The ‘dubious’ smiley might have meant that, but the rolleyes meant he remembered who you were.
I couldn’t figure out why people could pay bills with a check. I decided that the red stuff on top that held them together must be very, very valuable.
perhaps, :dubious:
But yes I do feel so deprived as a child 
When I was a kid I had a little stuffed bulldog that I loved so much I believed he was “real”. One day I spilled grape juice on him. Tried to wash it off but no-go. So I decided, since this little dog was MY dog and of course he’s real, I’d give him a haircut and it would grow back. I cut off the purple-stained fur, then decided to just even his fur all over so it would grow back nice and neat. Spent a good hour with scissors carefully cutting and ended up with a bald bulldog. It never did grow back and my brothers called him “Baldy” from then on.
I thought that grocery stores had two levels - one level where all the people shopped, and another level above that where staff were paid to lay on their stomachs and talk in holes through the floor (their floor of course being our ceiling.) This was my understanding of intercoms.
I thought sex was illegal, because everybody was always so hush-hush about it when the subject came up around me.
I remember being shocked as a little boy putting about box number seven of cereal in mom’s shopping cart and her saying, “We can’t buy all of those!”
It never dawned on my you had to PAY for cereal - I just thought you picked it up and took it home.
Then again, someone told me chocolate milk came from black cows and I believed that for probably a tad longer than I should have.
Well, I once…MN.
When I was about 5 or 6 I thought that many adults were witches (in the Bewitched style) including my parents but it was all a carefully guarded secret. There were just too many things that they did that weren’t quite explainable in ordinary terms. I got a little ticked that they wouldn’t use their powers to solve every little problem but again, Samantha wasn’t allowed to do that on Bewitched either so it made sense. I figured that there was a good reason for it and I would find out when they decided the time was right to reveal my own magical powers. I tried to do spells myself with only modest success and I am pretty sure that I came close to levitating from my bed a few times but I didn’t practice it enough for it to fully work.
When I was 5 or 6, my best friend’s mom was a jeweler, and she’d watch us in her shop some days after preschool/kindergarten. I’d see her working in wax all the way up to the final detail, then the next day there’d be a ring (or whatever).
For many years I believed all jewelry had a wax core and the metal was just a thin layer on the outside.
I still can’t look at a trapezoid and not think of it as a “Chinese Triangle”, which is what I named them when I was learning my shapes.
I thought “Princess Di” was a stage name for some singer or actress, like “Queen Latifah.” It bowled me over to learn that she was, in fact, a princess. Princesses weren’t just in fairy tales?!
I believed when you reached adulthood you had figured out life and just relaxed into a comfortable stupor for 50 years. I believed this until I was in my late 20s too.
When my mom told me girls didn’t have penises I couldn’t imagine how they urinated, so I thought that girls would spontaneously grow penises when they had to go to the bathroom, and then it’d grow wings and fly away after they were done.
When I was just learning my numbers larger than 10, I somehow got the idea in my head that the 40’s were optional. It was perfectly OK to count 37, 38, 39, 50.
J.
I use to think that radio singles were the mediocre songs and that if you wanted the good songs you had to buy the album. Edit: I don’t mean I disliked the singles, I just meant I thought it was more of a, “If you like this song, buy his/her/their album and you’ll get much better.” type deal.
I was worried about people on TV being able to look into my house.
I use to think that since from start to finish a movie takes months, if not longer, to make, and because they cost millions of dollars, and that they weren’t cranked out constantly like TV shows (I know better now) that meant they were all high quality and if I didn’t like any, it was all my fault. I had no concept that a movie could be bad, for quite a long time.
There was this street light at the beginning of, the driveway I’ll call it, to a row of rental houses my mother and I lived in. When it would start getting dark the light would slowly get brighter. I’d stand under it and “will it” to get bright. I was sure my mental powers were making it get brighter or start earlier than if I left it alone. At times I would stand under it, thinking, “get brighter. Get brighter,” and when it wouldn’t happen I’d leave, come back later, and try again, still thinking I had some impact on it.
I would throw up pebbles/ tiny rocks at night, and if I didn’t see them fall down, or didn’t hear them come down (I threw them slightly at an angle so they landed on grass instead of the driveway) I assumed I threw them into Heaven. If I did see or hear them come down, I’d try again, away from the light and towards the grass. One night I saw and/or heard a bunch of them falling back down and had to admit it was all a fantasy.
I thought that when people spoke a foreign language, it would be transformed into English at some point between their mouth and the listener’s ear so it could be understood.
I also thought that everything was alive and had feelings, so a pencil could be sad and a plate could be lonely, etc. I spent a lot of my childhood apologizing to things.
That brings up another one. I was convinced until I was 7 that girls simply lacked a penis and testicles and there was no equivalent for them except for titties. I had the sex act and childbirth partially figured out by then but I thought it was all anal. I thought that mothers pooped out babies. That grossed me out to no end but I never said anything because I thought it was a shameful secret that no one could do anything about.
I was about 4 and asked if I could see Dad’s truck sometime. My parents were very confused. I couldn’t imagine how else he delivered those babies.
Same here. Although I also thought everything was telepathic and could tell if I thought bad things about them.
All of these are from when I was probably five to seven years old.
I thought that teachers never went to the bathroom. The logic behind this was that the kids had to announce their need to go to the bathroom to ask permission but the teachers never did. Oh sure, they might have another teacher look after the class for a few moments but never to go to the bathroom or they would have said so. And I know I didn’t waste recess going to the bathroom so surely they didn’t either.
I also believe all religions were the same, you just went to a different church depending on where you lived, just like where you went to school depended on where you lived. I was taught by nuns and was used to different orders and habits, so when I saw a group like the Salvation Army I thought it was just a different kind of order with different outfits.
And possibly the strangest one, I had a babysitter who had told us about rigor mortis(I have no idea why) and explained that the muscles would stiffen up and stay that way. I obviously forgot about the part where you haf to be dead for it to happen, and would flex my leg until the muscles tightened and then relax, having dodged the moment when rigor mortis would set in