Sudden Realizations

Ever had a revelation that surprised you? I’ve had a few. Most of them were perfectly silly things that would have been obvious to anyone else, but nevertheless came as a shock to me.

A couple of examples:

—My mother doesn’t know everything.

—Cars are not protected by magical force-fields that protect them from hitting other things (granted, I already knew this one intellectually, but it took knocking off a signal light before it actually hit home - ooh, pun!).

Your turn!
Love, Kn*ckers

And another:

You shouldn’t use the word “protect(ed)” twice in one sentence. It’s weird.

:smack:

Replace that second one with ‘prevent’, it feels better.

My father teaches at a junior college, and my mother works at one. I was in the 6th grade before I found out that other kids’ parents didn’t get the whole summer off.

That I am a “visible minority.” When I was 14, I was in a doughnut shop and a woman who was known for being a local lunatic flipped out and started yelling at me, saying: “Get the f*ck outta here you goddamn spic!!!

My mom is Spanish and my dad is a pasty white man, I grew up in a francophone Canadian environment where my mom and I were pretty much the only Latin looking people around. It never really occured to me though that we weren’t “white” and that I could be the target of an ethnic slur based on the hue of my skin.

Quite the epiphany actually, because in retrospect it explained some dumb little-kid racist stuff that had happened in the playground and at summer camp when I was really little. (Not really evil stuff, just the kind of dumb stuff that happens when you’re still too young to know any better and you react to “differences” rather stupidly.)

I’m gay. Caught me completely by surprise when I was about 28 (and married with a kid). And I was married to a lesbian. Took her unawares also.

We’re still dealing with that.

  • I didn’t know until I was maybe six that women could be medical doctors, because I had never seen a female doctor.

  • I found out when I was in high school that my mom had been a bit friskier that she let on, because I found a diary she’d kept as a teenager, and read it.

  • I realized about a year ago that you can do indoor rock climbing even if you’re afraid of heights as long as you don’t look down while you’re actually ascending.

Wow - that’s about how old I was when I realized that ** men ** could be doctors - my pediatrician was a woman, my mom’s friend (a woman) was also a doctor… I thought that was just the way it was!

—My father is completely and utterly full of shit when he is drunk.

Unless of course he really did go to viet nam (even though he was too young), killed mosquit indians in nicoragua, worked in the CIA giving rogue operatives lead aspirin, and wrote a world famous book that he didn’t remember the name of.

I recently learned that I have been misspelling the username of Triscadecamus for nearly a year.