weird arbitrary rules you made for yourself as a child

When I was in preschool, the year before kindergarten, I thought that there would be a rule in kindergarten that when you peed standing up you weren't allowed to break the "bubble puzzle" which was the network of bubbles that form on the surface of the toilet water, and that I had to fill the whole surface with bubbles and not pee on the existing bubbles or I wouldn't be allowed in kindergarten.

I spent the whole year practicing.

if I didn't see a red car go past before reaching the end of walking along a fairly long street, I would have to throw myself into traffic (this lead to much dawdling as the end of the street got nearer, until a red car finally would drive past)

I had an elaborate set of rules about the light switches at the top and bottom of stairs but I can't remember how it worked now. I think I had a rule that once I turned the light out in the basement I wasn't allowed to look backward while ascending the stairs

My room had a built-in desk which had a two big mirrors over it - one facing flat out and another at an angle, but still facing out. What this created was an area in the center of the room where if you were walking past them you would see two reflected images of yourself walking in two different directions. I couldn't deal with this at 4 so the rule was that whenever I walked past them I had to duck down below the line of the desk and crawl past so I wouldn't reflect.

That actually sounds quite sensible!

I couldn't spoil my birthday or Christmas by doing a poo, so I would make sure to go the night before and then skip a day.

Thank you!

Xp

This thread is already hysterical

xxp that also sounds quite sensible

I knew that God wanted me to save everyone's pencil tips when they broke at school. Everyone got to know this and started deliberately sharpening and breaking their pencils for me and eventually it spread across the whole school. It went on for some years and I had bags of thousands of them, which I intended to make a religious sculpture with. I lament that I didn't.

what sort of religious sculpture?

cristo lead-entor

I was sure that non-handicapped people weren't allowed to use handicapped bathroom stalls. Our church's women's bathroom had one of each and I would wait in line to use the reg stall for years until finally I saw reputable adults using it and realized it was okay. (No I have no idea why I suddenly noticed after years of being there.) (We also had one parishoner who had to ride a motorized scooter so I thought that bathroom was only for her.)

if I didn't see a red car go past before reaching the end of walking along a fairly long street, I would have to throw myself into traffic (this lead to much dawdling as the end of the street got nearer, until a red car finally would drive past)

I told myself if I didn't get to my driveway before another car passed, I would force myself to jump into traffic. Where does this come from?

I knew that God wanted me to save everyone's pencil tips when they broke at school. Everyone got to know this and started deliberately sharpening and breaking their pencils for me and eventually it spread across the whole school. It went on for some years and I had bags of thousands of them, which I intended to make a religious sculpture with. I lament that I didn't.

there is nothing about this which is not fucking amazing on every level

I think maybe it would have been Saint John of the Cross.

Another rule involved squinting my eyes at every fourth lamppost to make a 'star' of the light, and then tilting my head from side to side so that it would detach and ascend to heaven. Religious symbolism really drove my internal world, it would seem.

Everyone got to know this and started deliberately sharpening and breaking their pencils for me

That reminds me of the year everyone in my grade decided that eraser dust was a valuable commodity.

i don't know that i had any of these. i mean, i liked making (and popping) pee bubbles, fled the dark when flipping switches, played imaginary games involving carpet lava, experimentally indulged odd "beliefs", but never felt truly bound by arbitrary rules. kind of sad ;_;

My brothers and I wouldn't ever go on or near this one plot of land in our neighborhood because it was owned by Hitler.

definitely the biggest thing for me, starting in 6th grade and going all the way through high school, was what i internally referred to as "counting the words". i would break out words into their letter components, assigning each one an half a beat (an 8th note) of length. The first letter of each word would receive a full beat (quarter note), spaces between words received half a beat, apostrophes and most other pronunciation half a beat. The last letter of a selected phrase received a full beat. the goal was to end on a downbeat rather than an upbeat.

So "puppy" would become P (full beat) u-p-p-y (half a beat each), and would end on an upbeat. The 's' in "Tables" would end on a downbeat, and even better, it ended on the downbeat of the right foot, if you were alternating your feet left and right to keep track. I thought of words/phrases that ended like this, on the downbeat of the right foot, as "perfect" because they would set up a new word/phrase on the downbeat of the left foot (the starting point).

i became obsessed with all of this. i thought i was keeping it private but eventually i think i said something out loud or was just acting like a complete weirdo and someone asked what i was doing. it's funny, i explained it to them (and for some reason they were willing to listen and even learn how it worked and tried it out!) and then i pretty much never did it again. it was like a terrible disease that you could only get rid of by giving it away.

That reminds me of the year everyone in my grade decided that eraser dust was a valuable commodity.

haha I love these spontaneous economies. in our school freshly mown grass('hay') was precious, to be hoarded, hidden, stolen and fought over. we had to have a serious talk about it in assembly

I just remembered that we also weren't allowed to go near the woods behind our elementary school because that's where Bloody Mary lived. I guess all of my weird arbitrary childhood rules involved the real estate of sinister mystical figures.

When using the school drinking fountains always do one squirt on/off first before drinking, otherwise you get girl germs. Can't remember if other boys told me this was necessary or I made it up myself.

we had to have a serious talk about it in assembly

We had to be lectured not to waste school supplies. I guess it was the limited availability of erasers and the time needed to convert them into dust which made it precious, but the dust was also said to have magic properties. Some Marxist base-superstructure thing operating there.

That reminds me of the year everyone in my grade decided that eraser dust was a valuable commodity.

― jmm

i had totally forgotten about this, but now i remember it was totally a thing when i was a kid! also cicada shells.

at one point in second grade i determined that the best way to get on That's Incredible was to be the kid who never stopped running. I was gonna run every day nonstop every day except when i slept for ten years. So I just kept running in place while sitting on the bus and at my desk and then at lunch i'd eat running around and then run all over the playground. I did that for like two days and then at some point I got distracted and one of my teachers asked me if I was finally done. I looked down and then started crying hysterically. Shortly thereafter, I opted to be the first kid who would wear groucho marx glasses for ten years straight. I think that lasted four days. I was never on That's Incredible.

I was on Child's Play though! No idea what episode. I bought my first car with savings bonds i won on it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a9KNKCOyRCY

fucking hell, i just did a youtube run and found one of the episodes i was on! crazy.

link LINK LINK LINK

I had a lot of rules about how I had to hold my breath and run as fast as I could through empty rooms in my house, or the devil would try to possess me. I still think about this when I'm in the laundry room or whatever. 'The devil's not real; you can move at whatever pace you want.'

I also had a rule that I had to pick up every earthworm I found on the sidewalk after the rain and carry it to some grass. At one point I carried like 25 worms before being able to find a grass patch, and I had to wait until I got to school to wash it off. Blech. I made a limit on carrying one worm in each hand after that.

it = worm slime

the video is not very interesting btw