When I was little, I used to watch soap operas with my mom, and when one character left, I asked my mother why she wasn’t on anymore, and she told me they fired her. I thought that meant they shoved her into a big, raging fireplace.
To get me out of the way when she made pierogies, my mother would give me a bowl of flour and water and let me make, well, slop. I suggested that I could make sauce for the pierogies with it, and she let me believe she actually put that gunk on the pierogies.
My cousin and I would make our Barbies have “sex”. Which meant Barbie and Ken got naked and kissed each other. That’s what sex was-you get naked, you get in bed, and you kiss.
You lucky bastard - we never had a Ken doll, so my sisters and I used to make the barbie with the non-bendy legs and dented breast, be the ‘boy’. So I guess there was a lot of barbie lesbian sex going on in our house.
And
Bubastis - If I hadn’t seen that you were Irish, I would have guessed you’d grown up in Australia. NOW I know where the Australians get it from (the larrikin behaviours) - the Irish were so much more influential in Australia than NZ.
I think I posted this incident here a few years ago but I will repeat it. When I was in high school a friend’s aunt was closing down a small clothing store and gave us a broken mannequin. I fixed up the mannequin and put some clothes on it. We found a length of rope and went to a bridge over a freeway that crossed between a junior high and the high school. Our plan was to have the mannequin hang from the bridge over the median. We tied one end of the rope to the top of the fence in the middle of the bridge but realized if the threw the mannequin over, it or the rope would break. So I took the mannequin off to one side and would push it over the fence so it would swing to a stop. Just as I got the mannequin to the top of the 6 foot tall fence my friend told me to wait, a truck was coming. When I tried to pull the mannequin back I cut my hand on the fence and let go of it. The mannequin swung down in front of the truck. The driver hit his brakes and started skidding to a stop. On the back swing the mannequin got caught between the truck and trailer. This caused the rope to go taught then the fence to be bent over. The rope broke when the fence hit 90 degrees from it’s previous position and the mannequin went flying across the freeway beside the skidding truck and trailer. My friend and I high tailed it out of there. Monday morning at school we went and looked at the scene. The fence was still bent over but had yellow safety tape around the damaged area. There were heavy skid marks on the freeway and broken piece of mannequin could be seen on the shoulder. We were disappointed when this stunt did not make the local paper.
I still wonder what that truck driver thought when he saw a bald woman in a blue dress swing in front of him.
Among the other things I did. Held a bullet with a pair of pliers while my friend hit the back with a hammer. Shot off a whole box of 30.06 bullets this way.
Shot at a low flying military transport airplane with a .22 rifle.
Threw perfume filled water balloons at hookers near an Army base.
Tied tins cans on each end of a 50 foot piece of fishing line then rigged the line across the street near home. The third guy we got with our gag did not think it was funny and chased my friend and I into a neighbors barn. He threatened to burn down the barn if we didn’t come out. Luckily for us he didn’t.
When I was really young (three or four, I think) I used to put all my stuffed animals in bed with me on Christmas Eve and I’d sleep on them to hide them because I thought Santa would steal my toys if he ran low while delivering.
A family friend told me when I was 7* that brushing your teeth too often is bad for you. At the time I interpreted it as, “it would be bad if you brushed your teeth constantly all day long”, but I also thought it would be best to avoid the activity overall just to be safe. I could save myself a fair bit of whitening money by going back and slapping seven-year-old me in the face a couple times.
When I first learned about sex I thought “uterus” referred to sex organs, in general; both kinds.
There was also a while that I thought that Tab A went into the belly button, not Slot B–how else would the baby get into the belly?
The Waterbury/Venice episode reminds me of something my girlfriend’s 6-year-old son said recently. We were driving to my community college, and talking about the GF’s recent trip to Las Vegas, and her son said “I wanna go!” I tried to explain to him that Las Vegas wasn’t a place for kids, and he wasn’t buying it. He’s a smart kid, and I think he had an inkling that what I really meant was “the things your mom and I would do in Las Vegas are not for kids”. Anyway, when we arrived at my college, he was really excited and said “Is this Las Vegas”? It was illuminating–my utterly un-exciting campus was Las Vegas to him; us adults need flashing lights and dangerous vices to stimulate us, but to him Vegas didn’t need anything to be cool except just being the kind of place his mom and her boyfriend would go to. I told him Las Vegas was far away and we didn’t have time to go there now but he would have a chance to go there someday.
gigi, I too had a fear of prosecution for people doing things that weren’t crimes, when I was a kid. I can’t remember any specific examples, but they didn’t have to do with jail so much (I don’t think, anyway) as just being full of the Terror of Wrongness. Do you think that’s made you more cautious as an adult?
*It’s kind of weird, but the reason I remember I was 7 was that I had seen Free Willy in theaters the day before and the main-character kid was seven years old too, and I thought it was just the coolest thing in the world that we were both seven.
When I was little, I asked my mom what the pads in the blue box in the closet were for. Looking back, what she must have said was “Once a month, a woman bleeds from inside.”
What I heard was “Once a month a woman bleeds from her sides.”
Speaking of doing stupid things, I found out a couple weeks back that it can happen more than once in a given month when one attempts certain maneuvers one’s seen in pornos. Turns out some moves are best left to the professionals. Who knew? Anyway, earned me an understandably irritated (in more ways than one ) girlfriend.
My dad did this to our first computer too, but he took it one step farther. He decided that since it was sooo dusty, he’d try to get things as clean as possible. So, he opened up the actual hard drive and vacuumed it out, too!
After putting it back together, he couldn’t figure out why the computer wouldn’t boot anymore…
I have definitely always been the “good girl” and rarely take chances. It’s more important to me to be safe than excited/risky. I also hate authority figures and have an irrational (mostly) distrust of cops.
I was very literal-minded too. I thought inspectors really did use a “fine-toothed comb” to sift through the dirt and lint in the corners of a home.
When I was probably 7 or 8, I conflated the words prosecution, persecution, and execution. I thought that “Trespassers will be prosecuted” signs read “Trespassers will be persecuted” and meant that anyone caught on that land would have their head cut off.
I also thought that toll roads were toad roads, and figured that there were lots of toads living in the ditches along those particular roads. I remember pressing my face to the window on car trips through Illinois, hoping to see the toads.
The small town I grew up in had a locally owned pharmacy, complete with a lunch counter and lots of merchandise other than just health and beauty supplies. Naturally, this was where one purchased the Webster’s Dictionary. As it happened, the family was friends of ours and had a son my age; I was impressed his family was famous enough to have a dictionary named after their store, and them.
Also, as a child, whenever my mother lotioned her hands, she always got a kleenex to remove “the excess.” For a long time I thought “excess” was a word that solely meant extra lotion on the hands.
I also committed the classic childhood blunder parents are always warning about: I took off my shoes and went wading in a mudpuddle at a construction site and … stepped on a nail and cut my foot. Oh yeah. Tetnus shot city.
Heh. I had only heard the word “solicitors” in British novels, so I only knew the lawyer connotation. I wondered about houses with “No Solicitors” signs outside. Are there really door-to-door lawyers out pounding the pavement?? My grandma was appalled when I asked what it meant; I didn’t mean I had never heard of it, just that the definition I knew didn’t make sense to me.
Once I had to deliver the weekly neighborhood newspaper for a friend on vacation. My mom had a station wagon and so we loaded up the back and I would deliver to the houses and then reload from the car. I was walking alongside the car and mom sped up a little. So I sped up. It got to the point where I was running flat out while looking left at my mom the whole time.
Until I hit the road sign.
I hit it with the right side of my face first and was immediately flat on my back. I faintly heard a car squeal to a halt and mom running around yelling. Once we knew that I was OK, it was funny. I wish I had a third person view of the incident. It probably looked hilarious.
A similar incident occurred when I was late getting home It was dark outside. Too dark to argue about definations of lateness. So as I sprinted home, I cut diagonally across the street. Or would have, if I hadn’t gotten clotheslined by the support cable running diagonally to the ground from the telephone pole. I had a long, thin bruise running from my right shoulder to my left hip.
Hypno-Toad, you reminded me of another from just a couple years ago. I was living in Baltimore then and biked down to the inner harbor. There was a downhill slope that was brick-paved and pretty rough, and took it too fast or tried to turn hard or did something similarly stupid that landed me on my ass. Keenly embarrassed at falling off my bike in public, I hurridly got up and rode away, looking down as I rode to make sure that the front wheel and brakes hadn’t been skewed in the fall. I looked up to find myself headed directly for a tree and had just enough time to get out of its way and save myself inestimable further embarrassment.
My tetanus shot story beast your tetanus shot story.
While growing up, my prents had this old trailer. Not an RV style trailer, but a two wheeled trailer used for hauling stuff (we used it to haul a yard waste.) Now, a bunch of friends and I for several summers played a game where a couple of us at a time would get in the trailer, run to one side and make it tip to that side, then run to the other side to make it tip back, and try not to fall down when it “whammed” upon the ground.
Well, one day, the trailer was positioned with the back-end up in the air. I was standing kind of behind it and to the side, but as we’ll see, not to the side enough. Two of my friends got in the front of it by climbing in, and the vibrations from them doing that were enough to let the gate (which I was essentially standing right behind) fall loose. Being that it was old, and metal, it had nice jagged edges, one of which caught me on the left side of my head, leaving a nice, long, two inch gash less than an inch from my eye.
Tetanus shot ahoy.
And then there was the time when I was 19 when I probably shold have gotten a tetanus shot, but didn’t. It was the summer after my sophomore year, and several of us didn’t go home for summer break. We went to a swimming hole, and as we were climbing back up the embankment, I was looking down, and WHAM, slammed the top of my head into a rusy metal pipe that was sticking out of the ground.
) girlfriend.