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Childhood Misconceptions

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15:44 / 15.04.05

When I was a child I thought I had something physiologically wrong with me because I ate with my mouth closed.

I now realise I just had a good upbringing.

Just posted this and thought to myself "I know, what about a thread devoted to childhood misconceptions". "Excellent idea, Boboss," I thought.

So here's another.

When I was just coming into adolescence - I was a reasonably early developer - I became concerned that my foreskin hadn't retracted far enough. So concerned and confused was I that I used to try and break the fleshy bond between foreskin and glans, thinking that it was the source of my troubles. I used to make it bleed.

That, my friends, is why children need to be able to talk to their parents.

Brigade du jour

16:03 / 15.04.05

That you have to be in love to have sex. I was well into in my twenties before I learned my lesson.

16:06 / 15.04.05

My mother explained that if one pressed both of the "buttons" on one's ankle simultaneously, that foot would fall off. Despite several advanced bio and anatomy courses, I remained convinced for ages, protesting to giggling non-believers that they just weren't pressing both buttons at the same time with the same pressure.

I still haven't tried it, just in case. She was right about the phantom dog bollocks thing.

16:07 / 15.04.05

Still haven't learned that one. Don't want to either.

Haus of Mystery

16:07 / 15.04.05

I thought babies grew out of one's belly-button. The more of an 'outey' you had, the sooner you would giove birth. Gender wasn't important.

Less searchable M0rd4nt

16:15 / 15.04.05

There was this total nuclear war obsession in our house, my folks were in CND and everything. They insisted on teaching us kids all about how a nuclear war was coming and we were all fucked when it did. This lead to one or two misapprehensions on my part.

1) That America Pie was about nuclear war and further
1)b) That "whiskey and rye" was something you drank to commit suicide, like alcohol and barbituates, suicide being the only smart response to impending nuclear doom.

2) That the telly series Whizz Kids was going to end with one of the kids hacking into a government computer and starting a nuclear war. This was totally my mum's fault, she had the show mixed up with War Games and made us watch it so we could learn how easy it would be to start a nuclear war by accident. I dutifully watched Whizz Kids every week (to do otherwise would have been cowardly). In a state of shaking, heart-pounding dread I would sit out the torturous half-hour, waiting for the ultimate horror to unfold. Would this week's ep be the one? Would they just white out the screen, or would they have the kids hide in a bunker somewhere and slowly perish from radiation sickness?

3) That a nuclear war was coming before I turned 18 and we were all fucked.

Brigade du jour

16:17 / 15.04.05

I sense a theme developing here.

16:35 / 15.04.05

When I was very small, I thought that the figures on Mt. Rushmore had been formed by the natural processes of erosion.

16:39 / 15.04.05

That if dogs ever caught their tales they'd continue eating until the dissapeared into nothingness.

16:44 / 15.04.05

Lol, this is great.

Mordant - fuuuckinhell!

Keep 'em coming, and more detail please...

16:46 / 15.04.05

Boboss, don't feel too bad about the foreskin thing. That little flap of skin can be quite confusing for developing children who aren't very certain of the uses of anatomy, but are fairly certain that these unknown instruments will be very crucial to success in life.

And I think every male has, at some point in his life, wondered "is it supposed to look like that?" because I mean, really, is it?

16:52 / 15.04.05

That when you pull on your lids with your eyes closed, you are pulling your iris and pupils off of your eyes. I would try to pull them and open my eyes all the time, trying to see the blank, white orbs, but never managed it.

16:55 / 15.04.05

Charlie, I don't feel too bad about it - it was almost twenty years ago. I just think it's nasty, I mean, making your glans *bleed*?

17:04 / 15.04.05

When I watched the news and heard about Gorillas attacking people or taking them hostage...

I could never work out where they got the machine guns.

17:08 / 15.04.05

Well, when I was young my best friend and her brother lived next door and liked to tell all sorts of frightening/bizarre tales - they had older sisters, and I think their mother was in on it too.

So I definitely believed that if somebody slapped you hard on the back while you were crossing your eyes, you'd get stuck like that. One day, to my abject terror, I saw a scene in a movie that confirmed that very phenomenon! That lingering fear did seep into adulthood, and I have to say I'm still a little afraid to cross my eyes even for a moment.

Also because of those friends I believed that there were leprechauns, and that peeing on the grass helped it grow.

17:12 / 15.04.05

Up until I was about 6 I used to really wonder if I was the only real person in the world. I was convinced that everyone could be a robot and I would never have proof that they weren't. I guess I eventually just started ignoring it, or decided to play along.

17:12 / 15.04.05

Bearo is probably the only one who'll know what I'm talking about, but in the shopping centre in Inverness, where I grew up, is a humungoid Noah's Arc clock, which sings and all the animals and Noah move every 15 minutes. On one side of the clock is the Early Learning Centre. My mum once told me, in an effort to drag me home, that the clock going off meant that you weren't allowed into the Early Learning Centre. Firstly I was confused with it going every 15 minutes- how did you know which one meant you could go in, and which meant you had to stay out. Also, I thought there were a hell of a lot of disobedient children in that town.

The bitch. Years, I tell you. Years.

17:13 / 15.04.05

I mean I know other people are real now, I'm not crazy or anything.

17:24 / 15.04.05

I believed that all dogs were male, and all cats female.

I believed that the funny little spot under a cat's tail was its belly button. (Incidentally, when you poke a cat's "belly button", it makes the cat squeak.)

I believed that firemen were immune to fire, and doctors to illness, and so on. (Following this principle would lead to some interesting immunities for some professions...)

I believed that someday I would be the mommy and my mother would be the little girl. (I seem to recall that I had memories of being the mommy before.)

I was an only child, so I guess coming up with odd beliefs was one way to amuse myself.

Scrubb is on a downward spiral

17:33 / 15.04.05

Mary Poppins baffled me for years.

I knew that it had been filmed in the Victorian era from the clothes and houses and so on.

But I also knew that movie filming equipment hadn't been invented until some time after that.

I just couldn't work it out.

17:42 / 15.04.05

I believed that when women got married they just started having babies. Some women had one, some had five. No one knew why exactly.

Later, of course, I learned the truth from Bill Cosby: kissing makes babies.

17:51 / 15.04.05

My family had me convinced that if you unscrewed your belly-button, your bum would fall off.

When I say family, I mean my entire family. Parent's, siblings, aunts, uncles, the lot.

18:06 / 15.04.05

Having ex-hippies for parents I had an odd musical upbringing and in my innocence the drugs references all passed me by. At the age of about 8 I had to be told that "Casey Jones" wasn't suitable class room listening, especially the line about "drivin' that train, high on cocaine". A similar thing happened with the Velvet Underground.
I also had a speech impediment for a while (due to glue ear) and when adults didn't understand me I would carefully define the word, because I thought they didn't know what the word meant.

Scrambled Password Bogus Email

18:14 / 15.04.05

I thought, would you credit, that I'd be rich, famous and depraved when I grew up.

I'm not that rich though.

18:58 / 15.04.05

Loving this thread.

And, hey, it's Gingerbop!

Warewulf, Lol.

19:16 / 15.04.05

That, my friends, is why children need to be able to talk to their parents.

That's all right, Boboss - my mother explained foreskins to me in graphic detail when I was a child and it still didn't help me. The first time I tried to give a man oral sex I remembered that she had said it needed to be "pulled back," and, convinced that this meant that a foreskin worked like a rolltop desk and trying hard to pretend I knew what I was doing, picked at HIS foreskin until it bled. Perhaps children need to be able to talk to their parents AND be shown charts and graphs to illustrate?

Scrubb is on a downward spiral

19:23 / 15.04.05

What is it about foreskins?

My mum got me the Usbourne book of Growing Up - all the biological and emotional wotsits associated with puberty, illustrated by cartoon characters getting overly excited about their newly deepened voices.

The picture illustrating the paragraph about circumcision was of two chaps side by side in the shower, one cut, one not, both entertained by each others todgers.

But:it didn't say which chap was the circumcised one.

Years I tell you, years of not entirely being quite sure of what - well, men's wangly bits looked like when you cut bits off them.

Haus of Mystery

19:32 / 15.04.05

I mean I know other people are real now, I'm not crazy or anything.

But do you Denfeld?

Do you?

19:42 / 15.04.05

I thought that when I was considering doing something bad Jesus and Satan would get into knock-down, drag-out fistfights that kicked up clouds of cartoony dust. Complete with the flying fists and hyper-extended legs that protrude from said cartoon clouds. 'Course, since Jesus was the "good guy", he always won.

I was a very boring kid.

00:21 / 16.04.05

When I was a really small kid I thought that:

1)If I prayed *hard enough* I would be made exempt from death.
2)That there was a special letter in the alphabet called the "Elemental P" (I was obviously really young as I didn't know my alphabet- L,M,N,O,P sorta sounds like that

3)That Bruno Brooks top 20 music chart consisted of each song,20 to 1,being sung by various male artists,then all the songs were sung again but by female artists this time.
4)That if you ate Thundercats crisps,the Thundercats sign would appear on your stomach.
5)That everyone had a "White nanny" and "Brown nanny".
6)I think this one comes from the title sequence of the old Batman TV series where the animated duo fight a ton of faceless thugs: That this sequence was taken from a cartoon series where ALL comic book villains fought ALL comic book heroes (later I would come to know of the "crossover" )

Nowadays I like to think that all of these things are true in some fucked up parallel reality

14:52 / 16.04.05

That everyone had a "White nanny" and "Brown nanny".

Er, you what? Please to explain further.

Like many kids of my generation I was convinced the world would end in a mushroom of nuclear fire, but as with all things apocalyptic I couldn't quite get away from the religious baggage. Somewhere in the equation - if I looked hard enough - I expected to unearth the involvement of Satan, Damien Thorn, and the archangel Metatron (but that was alright 'cause he was a transformer).
I vividly remember watching the news before I went to a primary school disco. There was an item about the arrest of some terrorist or other, the thing was he claimed to be the son of the devil - well... let's just say that even a disco couldn't distract from the terror.

And then there was that Observer front page proclaiming the DEATH OF THE OCEANS.

17:10 / 16.04.05

I thought I HAD a foreskin for far too long as a child... well, by child I mean until I was 19...

On a brighter note, I had a lovely dinosaur book which had a map of the world, with a dinosaur over areas where there were major finds. I asked my mother where we lived, and she pointed to the general area of North America, which just happened to be where one of the dinosaur finds was. As a result, I was convinced for years that there was a dinosaur buried under our house, and that I could dig it up.

In church I asked my mother what Eucharist meant, and she answered 'it means there's 15 minutes left in the mass.' When I answered the same question in school some time later, my teacher didn't agree.

When my teacher said that the tabernacle held Christ's body, I was convinced that when he died they divided him up between all the churches in the world, and that every church had some bit of Jesus... I pictured there being a flap of skin on a plate or something inside. Oh the joys of childhood Catholicism!

Less searchable M0rd4nt

17:16 / 16.04.05

Dune Tails, I love that you knew the word "Elemental" before you knew your alphabet!

17:26 / 16.04.05

That there was this... thing living in the attic above where I used to sleep as a younger man, age about Five. It had a horses's head and wore a pinafore, and was fairly malevolent, and nobody else could see it.

I now know better, but my mistake was believing 'them' when they said it was 'just my imagination.'

18:16 / 16.04.05

When I was in the tender age of 11, my breasts started to grow. They hurted quite a bit, and naturally I tried to make the pain go away by gingerly massaging them sometimes. I stopped, when my mother said that if I kept touching them, I would get breast cancer. Just the thing to tell a child. The concept of mammography as a preventing treatment to cancer escaped me for 4-5 years. It took a long time until I could really relax when someone fondled them.
I just love it when parents lie to their children, straight-faced...

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