Sometimes I like to look back on the things I used to think and say, "WTF?" It can be hilarious to think back to stuff you thought was true when you were very young, or to remember your complete misunderstanding of certain terms. Here are a few of my favorites that I can think of off hand.
Cartoons are real! Okay, maybe we all thought that at one point, so that's not very intersting. What I thought, though, was that not only were they real, but they all lived on another planet somewhere, and we sent camera crews to record their daily lives. This is what I actually believed. Still makes me laugh.
Another is what I thought a skyscraper was. The image I got in my head as a child was of a giant machine that was a mix between a fork lift and a crane. At the top of it was a huge paint scraper. Well, you see where this is going. This was a machine used to scrape the sky. Funny thing is I can't seem to remember what happened to the sky once it was scraped. Maybe I never thought of anything, or maybe that was what made clouds go away. That part I can't recall.
I live in Michigan, and we get a lot of snow. I always used to wonder where the snow went. This was before I learned about the water cycle, or that snow was even just frozen water (I may have known that but I can't remember). I can still remember when I first thought of this. I was in the car with my mom and we were stopped at a light by an overpass (Near Southfield Road and Interstate 75, I can even recall that!) and I looked over at the grassy hill around the sides of the overpass. As I looked, the thought came to me; just where does it all go? Okay, that one is not as funny, but still interesting to me. And I recall it with such perfection. Thanks for that, brain. I could probably use that space for remembering important things, but no, gotta remember my musings about snow.
On a serious note, I just have something I want to get off my chest. Nothing Earth shattering, just... Growing up I too went through the phase where I felt like the only way I could be good enough for my parents was to be perfect. I was very stubborn, and made things hard for them, and any time I got scolded for something (I was never doing whatever I did wrong on purpose, naturally) I would go on the usual tyraid about how they expect me to be perfect and all of that. It wasn't until I was in my late twenties that I really looked back and put a more human face on my parents. I'm older now, but that doesn't automatically make me some all knowing guru who does things perfectly. A lot of us feel that our parents expect us to be perfect, while never realizing that we were laying the same exact unrealistic expectations on their shoulders as well. They did the best they could, and they were wrong sometimes, but like I was fond of reminding them about me, they were only human.
Okay, sorry for the serious. I really mean this topic to be a fun and funny discussion about the crazy things we thought as children, I just needed to get that out while I was on the subject of misconcieved childhood notions.
