Ever had a WTF moment as a kid just to shrug it off and decide it will all become clear when you reach that magical time called adulthood but it never did become clear?
I have two instances. One, I was shopping with my mom in a women’s clothing store. I was about 4 or 5 and bored stiff. I decided to check out the store mannequins. When looking up the skirt of one of them I saw a metal BB stuck to her upper leg with what looked like a small wad of chewing gum. I plucked it off to get a better look, couldn’t figure out why in the world someone would put it on the mannequin and so just flicked it across the room. Later—it would seem like an eternity but was really about 15-20 minutes—my mom and I came back around to that part of the store. The two sales women were crawling around on the floor near the mannequins looking for that BB. I heard one of them say, “It was on her leg, I swear. I don’t know WHAT happened to it!”
I just let them search, there was no way I was going to fess up and say I was the one who took the BB. I could not figure out why this was so important and made a note to re-visit this particular memory when I got older so I could figure it out. I’m ahem a mature adult and I got nothing. It’s still as weird to me now as it was then.
Second: My sister and I were at a friend’s house for her birthday party. We played with this girl and her siblings all the time but always outside and never in their house. Or inside ours for that matter, just the way things were back then. The birthday party was indoors though and it was just us, the birthday girl, her brother and sister and various older relatives. We (the kids) were playing in Bday girl’s room and my sister was sitting on the edge of the bed when the grandma popped in to see what we were doing. She totally freaked when she saw my sis on the bed. I mean she was beside herself! Corralled all us kids to the living room in front of all the adults and tattled on sis. Collectively they all sucked in a breath and acted as if my sister had taken a shit in the middle of the bed. Eventually for the sake of being polite and all, they decided to overlook it and carry on with the party in spite of the uneducated heathen that had been invited into their prestigious dwelling.
I remember thinking, What…The Hell! My sister was mortified and with her being not real outgoing to begin with, was a little scarred by all this. My hopes of it making sense to me as an adult has not panned out. Those people were on some serious drugs or something.
Speaking of drugs, I will say I now realize why my dad planted a small part of our garden way across the yard from the other garden. It was tucked in the small area behind our garage and out of sight. It also had a gate to it that I wasn’t allowed to open.
I can still remember the day our family left church, and I finally found the courage to ask if it was only I who couldn’t understand a word the priest said. Was it an accent? Only me? A trick?
I was stunned into silence to discover two things; they were, in fact, speaking Latin, and, not more than half a dozen people in that full church actually understood Latin.
All along I thought I couldn’t understand because I was just a kid!
I could not wrap my head around people being so devoted, kneeling and paying money for a service in a language none of them could even understand!
I asked so many pointed questions, trying to understand, I was finally told to hush because…“It’s Sunday!” Which I did.
Until I next saw my aunties that were nuns, wherein I laid right into them with impertinent questions. Again, I was told to hush. I was very confused, but was just a kid, so no one really cared terribly.
Then one day I started asking if it was like my storybook about The Emperor’s New Clothing? That’s when I got sat down for a straight up talking to about religion. That one had to be respectful, no matter what you believed, and such questions were decidedly not so.
My parents were both raised in the kind of poor Catholic homes where full compliance was obtained with a switch, (from another time!) And shortly after their eldest child started school at the Catholic School, my Mom had some sort of falling out with them and my sister switched to Public School, and we all followed. We never went back to church either!
No clue on the first one (I just don’t know much about mannequins). As for the second scenario, was the birthday girl’s brother playing in the bedroom with the rest of you? If so, depending upon Grandma’s age (or rather, the era in which she grew up), your sister sitting on the bed may have been seen as some sort of sexual invitation/temptation.
Loach, you’re probably right about the store mannequins. I was really little at the time. But as for the birthday party, no, my sister remembers it exactly the same way. Plus it was a very weird family. I truly don’t think the kids were physically abused but the parents were way strict and always yelling at the kids. Like they would be grounded for a couple of days for dropping a bean onto the dinner table.
Mister Rik, I never thought of it in that light. After all the brother and I were around 11-12 and my sis and the birthday girl were around 7 or 8. The other little girl was maybe a year younger. A sexual connotation with kids that age when my sister was just sitting on the edge of the bed would be really weird but would be some kind of explanation if the family were extreme prudes. But then why let us go into the room at all?
It only crossed my mind because I’m currently reading V.C. Andrews’ “Flowers in the Attic”, which seems to be set in the 1950s. The insanely strict/religious grandmother in the story lays down some pretty strict rules about boys and girls being on the same bed.
I know I don’t want to start a Daylight saving time battle here, but I think this image on Wikipedia does a pretty good job of explaining it. You have to sit down and be willing to read and think about it, but it makes pretty good sense.
For most of civilization, people rose when at sunrise and went to bed whenever they felt like it (this is graph #2). When clocks came around and your boss says “I want you at work at 8AM every day”, your day begins to look graph #3. DST tries to make our day look more like #2.
The “spring forward” aspect of DST never bothered me for years. Eh, lose an hour of sleep between Saturday and Sunday. Big deal.
But then I spent 7-1/2 years working in the convention business. Our sales people somehow always managed to schedule the first big convention of Spring on the same weekend as the DST changeover. Now, if you’ve been working a steady schedule of 8-hour days, losing that hour of sleep isn’t that big of a deal. But before the Spring convention season comes the Winter “dead” season. So you’ve been mostly sitting on your butt doing next to nothing for a couple months. And then that first big convention hits, and BOOM! You go from doing nothing to working 16-hour days, with no warmup. So you’re already exhausted because you’re “out of shape” and you’ve done these 16-hour shifts on Friday and Saturday, and then you have to be back at 6AM on Sunday, and lose an hour of sleep to boot. It sucked.
Religion. Didn’t make sense to me as a kid, still doesn’t make sense to me. Oh, I understand the human need (in some humans, anyway) to want something outside of themselves to give life meaning and promise future comfort or security. The part I’ve never understood is needing to make other people believe the same way you do. What, strength in numbers? If a bunch of folks believe a certain way, it must be right? If you’re going to believe in invisible powers and promised but unprovable miracles, why do you need other people to believe in it, too?
We all had missals, and the English translation was on the facing page, so you could easily understand what the priest was saying.
As for the birthday party, when I would play at a friend’s house, her mom would be upset if anyone sat on he bed because it would wear down the edge. She wouldn’t shoo us out, but we all knew better than to sit on the bed. Could that be it?
She lived far enough away (I knew her from school, not the neighborhood) that I had to get my mom to take me to her house. My mom, not really feeling sure how to feel about her son having a GF at such a young age, called the girls parents and had a chat with them. I guess it all panned out because she finally agreed to take me over to my GFs house.
Anyway, I get there, we hung out for a while, then we started experimenting with kissing. (It was just pecks on the lips) We were getting along wonderfully until one of her friends dropped by the house.
I can’t remember exactly why, but the two of them together started making fun of me. I get pissed off, break up with her and call my mom to come pick me up. I remember thinking on my way home: “Man, what the hell just happened?” Then I remember thinking: “Well, I’ll figure all this stuff out when I get older.”
Girls/Women. When I first started dating I knew that age and experience would give me some insight into the inner workings of the Female mind. I could not have been more wrong. I have learned a few things, like Women fart but will not own up to it and generally like kittens/puppies/babies but inner workings? Nah. Warp Core technology is much simpler. This is no insult, i suspect they can’t figure us out as well or they have and will not tell us, results for us Men are the same.
When I was a kid we were never allowed to sit on the bed because it could damage the steel spring mattress, bending it out of shape and causing a sunken place. This was a pretty big deal to the older folks. Grandma would get all over our case.
About the only thing that still doesn’t make sense to me is how my parents ever got together in the first place.
Yes, but you wouldn’t behave that way to company, at someone’s birthday party no less. You would say “Oh, sweetie, would you mind not sitting on the bed, it wears out the springs,” or something like that. You wouldn’t drag everyone out to another room and then shame the guest.
I think it’s the sex thing, especially if there was also a boy sitting on the bed at the same time. Or maybe the sister’s skirt was too high and something was showing. People be weird about that sort of thing.
The Sexual Revolution was just taking off when I was entering grade school, thus an awkward time for both me and Western Civilization. At the time, grown up women really found men with hairy chests desirable (it wasn’t until the 80’s when back hair was an official turn-off, which killed chest hair since it’s usually a package deal unless the man is as genetic a rarity as that ideal woman with large breasts but narrow hips). So I was under the impression that after some point in time, I could choose to grow hair on my chest same as a beard on my face.
And, for the opposite of the thread title: penile tumescence. No advance warning and, once it happened, only the well-founded belief that I had better keep quiet about it.
I suspect that someone somewhere is laughing their butt off from watching the “Humans try to mate” Show.
One of my gay friends explained to me that sex is a yes or no question, with the answer usually being yes. This bothers me to no end as the answers I receive to this question come with stipulations, conditions, opt out clauses that I am never privy to, even when the answer is an enthusiastic yes.
