I was always obsessed with learning about plants, and thought I was an (American) Indian. I would spend all day in the woods, and build huts from branches and pine needles. No one taught me how to do it, I just designed 'em myself, and they were watertight, even.
I’d sit in my little huts and read, then go out and identify plants. Jack-in-the Pulpits and Indian pipes were a big thrill, and I’d draw them in my notebooks. (I really wish I still had those now…)
When I was 9, my mom made me a really cool Indian costume dress for Halloween. I used to wear it out in the woods. Mom once found me sitting at the base of a tree pounding acorns into a pulp on a rock, and making cakes out of 'em. “You’re a weird kid, L.”
I’ve done alot of things since then, but that strange little Injun is still basically who I am today.
Oh, yeah, that reminds me. Using your natural backyard resources, my sister and I would create meals. We crushed up flowers, plants, leaves, weeds, and mix sand, clay, dirt and water together and make all sorts of neat and pretty gross-looking kinds of food. But we had the woman-logic thing going on already to the point that we had little flower petals and berries to make everything look pretty, too.
I was always obsessed with learning about plants, and thought I was an (American) Indian. I would spend all day in the woods, and build huts from branches and pine needles. No one taught me how to do it, I just designed 'em myself, and they were watertight, even.
I’d sit in my little huts and read, then go out and identify plants. Jack-in-the Pulpits and Indian pipes were a big thrill, and I’d draw them in my notebooks. (I really wish I still had those now…)
When I was 9, my mom made me a really cool Indian costume dress for Halloween. I used to wear it out in the woods. Mom once found me sitting at the base of a tree pounding acorns into a pulp on a rock, and making cakes out of 'em. “You’re a weird kid, L.”
I’ve done alot of things since then, but that strange little Injun is still basically who I am today.
Baked caterpillar? Aw…poor lil tyke. (It, not you. -grin)
Well, torturing animals is one I never pulled. Funerals, however, I held: several for lizards, a few for baby birds,bats, and a mole.
I not only a kid who read the encyclopedias, I read the dictionaries too. I was especially fascinated with the different alphabets in the American Heritage Dictionary (1st ed.). After teaching myself to read Greek and Russian, I really got into the Semitic alphabets: Hebrew, Arabic, and Phoenician. Since Phoenician was the origin from which all the others developed, I made up my own alphabet out of it. I tried writing each Phoenician letter over and over real fast until it turned into another shape. Once I had mastered this, I began writing everything in it. Right to left.
I took my notes in class in my invented Semitic alphabet. (In transliterated English—I also used it for the language I was inventing, but it takes a lot longer to work up a whole language than an alphabet, so I used English in the interim.) One day the teacher saw me taking notes in class, filling whole pages with this alien script. He growled, “What the hell is all this crap!”, grabbed my notebook, and scribbled all over it. My face glowering bloody murder, I silently plotted my revenge.
My chance came when I snooped on his desk before class — this being a Catholic school, he was a monk in a teaching order which shall remain nameless — and there it was amongst his papers: I busted him with a big glossy full-spread-beaver porno shot!
[QUOTE]
*Originally posted by Jomo Mojo *
**I not only a kid who read the encyclopedias, I read the dictionaries too.
I’m so incredibly relieved I wasn’t the only kid who used to read the dictionary. I never saw the problem with it, but my mom and brother always mentioned this like it was a bad thing. We didn’t have encyclopedias, so I had to read those at a family friend’s house.
I’m another one of those “what didn’t make me weird” people, but:
I not only had an imaginary friend, I had an imaginary ranch in the backyard. We broke horses. My dad found me making up an imaginary budget and inventory for it, read it over my shoulder and said,“You should have some deer. You’ve always got to have some deer.” So I added them.
Since I always liked to write, my mom got me a subscription to Writer’s Digest. I’m fairly sure I must have been the only eight-year-old in town learning about the finer points of dialogue and setting.
Ahh…imaginary friends. What would I have done without them. Strange, my family did not thought weird the fact that I had an imaginary friend. I read someplace that kids who have imaginary friends tend to be lonely kids with lots of creativity.
