car that was always driving towards our house in order to fulfill it's job of running me over. Any car that turned down our street could be it; though their was one particular model of car that I especially feared. As long as my feet weren't touching the ground though it couldn't get me (I spent a lot of time in a tree on the edge of our front lawn so I'd swing back up into it whenever a car turned onto our road and I was on the ground).

I thought my dead best friend's parents couldn't stand me because they wished I'd died instead; I thought I hadn't died instead of her because god didn't want me around desperately enough; I thought you would die of meningitis if you put your head under in the thermal pools.

I thought the floating coloured blobs from say after y've looked at the sun were Jesus.

There was an incredibly deep hole/cave thingy in the bush in the region I lived in and the surrounding bush sloped downwards towards it; going there was absoultely terrifying because I thought you'd get sucked into the hole if you got too close.

I thought one of the ballet mums was the devious woman from my nightmares who would trick my parents into leaving me with her then suck me up in her vacuum cleaner.

I often thought my parents might kill me, but this actual seems normal. (a common fear surely).

I had a system of colours and numbers corresponding with Male or Female (the numbers were from a deck of cards: 1, 2, 3, 6, 8, 9, 10 were F and the rest were M and the numbers were from our game of magnetic checkers and the pink was male).

My dad told us two girlchilds that this fizzy drink "Mellow Yellow" was made from cow's piss so we wrote to the manufacturers to ask if it was.

When we went on a trip on a double decker red bus I thought we'd gone to England, it was very confusing. I thought the submarine we went on was something to do with the Beatles and England. I thought trig stations were some kind of alien thing.

Yesterday, my friend A. told me that when she was young, she invented a number between 5 and 6. It was called foogle.

Um, I'm not actually an egomaniac.

Also when I was little a friend told me that his mom used to be older than his dad--but not any more. I found this puzzling but accepted it.

As a little kid, I always was afraid of finding skeletons in my closet. I must have heard that phrase somewhere and interpreted it literally.

I tought that by peeling away birch bark, I was revealing the "ancient writing" underneath. The "ancient writing" was actually just the marks left behind by worms and insects in the rotting tree.

I also thought my teddy bear, named Tedda, tied the red ribbon around his neck because I still didn't know how to tie bows.

I also used to try to visualize intangible things. I thought of an hour as looking like a lemon, and a half hour as a lemon cut in half. I used to think God looked like Paddington Bear. A "jerk" looked sort of like a big brick of gefilte fish in chicken broth in a plain white plastic bowl.

When I was about 3, a friend of my mom's was described by my sister as having chocolate pudding colored skin - therefore, I thought that meant she tasted like chocolate pudding, too. She didn't mind much when I licked her arm to test.

My brother told me after I got my two front teeth pulled when I was 6 that because the blood turned black, I was going to die. He said my parents didn't have the money for a funeral, so they'd either flush me down the loo or bury me in the backyard. I was traumatized for years.

In the third grade, I am terrorized by television ads for the showing of a horror movie featuring werewolves. I never watch the movie, but am sure I have pieced together the general story from the trailers. For three months, as the station plays and replays this movie, I exist in a dark tomb of fear. I cannot sleep. I fear going outside. I cry all night. However, I do one day catch a small lizard in the courtyard of our apartments, and keep it as a pet. That night, I am not sleeping, and crying as usual when my mom comes in and relays to me the fact that, lo and behold, the kind of lizard I have caught has the distinct ability to repel werewolves. This is an epiphany. I carry this information with me for about a year when, well after I have gotten over thinking about this movie, my friends ridicule me for sharing the info with them. Good old mom.

Hah. I thought the same thing too.

For awhile I thought that the shrinking machine in the Monsanto Adventure Through Inner Space ride at Disneyland actually did shrink you.

i also remember my father telling me i could look behind the television and see daisy from dukes of hazzard's breasts when she flashed, idunno, roscoe p. coltrane maybe, with her back to the camera. i was quite disappointed.

and, uh, i thought commercials/music videos were live and always looked for differences between them whenever they reran.

that said, until like last year it never occurred to me that you had to pay milkmen. I JUST NEVER THOUGHT ABOUT IT ONCE. it was just there. not that it was a government scheme or like aslan put it there or whatever, just... i just never thought about it. it was weirdly profound actually. but you should have seen the look on my mum's face when i clocked

Of course. It is sad that so many posters on this thread have apparently been tricked out of their entirely correct assumptions by evil N ft robots, or something.

Ian Johnson: I also used to try to visualize intangible things.

I actually think I still do this, of sorts, though not really consciously. Abstracts -- or possibly the words denoting them -- are associated with if not clear shapes, then at least something resembling shapes and movement patterns. Erm, that may have not been at all clear.

There was a skeleton wearing a top hat (why?) who lived under my bed. He was benign most of the time, unless I let a limb hang over the side of the bed, in whcih case he'd grab me and pull me down.

One day I woke up and discovered a brand new set of felt tip pens on the table in my bedroom. Felt tips were the best thing in those days, so naturally I was convinced that fairies had delivered them during the night.

I thought Argnetina were going to invade the UK during the Falklands War.

And I'm sure we could do a whole separate thread about accidentally calling your teacher "Mom."

Not only did I think that, I was so terrified at the prospect I refused to ride it.

In more charming news, I thought the sun was hatched from a bag of fertilizer before I was born. And I believed that taking Kaopectate would prevent me from growing a beard. I believed that sometimes the people on the TV could see and hear me respond to them -- once I was convinced that the lead character of a kid's TV show was referring to me as "that weird kid who smiles a lot" or something to that effect.

But anyway that night I got totally freaked out that there might be people in my bloodstream that would become huge while inside me. It took some major consoling before I could get to sleep.

http://www3.mb.sympatico.ca/~bryang/weirdidea.jpg

When I finally did ride it, I was so freaked out by the giant eye that peers at you through the microscope I refused to go on it for years.

walking over drains
escalators
lifts/elevators
sleeping without the covers on
holes (even if i was miles away from them)
ghosts
heights
needles
knives
the dark

He also invented the following song:
- "All my life/I want to be a horse/I cried and I cried when I died"

2)I thought banks were charities that gave money to us so we could go shopping each week.

3)In a really bizarre misunderstanding I managed to confuse many things. This was the late seventies: there were images of north sea oil rigs on the telly, there was (and is) the Channel between England and France, and there were television channels. Somehow, through this, I became convinced that all TV programmes were made on oil rigs in the middle of the sea. I remember being troubled by the studio audience on Johnny Ball's 'Think of a Number' and repeatedly asking my Mum "but how do they get home afterwards???".

I thought that cheques and credit cards were just free money and hence couldn't understand why anyone would be so dumb as to still use cash.

One of my friends is a primary school teacher. The other day one of his pupils looked at him and said: "But what do you do for a job?"

Me too!

I also thought that that one song from Grease was actually about the Wizard of Oz!

I thought my dad's friend was called Chicken, because they called him Chick and his wife was called Linda, and the used to always talked about Chick 'n Linda....

Me: Dad?
Dad: Yeah?
Me: (pointing at church) Is that God's house?
Dad: Well, yes, I suppose it is.
(long pause)
Me: I didn't know God lived near us.

I was also crazy afraid of escalators — I remember seeing a news story where a little kid got his pant leg stuck in one and had to be cut out of it by a bunch of firemen. I would go on them, but I was always freaked and wouldn't stop looking at my feet.

When I was in preschool, I remember noticing my mom's smallpox vaccination scar and asking her about it. She told me about the scab on her arm, and said, "Then it fell off." Naturally, I assumed she was referring to her arm, not the scab. I was confused about this for days until I asked her to elaborate on how she got her new arm.

Everybody cut, everybody cut!!

when I was around 4, I overheard my dad talking about how all sorts of unlucky things had happened to him in 1991, such as losing his job and...well, losing his job. so I said something like, "oh boy, wait until the next 1991," being under the impression that every century they ran out of year numbers and, liek, the year after 1999 would be 1900, and so on, and maybe the next 1991 would also be unlucky. due to my comment, my parents had to gently break the news to me that time wasn't cyclical, and I've never really been the same since.

how Finnegans Wake of your younger self!

i thought that every time i played a record, the people had to perform the song over again for me. i tried not to play the same record too often, because i didn't want to tire them out.

At a very young age I had read about how reproduction involved sperm and eggs but not how the two came together. I assumed it was done by kissing.

I thought the tv worked because there were people inside it.

I feared stepping on grates in the sidewalk because Dracula was under there.

At a very young age I had read about how reproduction involved sperm and eggs but not how the two came together. I assumed it was done by kissing.

I didn't think it was kissing but I didn't know what it was, either. Certainly nothing close to the facts.

xxp I used to think that all broadcast TV was performed live, in the same single studio, with the presenters of each subsequent programme lining up in an anteroom waiting for their turn to go on.

I didn't eat Shredded Wheat for years because of that diagram on the side of the box with the part of the wheat labelled 'endosperm'.

I thought Boston was south of New York City ("when I was a kid" = until I was 19)

I thought DUMPLINGS! were birds until I saw "pork DUMPLINGS!" on a menu.

I thought that the tap water in bathrooms was unfit to drink, that it came from a different non-potable source. There might be some basis for this, that the plumbing in my aunt's old house in Ireland had something like this. Or maybe I imagined that. But to this day I feel weird about drinking water from the bathroom.

OK, weird, how did "DUMPLINGS!" get suddenly capitalized/exclamation-marked?

There it is again. Jesus shit.

Magic.

At one point, I thought that when married couples went to bed, they had to have sex all night long. I always wondered why grownups weren't more tired during the daytime.

after my mom gave me the sex talk as a kid i drew all these insane implications from it and believed the fuck out of them. i thought that having sex was the way you got an erection--the only way. i'd had erections for no good reason before, just woke up with them etc, i thought there was something wrong with me. i also used to think that any time you had a hard-on you were continuously emitting sperm. i also knew how small sperm were so i also concluded that they could just float right through the fibers of your clothes, so small they were invisible to the naked eye, flat-hattin' all around the air and just IMPREGNATING. i had genuine fear that i would impregnate an aunt or cousin. i had to dig out the book my mom used as an aid and reread it to assure myself that these things could not and would not happen. when it didn't address a single thing i made up i thought the text must be incomplete, so i went looking through our encyclopedias to see if they could explain things. nothing. some dumb reproductive organ blah blah blah, some drawings. what about the flying ghost sperm??!! eventually i heard about test tube babies and was like "oh i guess it's just really hard to get pregnant."

and thus i developed a mature and complete viewpoint on sexual relations

Once I somehow got it in my head that Superman got his powers from eating soup. I became convinced that if I ate soup, I would somehow spontaneously develop superpowers, but obviously this meant I could never eat soup in front of my family because they would then know my SECRET IDENTITY. I think I kept up my soup abstinence for about two days before reality dawned.

souperman

boring but i thought radio was just the audio of tv, was irritated i could never catch inspector gadget in the car

my hometown was on a lake and I thought that England was on the other side of the lake. All the TV shows I used to watch had that THAMES title card with Big Ben on it, and when I looked across the lake I could see a tower that I swore was big ben (actually an electrical tower lol)

The first time I heard our local morning AM radio DJ sign off on the radio, my mind was completely blown. I was stunned. The man in the radio goes home? Where does he go? He's the man in the radio, if he goes home, who runs the radio? Who knows what music to play? And I DID NOT LIKE the DJ on the next shift. Oh he played THAT song, of course he did, stupid fake Mr Radio, well just wait til the real Mr Radio comes back, he'll fix it.

I spent a lot of time behind the TV set figuring out where all the people came in and out.

I thought there was a man in the fridge who turned the light on and off.

I thought joined handwriting was basically a big long squiggly line so I covered all my Golden Books in squiggly lines inside and told everyone, look at the books I wrote! No one was very pleased with me.

the world had been in black and white since the dawn of time up till it slowly became more vibrant, starting in the 50s when the first faded color photos of my mom were taken.

I don't believe this anymore, but the sense of pride from living in a full color world still lingers.

lol, there's a Calvin & Hobbes strip about that: Calvin asks why the photo of his parents is in black and white and his Dad messes with him by telling him that the world was black and white until the 70's, or something like that

maybe i can get my kids to believe that standard def was as much as the eye could see until the great Ocular Evolutionary Leap of the aughts made everything 1080p.

lol

I'm sure you can.

http://multifamilyinvestor.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/calvin-hobbes-world-black-white-color.jpg

thank you Shakey!

Hobbes reminds me of Morbs

I was pretty sure that Rocky IV was instrumental in ending the cold war.

Reminds me of a great thing I witnessed once. I was riding a tram and a father with a little boy, about 5 ish, got on. Turned out it was his first tram ride. Little boy was wide-eyed, firing off questions left and right very excitedly: "Why does the man pull that cord?" "What's that bell?" "How do the doors open?" "Why is that man in that little room?" "How fast does the tram go?" ...all kinds of questions, on and on. Then at one point he gets very quiet, and then looks up at his Dad and says out of nowhere, "Dad, how are clouds made?"

Slayed me.

my friend went to hawaii and brought me back some kind of hard rock thing, maybe it was a coconut? anyway somehow I thought it was a turtle egg and got depressed when it didn't hatch. it had a hole in it and would make a noise if you shook it. I thought maybe i was shaking the dried dessicated remains of the baby turtle :(

I thought that the tap water in bathrooms was unfit to drink, that it came from a different non-potable source. There might be some basis for this, that the plumbing in my aunt's old house in Ireland had something like this. Or maybe I imagined that. But to this day I feel weird about drinking water from the bathroom.

― fit and working again, Monday, 11 April 2011 18:43 (5 hours ago)

We were never allowed to drink from the upstairs tap because it generally comes from old water sitting around in a tank in the loft and once my dad found a dead bird in/around there.

I once stayed up for three nights freaking out because I'd seen this picture in an encyclopedia:

http://www.wired.com/geekdad/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/The_cow_pock.jpg

When Candy Flip released "Strawberry Fields Forever" I thought they'd somehow managed to brainwash the entire nation into thinking it was their own song, when I alone knew it was actually by the Beatles. Naughty, evil Candy Flip.

I could never work out where they kept the beds my teachers would sleep in at the school when all the kids went home.

i thought that everyone had to give birth through their belly button and that it was extremely painful. i can still remember the feeling of relief when i found out this wasn't true and that only women had to give birth.

related:
i thought that girls and boys had the same genitalia (i imagine many little kids probably think this at some point) and it started to dawn on me that this might not be true when i got into a heated argument with my female cousin about whether or not you had to wipe after you pee.

i feared that my parents stayed up late at night because they were witches.

i associated the words "beer" and beard" and thought that one's ability to grow a beard was correlated to how much beer one drank.

i thought that the laugh track on sitcoms came from other people laughing in their living rooms and that the speakers on the tv acted as a microphone. the fact that they thought everything was so funny made me wonder if everyone saw the same thing when they watched the tv.

I thought my parents thought I was a satanist.

they're not even religious. but i was really worried about how appalled they must have been of me.

i associated the words "beer" and beard" and thought that one's ability to grow a beard was correlated to how much beer one drank.

^^this

also I figured if you played a lot of chess you'd get a hairy chest.

I was very upset when my moustached uncle told me that I would also one day have to grow a moustache. it scared me. He was also an asshole tho.

I argued furiously with my Dad when he told me that if you want to speak French, you can't just substitute every English word with a French word in the exact same order. I remember thinking 'but if the word MEANS the same thing...'

At a very young age I had read about how reproduction involved sperm and eggs but not how the two came together. I assumed it was done by kissing.

A friend of mine at age 8 stil insisted this was so--the man's balls would go up his throat, into the woman, and down into her stomach to make a baby

1) i am adopted from south america, but i have spent like 95% of my life in the u.s.

2) i once told some friends (who, when i was nine, adopted children from south america) that i would be happy to raise their children if they ever got sick of them – i could help them "learn" how to be colombian.

If we are talking embarrassing reproductive ideas –
warning: this story is sort of disgusting
– in seventh grade health class, they were talking about acne, and how pimples were full of a substance called "sebum." But I misheard and thought she said "semen." And I started thinking about 'feminists,' who I had a rather cartoony understanding as being universally separatist extremists who wanted to get rid of all men. Why weren't they just popping their own zits to impregnate themselves? I was confused about this for years. the end.

i am not sure i want to share this

but

i actually spent most of sixth grade

thinking that sex involved drinking different cocktails laced with bodily fluids, or made from admixtures of blood, sweat, semen, and pee

neither of my parents drank, and i thought that was why sexy people always went into bars on tv

i told my friend JR about this, and his mom overheard and i was banned from his house for life

awwwww remy!

i was greatly relieve to (a) learn i was wrong and (b) recognize that because i was adopted my parents hadn't, necessarily, participated in this gross process.

i had a friend who as late as 8th or 9th grade thought the female monkeybusiness was all located in the upper pelvic region just below the belt.

which all came to light listening to snoop and arguing what doggy style was

around christmas where my nephew lives I guess the firemen drive their truck around neighborhoods and have a dude dressed up as santa stand and wave at all the kids or something. The little dude freaked the fuck out as the truck approached because he loved the concepts of santa and trucks, and was all wide eyed and quiet when the truck and the wave actually passed. After it went by I asked him if it was all he wanted it to be and he burst into a huge smile and went "Yeah!!! And Tomorrow! The Easter Bunny! He's gonna come by on a GARBAGE TRUCK!"

sorry for that post it wasn't me

My sister nearly had a mental breakdown as one Christmas Even approached when she was maybe 5 or so. My mother FINALLY got her to talk about it, and it turned out she was terrified that a strange man was going to come into her house/room while she was asleep and everyone acted like it was perfectly normal.

Which isn't strange or stupid at all, really! She's clearly the sensible one among us loons.

remy, I haven't told you this for a while but I really like you very much.

i thought you could put as many horizontal lines in the middle of a capital E as you wanted to. the more lines you put the fancier the E was so i used to spend ages on each E to the point that each one would look like a comb.

i was greatly relieved to (a) learn i was wrong and (b) recognize that because i was adopted my parents hadn't, necessarily, participated in this gross process.

One of my friends asked me once if my parents had adopted me because they didn't want to have sex. We were probably like 12, 13.

I don't know if all adopted kids go through a lot of intense myth-making about their possible parentage, or if all kids do that and just find other justifications for it, but when I was five I was definitely fond of narratives that started out, "I don't know for sure that my real father wasn't an astronaut who was exposed to cosmic rays that will eventually give me amazing powers..." Even once I found out a very little bit - my father was a cop - I started thinking, you know, he was some super-cop who couldn't have kids because the bad guys would take them hostage or something. Years later - 30 of them - my mother explained that as far as she knew, my father was just a cop who'd gotten someone pregnant other than his wife. Balloon deflated.

i thought you could put as many horizontal lines in the middle of a capital E as you wanted to. the more lines you put the fancier the E was so i used to spend ages on each E to the point that each one would look like a comb.

me too

omg I love comb E

my dad had (and still has) a habit of referring to all of his friends as "uncle john" and "uncle rusty" in my presence, such that i thought they all actually WERE my uncles. "uncle" rusty owned a pizzeria and i remember going around the playground one day telling everybody that the guy who owned that pizzeria was my uncle. (i later ended up actually working there when i was 16.)

as it happens, my dad has an older sister and my mom is an only child so technically i have no uncles

this one isn't mine, but it's always stuck with me. a friend of mine when i was a boy, but not so young to have any completely ridiculous ideas left - we were probably adolescents at the time - were having a discussion about this thread topic when he told me that when his mum was a child she'd believed that electricity pylons (transmission towers merkins call them?)/the power lines that they carry were trampolines for horses. i find myself inexorably thinking of that every once in a while when i see pylons.

http://www.carboncommentary.com/wp-includes/images/Electricity-pylons-001.jpg

As a toddler, I first associated the word 'new' w/ toys & gifts. Thus, while en route to a camping trip in New York (aboard the family station wagon), I was devastated when we crossed the state line & it was the same boring old grass, trees & cars, and not the kaleidoscopic swirl of primary colors and teddy bears I had envisioned.

I recall the first time I was allowed to go outdoors at nightime, I was struck at the appearance of the nighttime sky. There were all these tiny lights that looked really far away. I imagined they were like little blue Christmas tree lights up in the sky. My mother told me those were stars and that they were actually big, and only look small because they were far away. So I imagined they were big light bulbs up in the sky, maybe 5 meters across if you climed up a tall ladder and got close to them.

One night I saw a star that, unlike the others, was slowly moving across the sky. When I asked my mum why one of the stars was moving, she told me that wasn't a star, but rather a plane. I had never seen an airplane up close, nor understood it's function. I just knew planes were kinda like stars except they moved across the sky instead of staying put. They were both just little lights in the sky at nighttime, and the only real difference between stars and planes was that stars stood still and the occasional planes I would see moved. As far as I understood, except for their motion or lack thereof, stars and planes were essentially the same thing.

^^
this is the most bonkers one of the lot in it's own way. had you not seen pictures of stars or planes before?

I didn't "truly" believe this, but the thought had occurred to me..

This was when I was at Sunday School, South Shields, so I'd have been five maybe. Basically, that everyone was 'acting' in front of me, that people were waiting for cues to appear in front of me, say/do whatever, then go 'backstage' and so on.

When the Truman Show came out, I was somewhat "OK, wait..", and of course no-one believed me when I said I'd had the same basic storyline idea back when I was five.

When I did get to see the film, I thought it pretty well done, funny, and so on, but the ending was a bit disappointing (basically, he gets out, and the film ends), so one day I might get round to writing my version.

reminds me of another calvin and hobbes strip where he imagines his parents are aliens and are just wearing human masks.

as it happens, my dad has an older sister and my mom is an only child so technically i have no uncles

― Sittin' Fran (donna rouge), Tuesday, April 12, 2011 12:16 AM (8 hours ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

Your parent's cousins can be your uncle, too.

um no, they are also your cousins

I used to think the president of the US used to live in this little office complex (where you might have a doctor downstairs and a dentist upstairs and thats it) because the building had columns out front barely oriented the same as the white house. Like, when he got upgraded to president of the whole country he went on to the fanciest of buildings with a small group of columns in the front.

You are saying that that my mother's cousin is also my cousin? My cousin's parents are my great cousins?

yes: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cousin

basically, everyone in your family is your cousin but some cousins get special names (aunt, uncle, mother, father, brother, sister, grandparent, etc)

(your parents' cousins are your first cousins, once removed)

So me and my family aren't totally crazy to use uncle and aunt instead.

oh no you're still totally crazy

Haha alright whatever I'm not calling my Aunt Lynn great great cousin Lynn.

I call those relations auntie and uncle etc. but only on the latin american side where just about anyone is an auntie or uncle.on the scottish side I call them 'sorry who are you again?'

This was when I was at Sunday School, South Shields, so I'd have been five maybe. Basically, that everyone was 'acting' in front of me, that people were waiting for cues to appear in front of me, say/do whatever, then go 'backstage' and so on.

When the Truman Show came out, I was somewhat "OK, wait..", and of course no-one believed me when I said I'd had the same basic storyline idea back when I was five.

i thought this too, i assumed it was a pretty common fun/paranoid fantasy. like "maybe my friends aren't really my friends, maybe my parents just paid them all to pretend to be my friends."

i thought that the laugh track on sitcoms came from other people laughing in their living rooms and that the speakers on the tv acted as a microphone.

yes!

also when we first got a VCR and my parents recorded something we were watching I sat VERY QUIETLY, thinking any noises I made would be recorded too. Then my mother asked me a question and I got irritable and didn't answer, and she said "you didn't think you'd be recorded, would you?" and I had to pretend that I knew all along but didn't feel like talking.

In Britisherland it used to be a thing for friends of your parents to be "auntie" or "uncle" even if they were no relation at all. That is mostly dying out but it's still a handy generic term for "some kind of relative who is roughly the same generation as your parents or older", or at least that's how it works in my family. (I don't know if I'm pointing out the obvious or if there is another great Atlantic divide for ILX to have a squabble over.)

Auntie or Uncle for someone who is so close to your family is still done in the US. Depends on how family-oriented people are...it varies wildly.

When the Truman Show came out, I was somewhat "OK, wait..", and of course no-one believed me when I said I'd had the same basic storyline idea back when I was five.

i thought this too, i assumed it was a pretty common fun/paranoid fantasy. like "maybe my friends aren't really my friends, maybe my parents just paid them all to pretend to be my friends."

― congratulations (n/a), Tuesday, April 12, 2011 9:39 AM (1 minute ago) Bookmark

yeah p sure this is a normal thing. I know I had such fantasies as a little kid & then got a similar deja vu shiver as a while reading Breakfast of Champions as a teenager - at the end when Bunny Hoover takes Kilgore Trout's story as gospel & imagines that the world is an elaborate set-up made by God/aliens just to fuck with him.

yeah i def thought everyone had that thought at some point as a kid...

One of my ex's thought that the truffles that pigs sniff for in the ground were the chocolate kind. We were out eating one night (around age 21-22) and they place brought truffles with the check and he was like, "You know pigs find those, right?" and I was all "O rly? Pigs find chocolates in the ground, huh? You don't say!" lol. He didn't know truffles were a type of mushroom and just never thought about the fact that chocolates don't grow in the ground.

That is kinda cute

^^ this was me until my mid-teens. Oh! There are TWO kinds of truffles! Except I didn't know there were chocolate truffles and I thought people ate the mushroom kind as a sugary treat 0_0

VG it was v funny and adorable at the time. Aw ffm :)

i broke up with someone once not too long after we went swimming in a bay and he said, quick! come and have a look at this, i think it's a crab! and i went over to look at it and it was a seahorse.

okay this thread is inspiring me to create some morel-flavored dessert

xp: hahahahahahahaha

that Jimmy Carter meant it when he said "I'll never lie to you"

also, when I was about four, I think I believed that women grew penises when they got older

(probably just wishful thinking)

hahaha

a little old for this thread, not to mention this conviction, but for a few months in eighth grade i became convinced not only that i was meant to have three testicles but that i had in fact had three testicles previously and had lost one (presumably through excessive masturbation)

i still remember the stunned wash of relief and deliverance when someone at school mentioned "both" of his own testicles

i am very pro-sex-ed

this is one of the best threads of all time

When I was little I thought Oscar from Sesame St's name was Ask Her the Grouch.