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...

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