I had a few strange notions that I was so sure of when I was a kid. Sometimes you never learn that its not true until you're quite old and you end up misusing a word or throwing your entirely false belief into a conversation and people all stop and stare at you like an imbecile.

    Here's a few of mine:
  • I still thought that gum stays in your stomach for five years, up until last year. I never considered that you'd need a special storage organ that would take gum from your other food intake and somehow store it.
  • When I was a kid I always just figured that before I was born or even conceived that I was floating around in outer space. I have no clue why...
  • The word 'paranoid'. I thought I knew what it meant when I was young and tried to impress my parents by using it. Thing was, I thought it was a type of triangle.
  • Bosom. Yes thats right, I had this one wrong at the age of 10 or so, when I used it with my parents again. I thought it was your butt - go figure. When they told me I didn't have a bosom and laughed I decided I ought to go check the dictionary...
  • When I was real small I had a fear of sharks from watching the Discovery Channel too much. Anyways I had the normal fear of every child, the bad things under their bed. But I also went a little strange and thought that there were these land-sharks, and I'd just see their fins sticking out of my bedroom rug as they chased me when I hopped out of bed. You see they waited underneath so I couldn't see their fins.

I was quite a handful as a child and it was all my mother could do to keep me from tearing down the house. Sometimes she had to induce terror through misinformation to prevent me from engaging in particularly odious habits:


Other silly things I came up with on my own - or perhaps by confusing fiction with reality (a habit I have yet to cease...).

  • If ever I saw a mounded hill in a lawn, I was convinced it marked the slumbering place of a fierce giant. If I had to go near such a place, I would tip toe about it and become terrified if anyone made a loud noise.
  • I thought it possible for my big wheel to attain freeway speeds and just didn't understand why I couldn't drive myself around.
  • Not knowing female anatomy very well, I thought babies were born through the mother's belly button.
  • Cartoons always puzzled me. Not understanding how a static drawing could ever produce the illusion of motion, I concocted the notion that cartoon actors, scenes, and all other objects were coated with a special plastic. When filmed by a special camera, these things took on a cartoon-like appearance. I didn't worry about exactly how a person's eyeballs could jump out of their head.

I was afraid of the number 0 and the letter Z. I believed that if Sesame Street was ever brought to me by those characters, I would instantly die.

I also believed that the grandfather clock in the hallway had a trap door next to it, which would use some sort of attracting force to make me fall through it if I stayed in the hallway too long, and that at night the clock would roll around trying to find a way to get up the stairs so it could catch me unaware while I was asleep. (I did, in fact, hear a sound which was like rolling - the sound of the furnace turning on.) My parents wondered why I always ran around the house so quickly.

This belief was reinforced by my nightmares, which were the reason that I ran away from lucid dreams when I was younger.

When I was young, about 4 years old, someone told me that the Earth rotates. I was constantly frustrated because it seemed that I never could get up early enough to find the front yard out of the back window.

When I grew up, I realized that that perception was really my conception of my home as my world, rather than everything around me being my world.

Also, I had an irrational fear of Caution Wet Floor signs. This was because it had that silhouetted picture of a man falling on his bottom. I knew that if I were to walk on that floor, I too would definitely fall down and get hurt. And that it was a very bad thing. I would throw a fit every time I saw one and would rather go home than into a store with one of those signs.

When I was a very little girl, I believed my father was the greatest magician that ever lived. He used to do amazing things, like telling me to close my eyes and then making my glass of milk disappear (by hiding it behind the milk carton). It was the most wondrous phenomenon in the world.

I was a pretty gullible kid. I also believed that brown cows produced chocolate milk. I'm not sure why, but most of my beliefs involved milk in some way.

When I was two years old, I asked my mother the immortal question:

"Mom, how do women become pregnant?"
"Well, Nathan, when a man and a woman have a special kind of love, that love turns into a baby and grows inside the woman until it's ready to be born."

A few minutes later, I started crying. My mother got very concerned, and asked me what was wrong.
"You and Daddy don't love each other anymore!"
"No, your daddy and I love one another very much. What makes you think we don't love each other?"
"Well, you loved each other to make me, but if you still loved each other, I'd have a little brother or sister, wouldn't I?"

At this point, my mother went into more detail.

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