Weird things you did as a kid but until now haven't told anyone about

Also, my barbie dolls were all lesbians, I said it was because I didnt have a ken doll. I didnt really even understand what gay was, I just wanted them to sex each other. I have told people this before, though.

-Around the age of one or two I'd take out the spoons from my grandparents' utensil drawer and line them up end to end on a table in the straightest line I possibly could with all the spoons spaced out as evenly as I could. If I thought it was even slightly off, I'd knock the spoons off the table and would start again. My family thought I was a savant for this.
-I drew extensive fictional road maps and tried to design my own interchanges. Sometimes when I felt really ambitious I'd design fictional countries and do everything from list all the major network affiliates in each community to designing a succession of weather maps for the country (and this usually involved developing my own hurricane season with a list of names and a whole slough of tropical systems morphing into Category 5 monsters just prior to landfall).
-I taught myself to read at the age of two and a half. My parents swear they didn't help me or encourage me.
-I loved watching the KTLA/Los Angeles news (my grandparents' received it even though they lived in Panama City, Florida -- it's a superstation like WGN or WPIX) mainly for the skycam aerial views but I also had a minor crush on Jennifer York, strangely enough. She's waaay too chatty for me to be interested in her now.
-In speech therapy class in first grade (I couldn't pronounce my "th's" "r's" "l's" and "w's" correctly) we once played hangman and I got really bored of all the other kids doing easy words like "cat" and "dog" and decided out of my impatience to be a showoff and stump them all by challenging them. I put 17 dashes on the chalkboard, informed them all that it was one word, and had them guess the letters. Halfway through they understandably gave up -- "We don't know this, Ian! Give us the answer!" So, what was this word? "Electrocardiogram."

who I thought I might possibly be impressing with this deceit, i no longer know.

I'm really ashamed of this pastime now.

Anyway to me I think it was something about pretending to be metallic, and trying to talk with a spoon in my mouth made me sound like a robot, or something.

I've been very nice to animals ever since because I'm not getting attacked by internal organs again (unless I eat a giant burrito).

On the beach we used to build golf ball castles which were huge mounds of sand with tunnels and ramps on them for golf balls (which we stole from the golf course, thinking about it probably from people who were currently playing) then we'd make them bigger and as the tide was coming in we'd sit on them untill they collapsed then we'd swim in sea.

I used to take all of my stuffed animals and some things that weren't stuffed animals (like all of the change banks in the house) so that I had a perfect square (say 36), name them, arrange them as a classroom and teach them about number bases.

Could someone travel back in time and slap my 6-year-old self, please?

I also used to keep my worms in my trouser pockets. One time my mum took my trousers out of the wash and thought I'd left a hanky in them or something and pulled out a handful of soggy dead (clean) worms. She vomited too.

sorry memories coming back...

I secretly ate olives in my room and chucked the stones down the side of the bed next to the wall. I forgot all about them until we moved house and there was this enormous stash of crusty olive stones under my bed.

Also I set fire to the railway embankment by our houses trying to make smoke signals and got grounded for a month.

The blaze spread really quickly, and fire engines had to come and put it out.

Nobody ever suspected it was me.

When I was much younger, my mum would work Saturdays and my dad would go playing golf, so my older brother (10 years older) and my sister (8 years older) would have to look after me and my other brother (3 years older than me.

I think more out of sibling rivalry than anything else they'd always want to win us over, I remember my sister said she was a zombie, and we were the zombies, and I was in her room doing whatever it was the zombies did. Then my brothers ran in and kidnapped me.

They brought me into the garage and said "we are the ghouls. you can join us but you must pass a test". The test was taking a bite out of a raw potato and then smearing potato juice all over yourself. I passed it and my sister started crying because I thought ghouls were better than zombies and she was on her own.

I was immediately sent to the principal's office.

you sure you weren't being abducted by aliens?

For some reason I was fascinated with the idea that a loincloth just covered your bits, and that it could probably be rather revealing if you ran or caught a gust of wind. So I would fashion a loincloth out of my pajama bottoms and sleep shirtless in those. I vaguely remember running around the house like that, too - probably on a Sunday, when my parents were sleeping in. I couldn't have been older than five.

make "cement" by scraping away little bits of plaster on the windowsill, mixing with water, and then resmearing.

burn things with a magnifying glass under the hot sun.

I think it'd be worse if the came out the wrong end of the barrel.

I also buried food that I didn't want to eat, underground, and a couple weeks later, was scared to check to see if it was still there, but did anyway.

After that I convinced myself that I was really Russian and had been placed with an American family in some sort of Cold War spy program -- my parent's real child had been switched and was serving in the Russian child army.

* When my dad took us to his office, we'd play a game named "Sloop" where my older sister would pretend to be a crazed monster on the loose, and me and my little sister would hide and wait for her to find her. We later found out big sis just wanted to be on her own so she could eat candy out of the random office candy jars.

* One day, when I was about 6, I thought I had a magical power of water coming out of my finger tips. I was also very confused as to why this power only happened in the shower. I wasn't a very bright child.

* I used to be terrified of insects, so scared that I'd stay up all night with the lights on. Later the fear of bugs turned into a fear of vomiting, and I'd somehow get a stomach ache every night and stay up all night with the light on, reading, because I was so scared of puking in my sleep.

* I was a pathological liar ages 6-9 or so. I told my second grade class that I'd been to Yellowstone Park one weekend and my teacher contested my story. I hadn't realized that Yellowstone Park was so far away. I also told Mariah, the dumbest girl in class, that I was actually adopted and my REAL name was Emma and that my parents were English.

http://www.123helpme.com/view.asp?id=11543

I feel MUCH better now! Phew! Thanks, Gear!

Er...? Why are you apologizing?

My "Oh God" was the dread-filled realization of what an outrageously nerdy child I was, not a comment on your post. If my self-loathing inadvertantly made you feel bad, I apologize.

Yeah, kelsey, your post was oddly comforting!

I did lots of weird things as a kid, but I'm pretty sure I've told people about most of them. I have this bizarre pride when it comes to how weird I was.

Turned on other second-grade girls to the use of Dixie cups as Wonder Woman's magic cuffs when SuperFriends craze hit our class. When I was about two I used to stuff my fists in Dixie cups and play Horsey.

Decided, aged six, to adapt afghan crocheted by mom into fetching off-the-shoulder number, which I paraded around in while playing with my friends in next-door's garden. I had also been experimenting with lipstick. To this day I have *no idea* why I suddenly started running around, yelling "I'm a drag queen!", ending the episode by assuming a defiant stance and wiping off this bright orange lipstick with my arm.

( . . . just in case anyone else thought they were dumb . . . )

I was a superhero when I was really little, by the way - Super SaPrincess. I had a theme song and costume and would create stories for my character. My sister heather was True Blue, my trusty sidekick. Our youngest sis, Leslie, was Super Baby. All she did though was sit in her crib doing baby stuff - not very exciting.

Sarah's post reminded me that for a summer I was a superhero of the water: The Great Minnow.

Let me see if I can come up with something on par with kelsey's doorknob story -- I used to hump the couch when I was little so much that one day blood came out of my urethra. I complained about it and went to the doctor. It's horrible to have your own mother tell you that the cause was probably from humping furniture so much. *le sigh*

When I was small (five or so) I was obsessed with Popeye, to the point where I claimed my middle name was Popeye, and would sing his happy song a lot. As he ate spinach, I was determined to eat green things at certain points to gain his strength. That I chose to eat a couple of random small plants in the garden was seen by my mother as most unusual (this is probably why Poison Control was called).

Ned, man, were you eating my stash?

I didn't eat any poisonous plants, but I did like to make vegetable soup, which just meant I'd ruin a bunch of fresh veggies by throwing them in the sink, filling it up with water, and then pouring sugar, salt, and whatever else I could find in there.

No, I don't!

also, my friend and i would take office supplies from my father and try to sell pieces of paper, pens, and paperclips etc for like a nickel each at this intersection by where we lived.

-- Candicissima (candicissim...), May 20th, 2005.

i still do this!

Lemme tell ya, there are still workbook pages somewhere in the family scrapbooks signed Ned 'Popeye' Raggett, plain as day.

workbook pages? family scrapbooks? I know not these things, although I can make educated guesses. Can you describe?

When I was young, I *loved* puzzle books and workbooks and things like that -- still am a fiend for a good word puzzle -- and as many of them were I guess slightly designed for school use they had a space at the top of the page for your name, and so I dutifully filled it in with my scrawl (and make no mistake, it was a scrawl -- both my handwriting and printing are not to be held up as an example of the art).

The family scrapbook thing is more recent. There had been a few family records and books around, plus tons of photo albums, but my mom really took to them after my grandma died and left behind a huge amount of stuff that we ended up having to give away (we're talking about never-worn clothes and things). My mom and dad decided that they wanted to really reduce down the amount of stuff they had around (something I've been pursuing more recently as well) and in the process of it she ended up creating a bunch of really nice family scrapbooks of photos and things for each of the family members plus older sides of the family as well. So old photos and papers and things kept for sentimental value are in the scrapbooks.

*amazed* And the smell didn't put you off?

You are being much too rational for the childhood me.

Also, my brothers and I would pee in plotted plants (including fake ones) to "water" them -- but I think I mentioned that in my Blog 7 xmas extravaganza.

That reminds me -- I used to record episodes of Jeopardy! off of the radio (the local CBS affiliate can be picked up at 87.5 FM) and would try to memorise the answers. Also, on the computer program Hyperstudio when I was ten (remember it? It was like a prototype for a Powerpoint, but more fun for children) my friend Jobeth and I would record ourselves pretending to be British deejays on a radio show called The Fleabag. "Next up we have some Prodigy on the way, but first we're going to play the new Blur!"

- attempting to make blackberry ice cream one summer by getting a bunch of blackberries from the bush in the back yard, taking them in, and mixing them up with crushed ice and salt (because I had heard that ice cream makers use salt in the churning process). Needless to say, the concoction was neither ice cream nor particularly edible.

- pretending that I was the queen of some ancient tribal society. I would strip down to my undershirt and panties, wrap myself up in my old baby blanket, and order my stuffed animals around.

- being at my grandparents' house (again, during the summer), staying in the family room, and pretending to be a bus driver by scooting their wheeled ottoman around and picking up imaginary children. This was actually a great deal of fun to me.

- being so paranoid about stepping on the in-between gaps that occur when a walking surface is composed of various slabs that I would look down all the time, just to make sure that I didn't step on any. Do you guys know what I'm talking about? I don't know the terminology here; I do know that I wasn't nearly as bothered with stepping on actual cracks than I was on those grouted gaps.

- reading my children's Bible and finding out about this thing called "manna", which sounded really delicious to me, so I attempted to replicate what I *thought* would be "manna" by taking a slice of bread and drizzling honey over it, then letting the honey harden on the surface of the bread and eating it. Ever since then, I've found that to be one of the most pleasurable things to eat. And I've found out that "manna" wasn't really that.

- thinking that egg rolls were, literally, rolls filled with egg, and since I really didn't care for eggs as a child, I did not for the life of me want to try out an egg roll. Now, I love those things, and I actually like eggs too.

http://www.yesnet.yk.ca/schools/wes/webquests_themes/insects_webquest/insect_templates/mud_dauber_wasp_template1.gif

I made "chocolate milk" by pouring bitter cocoa powder and sugar in milk. It never mixed well.

Occasionally I drank maple syrup direct from the bottle

The worst was when I ate raw sugar from a bowl. It was gritty so I poured water on it to make it pasty. It makes my teeth ache to remember that.

When i was 12 I did a paper route, and sometimes brought this kind of stuff in a thermos to drink when it was cold. I mixed hot chocolate with egg nog, maple syrup, and pilfered liquor. I even stirred candy canes in there until they melted. Yuck.

Once, while sleepwalking, I walked into my parents' bedroom, walked into their bathroom, peed in their trash can, and then went back to bed.

One time, I had to urinate, and for some reason I didn't want to leave my room and go to the bathroom. So instead I took and empty box of cough drops (Vicks, I believe), used scotch tape to seal up the cracks, and peed into that. I had obviously underestimated the capacity of my bladder and/or the cough drops box because it filled up long before I finished and some of the overflow got into my trash can. I remember being very ashamed about that, and part of me was always afraid that someone would see the rust marks that eventually formed on the bottom of the trash can and KNOW that it was piss rust.

I once cut open both ends of a large envelope, drew some kind of robot circuitry on it and put it on my arm. I also put on a pair of sunglasses and my mom's shower cap. Then I insisted that my mom take a picture of me standing in front of the Christmas tree. I'm not really sure what kind of "look" I was going for with that.

I used to be convinced that the look and texture of a tongue up close was caused by putting a snail in your mouth. I was always afraid to look at my tongue because I didn't want to think that a snail had somehow gotten into my mouth without me realizing it.

For a long time, I was afraid to eat that large, shelled pasta (can't remember the exact name for it) because it reminded me of the maggot that woman gave birth to in the remake of The Fly.

We hung out for what seems like years. One time we decided to act out what we would do when we were grown up and I decided I'd be a famous mathematician by finding a number that would be so big it couldn't be subtracted. But when I did the math i just kept getting negative numbers, and I knew it was too abstract of a concept for me to figure out that morning.

I remember being really upset when one day we were told we couldn't have a sleepover cos I was a boy and she was a girl. It was totally innocent, we must have been 3 or 4, but it crushed my heart.

Funny thing was, I wasn't teased or bullied and I did okay in school, I just had better things to do at home.

Heh. When I was younger, me and my brother did this whole choreographed routine to several tunes from the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack, that "fire on witch mountain" (is that what its called?) one in particular. Lots of dramatic arm moves and arty stuff - we had it all planned out that we'd perform for the family at xmas day. I dont think anyone really wanted to see it once we did, though.

Except I'd always fall over afterwards of course.

Eventually we freaked out and told our parents who got very upset and sent us straight to the showers - literally. The subject were then mercifully dropped by our parents never to be mentioned again. Which didn't stop us from going at it the next summer.

Along the lines of choreographed dancing, one day at school two girls made up a dance to BLACK CAT by janet jackson and performed at recess. Desperate to have the spotlight, I tried making up a dance to PERSONAL JESUS by depeche mode and really wanted to show up and stun the whole school.

I failed 7th grade science class, because instead of paying attention, I made little flip book epics in my textbook. It was hundreds of pages worth. They were stick figures getting tortured, mostly. The best one was a stick figure chased by a missile. He dodged the missile, which flew off the page, but then he walked off a cliff and splattered. His ghost rose to heaven. Then the missile doubled back and made a hole in the ghost, which fell and splattered. Then the missile looped a third time- and blew up the dead ghost.

This is now my profession.

- After watching a show about how you could make a tiny wind-up car out of a matchbox and an elastic band followed by a show featuring a sit-in electronic car for very very rich kids, I figured I should pester my Dad to help me build a giant one of these elastic propelled cars. I remember him going "But how are we going to make the wheels? Where are we going to get a giant elastic band?!".

- After watching 3,2,1 I also figured it would be very easy to build a robot out of a dustbin.

- I wanted to be a cartoonist when I was eight and designed a whole book of comic strips centring around a character called Brian the Mouse and his friends. In a shop on a visit to America I went round shaking a magic 8-ball shouting "Will I be a cartoonist when I grow up?!".

- In true Calvin and Hobbes style, I saved up tokens off the back of Ricicle packets and sent off for some cardboard specs that were supposed to turn you into another person when you moved your head. I was so disappointed that all they did was change colour. "Well I wouldn't want you changing into another person" said my Dad.

My cousins and I used to do this with a see-saw except we would sing "Eeeehhh-Bob!"

My cousin used to perform magic tricks as a four year old. He would make objects disappear but we had to close our eyes and look away. He'd then run into the house and run out again with nothing in his hands going "You can look now!"

We also used to bounce up and down on the trampoline to the tune of Lorelei by the Cocteau Twins (who at that point I hadnt got round to actually getting into) cos it had been on the TV test pattern, believe it or not.

This thread marvels me. What if we stayed this cool into adulthood? What of the world?

Later on in our early teens we made a tape called Bud. The first track was my friend talking about how he "skanked" 99p from an old man, then a song called "Farmer Heemar", then a song called "Fuckfuckfuckfuckbuggerbollocksbuggerbollocks" featuring a toy keyboard, then a really horrible 6 minute noise made on guitar and computer speaker, then a song called "The Bastard's Coming Home" set to the Monty Python theme tune.

*Gobots were involved in these battles in place of Transformers, because Gobots were cheap and ghetto and I didn't mind so much when sand got all up in their asses.

I once decided to dig a whole through the crust of the earth to reach the mantel and maybe find a dinosaur along the way. So of course the parents came home to find a big pit in the middle of the lawn.

[...]

I walked around the supermarket dragging my right leg so shoppers would think I was a cripple and feel sorry for me

UNBELIEVABLY AWESOME

I used to do this with Mini Cheddars.

I also used to take the light up bit out of my GlowBug (remember? GloBug and Gloworm/Squeeze their tummies/ see their faces light the night) and leave it on my stomach, enjoying the almost burning sensation.

I spent one whole evening playing a game of tick (tag for the US) with my cat and a neighbour's cat. They got it, I swear.

And I used to climb into the airing cupboard, in my house and at both of grandmothers' annd prentd I was stowing away on a ship. I spent hours in there. I also used to climb onto the bottom shelf of my bookshop and into my wardrobe. Actually I still read in my wardrobe now.

I also still chatter happily to plants.

I also used to record tapes on my sister's stereo of me doing "comedy" routines, some of which involved impersonating Smashie and Nicey and doing my own sound effects(ie, breathing heavily to simulate applause).

Amen to that. Plus because they were die-cast they would hurt more if you threw them at your sister.

I got scared easily as a kid. Things that scared me:

- the Read & Listen Storyteller version of Beauty & the Beast

- Mask, the comic book in which Dusty Hayes gets injected with a drug that makes him act like a baby

- a drawing in a book about cowpox. It was meant as a satirical drawing at the time and had people with cowheads all over their bodies - really grotesque. I didn't sleep for a week and then my folks explained it was meant as a joke and that cowpox didn't really do that to you.

- Tintin and the Seven Crystal Balls/Cigars of the Pharoah. I slept with my covers tight around my neck so that no-one could fire a poison blowpipe through my window.

UNBELIEVABLY AWESOME

I didn't comment on this as I thought everyone did it, but Dan's response indiciates they maybe don't. In that case, I'd like to make it clear that I am (on these specific, admittedly narrow, terms) unbelievably awesome.

Give all barbie’s a scalping of the hair or new punk cut when I got them- swap their clothes with ken or leave them naked or draw pubes on them, and tie Barbie to objects in the house. Also decapitating the dolls and trying to flush her bobbing head down the toilet.
· I pretended I was anne frank while hiding in my cabin bed with the desk drawn in so no one could see me but I could see them- I also kept a very mundane diary about this (dad and mum were nazi’s)
· I collected hoards of worms from the garden and would place them in objects around the house i.e. mums vases – my sisters lunch box, my lunch box I would also use them as torture devices for tied up barbies.
· On a day when my mum was having a dinner party I decided to take all her sanitary towels and tampons out of the bathroom cabinet and place the tampons around the bath and down the stairs like mice, and the sanitary towels were aeroplane stickers.
· On this same night I decided to demonstrate to everyone my amazing power of snorting spaghetti up my nose and cough it out of my mouth, my elder brother trying to better me, copied me and threw up.
· I read a book about this boy who makes a marvellous potion (george?- I was a very booky child) and decided to mix all of the items I found in the bathroom together- this involved several highly toxic cleaning compounds that when mixed together release poisonous gas…..)
· I was playing drown the dolls ( a game where all the dolls where put in my toy boat in the bath and one by one where made to walk the plank of doom) – so I filled up the bath- got distracted and caused £5,000 of damage by flooding the bathroom and the kitchen ceiling collapsed (I was 5…..)

I am so ashamed…….

* I put on shows for my parents. I decided my sisters and I would be called the Blondettes, because my dad liked to call us his Blondies. I wrote all the songs and made up dances. I was also, of course, in charge of costumes. I was most proud of a solo number I did wearing my long red silk nightgown with a rose on the front. I called it "The Rose of September" and imagined myself to be a lounge singer. That must have been really weird for my parents.

* I also always insisted on having a club with my sisters and was almost always the Secretary. I let my middle sister be the President because that didn't really mean anything. I wrote up newsletters for us, including reports on what our parents were up to, and, for some reason, also treated the club like playing school. I would type up text book-like notebooks about Wellness or make my sisters memorize portions of Numbers (from the Bible). The club was usually also called the BLondettes, but sometimes would switch names to something like The SHLJ club.

my brother also took it upon himself to record a top-ten list of insults. unfortunately, due to the popularity at the time of "dick head" and "dick nose", coupled with the fact that he was ad-libbing the list, the number one insult of 1987 was apparrently "dick knee". i never heard anyone use it before or since. but i may start using it now.

we then listened to these recordings over and over until the batteries ran out.

i would read the book and record myself reading it and play it back later.

this later lead on to me making my own radio shows- also making sure i did the news and the weather- and adverts, all in a variety of voices. my brother would do the news tunes on his keyboard (it was the 80's they were very "now")

when i was about 10/11 my friends got involved

when we were 14 we made a pirate radio show

and when i was 18 i had a show that was being aired for 2 hours every week with Sin radio (am not fm)

I used to eat lemon. I would also contort my fingers (on my left hand)while eating. As a result they are still very flexible. I would also switch vowels in words. For example pannekoeken (pancakes) would become poenekakken (which sounds weird as kakken means shit) or daddy would turn into dydda. Oh I also stuffed my knickers in the toilet if I soiled them.

nothing unusual there

he used to wipe the bogies on the wall in his room beside his bed

not so bad (some of you have done worse)

but

he

would
not

stop

even picking his nose while having a full blown nose bleed......

When my sister was 4 and Wheel of Fortune came on, she would shout out, not "wheel! of! fortune!" but "GEORGE! IN! HIDIN!". She did this for like a year and a half. To this day still no one knows what that was all about.
That's fucking brilliant!

Nathalie, I ate lemon, too!

As toddlers, all the kids that've ended up becoming gifted (or pretty close to the mark) in my family always went "Dicka dicka dicka dicka dicka..." while running around.

its only now that i realise that my hyperactivity disorder coupled with my natural curiosity and higher than average intelligence (at that age- i must have levelled at about 10.....) must have been so hard for my mum cause dad was never around.... we drove her absolutely insane....

like the time when my brother and i filled our supersoakers with poster paints to play paintball..........in the house.......when mum had jsut decorated....

or launching myself off of the top of the shed to grab on to the tree branch......

i cant do that now.....

My niece and I once tried to run away from my grandparents. My niece and I had the brilliant idea of jumping out of the window from the first floor. We could stand on a shutter and then jump. The problem was that I chickened out... while hanging from the ledge. My niece standing in the garden whispered: "No no! Just jump!" Uh no. My grandfather had to drag me back in. Gawd, I was such a wuss.

My niece and I also attempted to watch her dad's porn collection. We failed. Thank god, since he had tapes with bestiality on it. Pervert.

I forgot to say I ate the entire lemon. Rind and all. Blergh.

Then I'd put the container in the boiler cupboard to keep them warm.

I'd also look for secret passages in my house by walking round knocking on all the walls. It drove my mum mad, especially when she caught me trying to hack a hole through my bedroom wall with a knitting needle.

I used to draw little people, colour them in and cut them out. Then I would seal them with sellotape so they wouldn't disintegrate when I played with them in water.

Did we all masturbate as kids?

Christ, that sounds like a jazz fusion prog album title from 1973.

i also used to just smash them on the kitchen floor and squish sticks of margarine. and eat powdered jello.

Christ, that sounds like a jazz fusion prog album title from 1973.

-- Ned Raggett (ne...), May 25th, 2005.

heh heh. year of my birf, so it's appropriate!

When my parents were in the middle of their divorce proceedings, my dad agreed to sleep in my bed, leaving my mom alone in her kingsize bed. (I slept on the floor in the hallway, which I didn't mind because I did that all the time anyway -- for some reason it assuaged my fear of the dark.) I was so utterly embarrassed by my pee-stained bed that I poured all this Aqua Velva (one of my Dad's useless Christmas gifts) on the mattress, hoping it'd hide the smell.

I don't think it did. He didn't say a word to me about it, but I can only imagine.

We used to draw mazes on the sidewalk with model glue and put a bunch of ants or beetles in the middle, and then set the glue on fire. We thought that the insects would be able to find their way out of the burning maze but that never happened; they'd always just burn up.

For a while, we were also obsessed with what we called "burmese tiger traps" aka pits covered with leaves. We'd build small ones in an attempt to catch chipmunks, but only succeeded in catching shrews which were small enough that they weren't able to get out. We really wanted a chipmunk, so we got two gallon sized ice cream buckets, cut the bottoms off, and buried them on top of each other so we had a two-foot-deep pit lined with plastic. We covered it with leaves, put peanut butter on it as bait, and went to sleep in a tent in the back yard.

Early the next morning, right before the sun came up, we woke up to a horrible noise from our pit. We ran to check it out, and discovered that we had caught two shrews who were now locked in a fierce battle to the death. Both of the shrews ended up dying, so we pulled them out with barbeque tongs and placed them in a ziploc bag, filled it with sand, sealed it with Shoe Goo, and hurled it off a cliff up the street as the sun was rising. We felt really bad about it.

My youngest sister used to be terrified of burping, because she thought it meant you were going to become aged and die quickly if you burped too much. No, I do not know how she got this impression. But anyway I used to force myself to burp virtually constantly around her for my entire 8th year, to the point of her becoming incredibly hysterical and screamy.

Also my cousin and I insisted on shoving all of our Star Wars characters into the VCR, claiming it was the Death Star, on a daily basis, confounding and annoying my father, who would have to dismantle the VCR and remove the toys, on a daily basis, when we would then run to him and insist on watching Star Wars, but the VCR didn't work.

It is kind of amazing I made it past 5 without my father killing me, because these were not isolated incidents.

Another time, I developed a profound sense of dread and doom as a result of watching an Unsolved Mysteries segment on Ball Lightning. The way I understood it, Ball Lightning wasn't a freak electrical occurence, but was rather single menacing entity -- like Sasquatch or the Loch Ness Monster -- that terrorized people throughout history. I used to think about it all the time, for years.

* During doctor visits, stealing tongue depressors. Later, me & my brother would put them into the seat buckles in my grandmother's Jaguar, then take turns releasing the buckle toggle and shooting the tongue depressors out the sunroof.

* Playing Grateful Dead and Yes tapes in my Teddy Ruxpin. Was hilarious, probably still is.

* Secretly peeing in the corner of my room and into towels. This caused many tempers to flare when discovered.

After she cut the braid off, I remember getting lost in the supermarket ALL the time, like every single trip, for months.

-I also made "I am a superstar radio comedy man" tapes, either involving poorly-done song parodies (why did I think it would work to turn Genesis' "Land of Confusion" into "Land of Confucius" replete with awful mock Chinese accent?) or taping snippets of songs off the radio and mocking them somehow (example: classic rock station plays Aerosmith's "Last Child"; Steven Tyler sings 'take me back to South Talahassee' and I would switch quickly from radio to mic and yowl 'TALAHASSEEEEEH' because '70s rock is hilarious). This continued until I was roughly 13 or so, when me and this kid named Steve made up songs about Spaghetti-O's and laughed at the Police's "Roxanne" because it was about PROSTITUTION and thought the funniest thing in the world was the phrase "I'm having my period!"

-No Matchbox car was safe in my possession. I was obsessed with junkyards, so I would attmept to replicate super car-crushing machine junkyard power by smashing the cars in various household door jambs. This, understandably, irritated my parents.

-One of my more inexplicable memories from third grade was sharpening a pencil and realizing the shavings looked like a miniature hand fan like Japanese people used to carry in the 1800s. So I started waving it around and calling it a 'Barbie fan', singing about it in a disturbing falsetto. In a completely unrelated coincidence, my third grade teacher asked my parents once if I was autistic.

Also I had a poster of Morten Harkett from Aha which my brother swears I used to kiss goodnight.

I hope no one knows me in here?

I suppose it’s not as bad as being on a hospital table in the woods though.

Having said that (note: these aren't exactly in the "haven't told anyone about" category)....

There was this one time when I was four years old. I had beautiful, iron-straight hair. It was the one thing about me I was happy about. I, for some unkonwn reason, decided I wanted to cut my hair. Which I did. All around. My hair was rather short and very uneven when Mom discovered me surrounded by hair. I got a bad spanking because of that.

I remember attempting to bake sugar cookies once, when I was about seven or eight. I thought that cookies were made just from flour, sugar, eggs, and what at that time I called "butter" but what was really just margarine sticks. (I had no idea that margarine wasn't butter until I was about 19 years old.) Surprisingly, they didn't burn, but rather unsurprisingly, they tasted like crap. Mom made me eat every single one of those cookies until I had eaten all but three of them, at which time she took pity on me and let me throw the rest away.

I also remember taking current newspapers and pretending to be a newscaster by reading them in front of the TV screen, which I pretended was a TV camera. (I've never had a video camera at my disposal.) I also used to pretend to "do the weather" by turning to the Weather Channel and reading either the text on the crawl at the bottom of the screen or whatever popped up during the "Local On The 8s" segments.

I also pretended I was a businessperson by hijacking my mom's old typewriter and some typing paper we always had around the house and by typing in random things. I would also take books I found around the house and scribble in them using my crayons, as if I were doing some kind of bookkeeping. I *did* know which books I could never, ever get away with touching if I loved life (e.g. Mom's old encyclopedia set from the '50s, Dad's Bibles, anything found in the file cabinet), but the rest were fair game.

... you know, normalcy is such a relative term....

Once I stuck a peg from our Battleship game under my right eyelid and it moved around where I couldn't reach it. For about 20 screaming seconds I was convinced it was going to go behind my eye and get lodged in my brain, but then I pulled my eyelid out away from my eye while I was looking down and it fell out.

-I was afraid of swimming in the deep end of a pool in case a blue whale surfaced beneath me.
-I was constantly terrified that WWIII would suddenly start overnight, and without any political foreshadowing, "enemy" planes and troops would start attacking my house.
-Also made a stupid gang called "the Tics", made up of AsthmaTICS (like myself) and a handful of renegade DiabeTICS.

I'm sure tehre's more.

Also be warned: incorporating childhood memories into works of fiction, but altering them for dramatic or narrative purposes, fucks up the actual memories, supplanting them forever with the better fictional versions.

It all ended in tears when I fell in the dog bowl as a result of not being able to see.

this is hilarious! I love kid brains.

I remember arguing with my friend because she revealed to me that the word "you" was spelled you instead of "U" as we previously thought. It was totally inconceivable to me.

I also used to listen to Michael Jackson's "Bad" album with the record sleeve propped up (it was one of the ones that folds out) so I could reproduce in front of the mirror the moves that MJ was doing in the album pictures.

(aprox 9-10)

in comparison, that's not really nearly as weird.

I used to take white bread (no crusts) and squish it into a ball before I ate it. I also didn't like to do something with one side of my body unless I did it on the other (so, if I tapped my right leg with my right hand, I'd then deliberately tap my left leg with my left hand). I spent a good portion of my childhood pretending that I was someone else (i.e. Nancy Drew or Mindy from Mork and Mindy).

Finally, if you look in my diaries and journals - which I started keeping when I was 8 years old - at the end of every entry, I always stated my age for some reason. I didn't break that particular habit until I was over 18 at least!

I used to take all of my stuffed animals and some things that weren't stuffed animals (like all of the change banks in the house) so that I had a perfect square (say 36), name them, arrange them as a classroom and teach them about number bases.

-- The Ghost of Dan Perry (djperr...) (webmail), May 20th, 2005 1:45 AM. (Dan Perry) (link)

(You're just convincing me again that you are secretly my little brother that my parents decided they couldn't handle because I was already so much trouble.)

Then we stood by my bedroom door going "tickets! Show of the year, come one come all!". And I suddenly felt really really stupid :(

^^^ ME IN 3RD GRADE

My best friend in second and third grade told me that she could talk to angels, specifically one named "Maybe, Maybe Not." That wasn't his real name - he couldn't tell us his real name. In my heart I knew that Maybe, Maybe Not wasn't real but I wanted to believe so badly that on some level I did. She told me once that he got sent to hell for talking to us and boy did I freak out.

I used to run away a lot. A LOT. When I was really young, pre-kindergarten, and for no good reason. Well, once it was to mail a letter to my grandmother that was addressed to "Mom Mom Rogers" and stamped with a stamp that I drew myself. I can't remember why else, other than being bored. I probably didn't go more than a couple blocks, but once my father came home from work only to find me walking along the shoulder of a dual highway. I wasn't allowed to play outside for two whole days and I totally didn't see what the big deal was.

I don't remember this, but once I took a shit under the Christmas tree.

I did this too.

If a daddy long legs crossed my path while I was playing in my sandbox I would pick it up and tear off all its legs but one so it could only walk in a circle. I feel really bad about this now.

The swimming pool where I took lessons had a thick red line painted on the bottom of the pool to indicate the deep end from the shallow end. When swimming lengths we usually had to cross over the red line, and I would always swim over it as fast as possible because I had convinced myself if I went too slowly over it bloody red hands would grab me and drag me underwater to drown.

I referred to my uncle Reg as 'les incompetents' after hearing it in Home Alone ("Kevin, you're what the French call 'les incompetents'"). I don't know why I called him this, because I quite liked him, although it may have been fitting as he's declared bankruptcy like 5 times or something.

When I was three I put a single ball of syrofoam up my nose while at a gathering with a lot of my extended family. It got stuck there and my dad had to fish it out with tweezers. I don't think anyone in my family but me actually remembers this event.

Also aged three I decided to cut my hair. I put a plastic grocery bag on the floor of my parents' room to catch the cut off bits and found my cheap scissors and started hacking away at my hair, which had just been properly cut a couple days earlier. My dad found me mid-haircut and much yelling ensued.

saw a dead body by the side of the road with its head cut off. never told anyone.

no wai

My parents like to tell the story of how when I was 4 we went on vacation to the Netherlands and some dude asked me if I liked music, and I rattled off the names of like 15 Buddy Holly songs.

I once dropped a nickel onto a plug that was hanging partly out of the socket, freaking the hell out of me and my dad. That was probably the only inexplicably self-destructive thing I did as a kid.

I did the chemistry experiment too, but I wasn't too up on chemistry, so I just mixed a bunch of stuff from the kitchen cabinet up in a glass and left in my closet for a few months. It turned out less gross than you might expect.

I announced that I was on strike from school in the middle of third grade math class. I think the strike lasted about a minute.

can't compete with omar though

- Age 3 told my friends where babies came from (had asked and got a very detailed answer from my parents). Upset Presbyterian neighbours. Forgot it all due to total irrelevance to 3-year-old life and had to ask parents again aged 7.
- Age 7 was told for the first time about someone called God, at Brownies. Came home and told parents that the most important people in rank order were God, the Queen, Mrs Malton (headmistress) and them. They took it very well. Left a year later after failing to get Pathfinders badge (couldn't find path).
- Age 12 or so was madly in love with Dempsey and attempted to be Makepeace with bob haircut. I wrote storylines for them in a 'school history notebook' with HISTORY written on the front while watching the show. My mum must certainly have found and read it in my room.
- Compulsively made high-pitched squeaking noises in a certain pattern when alone in my room, at around 14. My mum heard and (unforgiveably) asked about them.
- During period of compulsive pen-pal writing (ILE of the 80s) posted off loads of photos that my Dad had taken of me and left lying around, causing massive bust-up, the proportions of which I now understand were something to do with his guilt at not living with us any more, but which I then regarded as some kind of an attempt to control my, like, image or something.

Okay:

- When I was three or so, I would always insist that to adults that I had more than one penis. I once asked my uncle how many he had, and after responded with the natural response to an adult, I puffed up my chest and said, "I have ten!"

- more to come. i am not drunk enough...

Not going to be able to beat table here but:

Before I could read I would open a book and leaf through each page until i got to the end.

If I ever did a piss somewhere where I couldn't wash my hands, like if we were out in the country and I went in a bush, I wouldn't touch anything with my hands until I could get to a sink. I didn't mention this to my parents and tried to be surreptitious about it, would sit with my arms resting on my legs with my hands hanging down in the middle. I was in no other way a clean freak, would roll around in the mud playing football, play with dogs etc. without ever thinking about cleanliness.

When I learned about mortality I didn't sleep for about 2 days. Think I was 4 or 5. I didn't tell my parents because I didn't want to be a downer by reminding them that they would die.

Alright, I'm going to reveal foot tap-counting--letter-word game habit.

I don't know how it started, or exactly when, but I got totally hooked on a way of counting out the letters of words and sentences musically. I would sound out the spelling of words and sentences in my head at a steady beat, so that the first letter of each sentence (or any letter that would be capitalized, like the names of people or cities) was worth a full beat, every other letter was worth an eighth note, and spaces were worth an eighth note. So the word "anyone" would go (hope this code works):

A-----n-y---o-n---e
1 and 2 and 3 and 4 

The word "anyone" is what I used to think of as a "perfect word", because it ended on 4. Since it ends on 4, and there's an eighth note of space between one word and the next, that means the next word would start on the 1 again.

After a while I started counting out sentences like that too, and again, if the sentence ended on 4 I'd feel pretty good about it. Since I hated ending on offbeats so much I'd try to shorten or extend sentences until they ended where they supposed to.

Also, in words with apostrophes, the apostrophe was worth an eighth note, and pronounced (mentally) as "E". I don't know why.

OH!

Starting around 8, I would pretend that I was a famous musician (or something, usually musician tho) and answer questions that an interviewer (also me) gave me. Only did this in the shower or bath, and continued to do so until...who knows, probably around 16 or 17.

xp ZS - that's awesome.

When I was in 6th grade, a friend of mine and I concocted an elaborate fictional soap opera involving our classmates, who were given character names that matched their initials. This was in the 80s when Dallas, Dynasty, etc. were on TV, so there were various rich tycoons, people dying in private plane crashes then being brought back to life, and so forth. Eventually our classmates found out about this, and would demand input into the doings of their characters. I think that was probably the most popular/influential I ever was in school.

I used to pee myself in first grade so that I could go home. I was also in a sixth grade reading class at the time. This pair of facts is somehow reflective of my life as a whole.

From about age 7 or 8, obsessively made stupid bets with myself--"If a red car doesn't drive past me by the time I walk to the next street corner, I'll jump into the traffic and die!" which, needless to say, I never followed through on if I lost (though I would walk SLOWER and SLOOOOWWERRRR as I got nearer to the corner so as to maximise my chances).

used to hyperventilate a lot
and hallucinate

From about 10-11 I used to have night terrors almost every night.

I also used to sleep walk for years. I would go downstairs and have entire conversations with my parents before they realized I was completely asleep.

So much goodness in this thread. I thank you all.

My own story:

When I was three I loved the story of the Biblical Samson. I took his story as an allegory for the strongest person I knew at the time: my mother. Years later my mom recalled that she awoke from a nap one day to find her young son straddling her torso, smiling, and holding a scissors in one hand and her hair in the other. She naturally wondered what I was doing and I said "taking your strength away," to which she replied "Dear, if you cut mommy's hair off you will not take her strength away, but you will be taking mommy's smile away."

I processed her argument, slumped off her stomach, dropped my scissors and silently went back into the living room (probably to dress up and movieoke scenes from 89's Batman).

A world where mommy had lost her physical strength would've been a place of unlimited visits to Toys R Us, unending video game time with my father, and lots of violent television. I can still see its appeal.

This thread is gold!

http://www.bisnow.com/archives/realestate/0608/re_images/060208e.jpg

Using a boom box I used to record little sketches where I did all the voices. I don't remember many of them, but I recall doing a few where two characters plotted out some kind of prank to play on a third character, who, without fail, would walk right into said prank--getting a bucket of worms on his head, hole in the ground full of bees, etc. I brought it back when I was about 13 or 14 recording my own conversations between Beavis and Butthead. I did a few, I think even got a friend in on it with me, and feeling damn embarrassed of them and threw the tapes away.

I used to chew up one Ritz cracker and then make a sandwich of the chewed cracker with two other crackers. yum yum.

i used to sing the chorus of "erotica" by madonna all over the house when it was on the radio because i loved it so much

this was 1992. i was eight years old.

I used to chew up one Ritz cracker and then make a sandwich of the chewed cracker with two other crackers. yum yum.

Wow, this theme has come up two or three times now. Oreos, Ritz, etc.

Results 1 - 10 of about 983 from ilxor.com for "resulting paste". (0.44 seconds)

We had a large oval rug in our living room and I used to race my Matchbox cars around it, allocating names of classmates to the cars, so the popular kid always "drove" the purple dune buggy or whatever. Often, my own car would lose to this popular kid who I was obviously in the thrall of, but occasionally "I'd" win. There were approximately twenty cars in the series, all corresponding to a real person, and I kept records of all races, an overall table of points a la F1, as well as a kind of running written commentary in which friendships and alliances would be in constant flux. Usually, ha ha, I'd form some kind of secret alliance with the girl I was currently crushing on. God, I was only 8 or 9!

Anyway, it was such a boring race, really. Like NASCAR, which I didn't and still don't like. Plus hard to execute, considering I only have two hands and yet I needed to manipulate the fate of twenty-odd cars and their real-world occupants, as well as record lap times and other more subjective observations. I remember it was stressful at times, especially when my mother needed to do the ironing and pretty much placed the ironing board over my circuit.

At night, I would go over in my mind what had happened for that last race and it would somehow seem more real than my own and my friends' lives.

xpost Okay, someone needs the user name "resulting paste", lol.

Add me to the list of home radio show tapers. I usually made them with my friend Br4nd0n, so it was "The Ry4n and Br4and0n and Sven show," Sven being me, holding myself back from giggling as I did a horrible Swedish accent directly ripped of from the Ren and Stimpy character of the same name. I found a box of these tapes recently while cleaning out my mom's shed and threw them away, knowing I would die of embarrassment if I actually listened to them.

In preschool I remember having these sort of "fantasies" during nap time that would revolve around this couple who I think were neighbors of the school, details are hazy. I had idea, for god knows what reason, that they were "sexual" but not knowing anything about sex I would have this weird idea that they would literally eat penises, like bowls of penis cereal. God that's bizarre. I don't think I ever masturbated at that age but I remember one day being embarrassed when the teachers discovered that I had pulled down my pants and underpants during nap time.

Not something I did, per se, but related to the last post: I had a dream when I was in 3rd grade that two kids in my class, a boy and a girl, stood face to face, fully clothed, and their penises crawled out of their pants independently and into the other kid's pants. And even though I'm pretty sure that I knew at that point that girls didn't have penises, I think there was a short period of time when I thought this was how sex worked.

your username suggests you are prone to wishful visions of genital spontaneity.

lol

i used to like biting my lip so it would get bloody and i could make lip prints on paper (i think the prints are on several school books).

I used to mould cheese into a ball and squeeze it in the hope of extracting milk. I seem to remember a giant doing it one of my favourite books. Gutted that it didn't work.

I think the dude who did that in the books (it was not a giant rather than some regular dude who wanted to impress a giant) only got water out of the cheese, he claimed it was a rock and that he could squeeze water out of a rock. I think you can do that with the more "moist" types of cheese.

(xp)And that's how I learned that cheese screams.

Why did this guy want to impress the giant so much?

I tried to put the infra structure on paper of the houses that were the stages for tv-series. My favorite series' dwelling was the one in Man About the House (Three is a Company in the US).

Pen and paper and off to the drawing board: 'so if this is the living room (inclusing furniture), than this door leads to the master bedroom (which looks like this, as seen in episode whatever). Said bedroom has a door on the left, which leads to the hall. And should, logically, be opposite to the hallway door of the kitchen...

I was never able to lay down a logical, functioning infrastructure; as I could do with the house I was living in myself. I had no clue that tv-series are shot on stage and not in real houses. This confused me quite a bit.

i think that's jack and the beanstalk? not sure, but i remember the cheese squeezing dude-impressing-a-giant too.

or maybe Seven in One Blow? (huh huh huh)

fairy tales 4 u

http://fairytales4u.com/story/sevenat.htm

I think of the things I did that got attention and most of them were just original / clever instead of "weird" (i.e. make your parents want to take you to a shrink). The only thing I did that I had trouble living down was when all of the kids in school were getting braces and retainers so I decided to play a prank by putting a paper clip in my mouth and saying I got a retainer like all the other kids.

It seems like no big deal, a harmless gag, but one girl on the bus overreacted to it, like she was angry I would do something so deceitful. Now that I think about it, she was the real weirdo, like she kept obsessing about the paperclip in my mouth for days after.

who didn't make a pretend retainer?

oh wait

Three is a Company

haha. good stuff here.

when i was 7 or 8, i remember breaking down crying because i didnt understand the meaning of the word 'bad'. i didnt stop crying until my mother came home and explained it for me....

I've told everyone about this, so it doesn't quite belong on this thread, but I've got like 20 tapes of me doing radio shows from around 9 to 11-years old. I've got a tape somewhere called "2007" which I recorded as a Dick Bartley-stlyed "look-back" at the year 1987 (that I did in the year 1987.)

I would also have my programming interrupted by tornadoes and would go live to reporters "on the scene" which I would accomplish by turning on a walkie-talkie next to the mic and "broadcasting" my reports from the bathroom, so that the voice on the tape would sound like it was on the phone.

In my early teens, I started doing more sound collage things, like five seconds from all my records and tapes in alphabetical order or those lame Q&A things were the Answer comes from a song title.

After that, it was 15 years in radio. I really should've just been sketching at a drafting table that entire time.

In my early teens, I started doing more sound collage things, like five seconds from all my records and tapes in alphabetical order or those lame Q&A things were the Answer comes from a song title.

my older brother tom and I used to do something like this 'cept with Roland Rat records.

i really hate that i didn't keep up with tapes i made. interviews and things where i did all the voices. one involved a book review of some classic novel where the reviewer is called out for simply reading the back jacket off a hardy boys adventure. another sketch was dictionary reading for the blind. as the name implies, i read a page from the dictionary.

You had some rather lofty inspirations for a child. I was into more readily grasped subject matter, for example, lol bees.

I don't think I've changed a whole lot.

Q: So, Mr. Lennon, what did you tell the doctors on the night of December 8?
A: "Nobody told me there'd be days like these!

I was a pretty sick fuck even back then.

I think I even interviewed all the Beatles at one point with John coming in on that walkee-talkee since he was on remote.

Climb up my bedroom door frame at night when my parents were watching tv in a different part of the house. I used to sit up there and listed to the TV until I got tired.

I used to pull the plug out of the bath and just lie there till all the water drained away. At a certain point it gets unbearable tickly but I would try to remain still.
This was supposed to teach me mind over matter so I could be like my hero Snake Eyes from Action Force (GI Joe).
As a a result I am not remotely tickly now...

^^^my daughter does this every night. when the water is gone she licks the tub. kid drinks bath water like its champagne.

i think i did that too. it took me a long time to realize it was ok to get out before the water drained.

I did that to. When the water is almost gone it creates a suction between the bottom of the bath and the your (stretched) legs which feels like your legs double in weight. That's an amazing feeling.

Starting around 8, I would pretend that I was a famous musician (or something, usually musician tho) and answer questions that an interviewer (also me) gave me. Only did this in the shower or bath, and continued to do so until...who knows, probably around 16 or 17.

I still do this.

i used to bite myself really hard on the arms or legs, sometimes drawing blood, and then i would study the bite marks

^^^ i did this