As long as I set up my action figures or stuffed animals as sentries before I went to sleep, any monster that dared approach would be immediately dispatched.
When I was in third grade, I had an aunt, I knew, who worked for the State of Florida. When I asked my mom what she did, she told me my aunt was a clerical worker, which basically meant she was a secretary (explained for a 9-year old, you understand). I had heard occasionally on TV about a similar-sounding position, so I told people I knew that my aunt was Secretary of State.
Unfortunately as the oldest child I was always too smart for my own good, reading my mother’s college textbooks and watching Cosmos and such. But before my mom went to school and before we got electricity I thought that since my little sister cried so much we could just take her back and get a new one.
My cousin, who lived with us for 6 months once, was certain that if the water touched his ear it would leak into his brain. Tough thing to believe since we went to the ocean basically every day.
From lookng at maps, I got the idea that rivers were fed by the oceans, and flowed up to the mountains, branching out into smaller rivers and streams and finally evaporating.
That there was a secret passage in our house. I even thought of where it could be; there was one wall I decided was unusually thick and had a passage in it. And you could SEE three sides of this wall; it’s like 30cm wide! I even decided that the way to open the hidden door was in some way associated with this black thing sticking out of the opposite wall (which was in fact one of those rubber things for stopping cupboard doors from scraping against the wall).
Oddly enough, I understood the basics of sex (man, woman, penis inserted in vagina) and about babies growing from sperm and eggs (I even knew how twins came about; I have ALWAYS been interested in genetics, even since then!) since about Grade Three. I never, however, made the connection between the two!
I believed that my school was gigantic. I believed that the major determining factor of personal happiness and contentment was related to having a quality tree house. The utmost of cool could be achieved by:
Getting to sit on one of the two back seats on the bus.
Having the 60 pack of Crayolas
Having a Monkeys lunch box
Having a pair of the canvas Converse shoes (Chucks)
This was exactly my conception of Heaven, though it was inchoate rather than fleshed out.
I used to believe there was a real Land of the Lost, and that cartoons were also real, and there was a place where you could cross the border between the real world and the cartoon world.
I also used to think that getting stuck with a pin would kill you.
I thought that the street lights came on when parents flipped a magical switch located in their closet, which happened to be where my parents breaker box is.
I also thought that when a song played on the radio, that the band was at the studio, playing the song live! It wasn’t until my mother explained the logicistics of bands having to travel from station to station that I gave up on that idea.
I also used to believe my parents when they told me that all Santa would bring bad children for Christmas was a bag of switches and ashes. Every Christmas Eve I would have a giant pity party for myself because I knew I had been bad through out the year - and that I would have to make due with a pile of sticks and some fireplaces ashes while my brothers got all sorts of cool stuff.
I was concerned that there were only 2 things to be- a boy or a girl. Why weren’t there more choices?! I kept looking for someone who was not a boy or a girl.
I thought that there was only one person in the world that you would want to marry, the one and only one for you! My parents were so lucky that they went to high school together. What if my one and only lived in a small village in Africa or China? I would never meet him!
I was confussed about God and Santa Claus. I thought they were the same being. They both new what you were dong at all times and made judgements about your behavior and rewarded you or not, based on that. I thought they watched me in my room as if one wall had been removed, like the way we see the rooms on TV.
I didn’t make the connection between the sun and daylight. I thought the light came from the sky itself. After all, there was light on an overcast, cloudy day, but no sun.
I thought clouds were artificial. They were made by airplanes, from their contrails. It was their job to fly around and make clouds all day. Sometimes they were also made by factories that emitted them from smokestacks.
I never in my life believed in Santa Claus. I pretended I believed though, because I thought if anybody knew I was in on the secret, they would stop giving me Christmas presents.
The really scary thing about some of the posts in this thread is this - how many of are permenently scarred by things our parents told us just to shut us up??
I used to believe that if I had, say, 1 lolly, and broke it into two pieces, that I’d have an even amount of two lollies.
That aliens wouldn’t abduct me because I was under a certain age. My mum told me this to calm me down because I was frantic about being abducted by aliens. She said “They don’t want to abduct children - just adults!” This actually calmed me down. So whatever works.
I could never, ever figure out what the term “The week after next” meant. What week is next?
That the noise of thunder was God moving his furniture around.
I always thought is kinda dumb to wear less clothes in the summer. Shorts and a tank-top were cool looking, but it let the sun in! If I were to bundle up in my winter clothes, the heat wouldn’t be able to get to me. I never got around to experimentation, however.
Before I realized how movies work, and before my notion that we were all being filmed like Truman, I thought all movies were cartoons. The movies with the bigger budget could afford better cartoon technology, and that the cartoons that look like cartoons just weren’t done as good. Wow, I’ve gone through a lot of film theory in my lifetime!
If a match was lit in the room shortly after a fart was let, the house would explode. But my brother made me believe that one.
There were cookies somewhere in the house and I WOULD find them. Hell, I still think that.
If I did realllllly bad in school, I wouldn’t graduate the 6th grade. Then my life will be ruined and I’ll live in a cardboard box in a big city.
It would be really cool if someone built a building so tall that it could be seen from anywhere in the world.
I would try to find a way to not grow up, because if I didn’t want to play anymore, what’s the point? On the other hand, I thought someday I’d close my eyes and open them as an adult like a movie jumping several years.
All black people were horribly burned somehow (that was before I moved away from Idaho in '85 and actually met black people.)
You know how mountains in little kids’ drawings are big sharp pointy triangles? When I was 5, I thought they were really shaped like that. I was really upset when my folks told me we were moving to the mountains, because I was picturing a house precariously balanced on one of those pointy mountaintops, wobbling if the people inside moved too much.
when i went to hawaii when i was around 5, we went to an island with a large asian population - i thought we went to japan. this lady who barely spoke english ran up to me and wanted a picture with me (i was a cute, blond little girl), so i figured i was a foreigner there. heh…
As I’m olive-skinned, I tan very easily, and used to get kidded by my mom that I’d be so dark soon that I’d “have to move out of the neighborhood.” (Yeah, Mom was a bit on the racist side - I assure you it was in ignorance, not malice.) So, naturally, when I saw people with much darker skin than mine, all coincidentally NOT living in my neighborhood, I simply assumed that they had tanned themselves thoroughly for the sole purpose of getting to live in THAT neighborhood, which was way cooler than mine, because they opened hydrants on hot days, played music in the streets and hung their laundry on fire escapes.
I believed that the motive force for automobiles was the smoke exiting the tailpipe. I had a little trouble with cars that were idling and not moving, but I worked that out although I don’t remember how. I had more trouble correlating the forward movement of locomotives to smoke rising upwards from the smoke stack. I worked that out, too. When I considered smoke exiting a chimney while the building remained still, I gave up and asked my father. He gave me his standard answer: “Don’t be stupid.”
Ooooooh, siblings! My older sister convinced me that 1) if I accidentally swallowed Listerine while gargling, that I would die instantly, and 2) that there were monsters in the toilet that were just waiting to bit me on the heinie.
Got her back, though, once. She sent me to get her a carrot out of the garden and instructed, “Make sure you wash it!” In my childish ignorance, I thought everything got washed with soap and water.
I shared many beliefs with others in this thread, amongst others that breaking goodies in two doubled the amount of goodies you had.
I believed for many years that my mother had eyes in the back of her head (well she told me she did!) and I would search in her hair for them. Many years later, the significance of that cars rear-view mirror hit home…
Regarding the confusion of meeting people from different ethnicities; I was 5 years old when I first saw somone of a different ethnicity, and I mean not even on the telly! A very black man was sitting across from me on the buss, and my eyes were about to pop out of my head. He might as well have been green. After a while I piped up to my auntie “Why is that man black?” in an incredibly loud voice. My no doubt slightly mortified, but yet cool-as-a-cucumber auntie said, “Well now mini-Iteki, why don’t you ask him?”. Apparantly the nice man said something about about coming from Africa and that was how people looked there, because from that day forward (well, not all the way forward, I have stopped now!) I would roar out the windows of the buss at statues. You know how statues become blackened from exhaust fumes etc? I would point and roar “That mans black! He’s from AAAAAAAfrica!”, and be very pleased with myself and my logic. :eek:
Still on the point of statues, we have a lot of statues where I come from, I thought they were naked. I assumed since they weren’t actually wearing “separate” clothes that they were in the nude. So my roaring at statues also included a phase of “LOOOOOOOK that man has no cloooooooothes on!!”.
I am surprised they actually took me into town so often…
Heaven was a golden hotel on a cloud (which I could have sworn I once saw on an airplane trip). Everyone got their own room and stayed there, alone. You could spy on people you knew that were still living. I wanted to go to heaven so I could watch people taking showers.
In hell, you ran on a treadmill while being electrically shocked and yelled at.
There were three colleges in the world: Harvard, Yale, and Texas A&M.
The land was just a few feet of dirt over the ocean. If I dug deep enough I could create my very own beach. I was a bit worried about the land around it breaking off and me falling in. I remember telling my dad once, “I used to think the land underneath us was about 2 inches deep, but now I know it’s more like ten feet. :)”
At age eighteen, all boys became women and all girls became men.
Sperm was invisible and could travel miles at any time between a married man and woman.
My friend from Singapore told me it was “under” Malaysia. I thought that it was built in hollowed out ground underneath the country (this contradicted my theory about land being a few feet thick, but I never thought about it too hard.
The spinning of the earth was caused by God spinning it like a basketball. If he dropped it, there was an earthquake.
I thought there were actors inside the TV and singers inside the radio. When I dropped my radio and broke it, I thought I would be jailed for murder. I cried.
