Steve V. wrote:

tommydski wrote:

lemur68 wrote:Because old photographs and movies are in black & white, I thought the world actually existed in black & white back then.

Yessss! Me too.

Thirded.

This is reassuring. I never know if my misconceptions were universal, or if I was just a fucked up child. I could read when I was 3, but thought my mom was born an adult.

in 5th grade all the girls were sent to watch a film about sex and aids. they kept talking about condoms and i had no idea what apartments had to do with anything. i went to the back of the room during the movie and asked my teacher why you had to buy an apartment to do it and of course she didn't answer, the video was all we had. this left me thinking and condoms were condos until i was a freshman in high school.

i thought boys' weiners functioned like dog weiners, lipstick and all.

My older brother Jim was the victim of a couple of great misunderstandings.

The first, when he was very young, was he had the mistaken belief that any liquid was "tea". Wine, water, whatever. All came under the blanket name of tea. Says quite a lot about my parents.


Secondly, when my parents finally got a colour TV, he sat down to watch an episode of Spiderman. He burst in to tears on discovering that Spiderman's get up was red and blue, and not the attractive green and yellow he'd always imagined.

I believed in an omnipotent creator-guy named "God" who lived up in the clouds and with whom mortal people routinely had important little chats.

I believed people had "souls."

I thought Bon Jovi was singing about living on a "prair." Like in a little house on a grassy meadow.

I thought this was the most righteously designed thing, ever.

I thought Jack London was the greatest writer ever.

I thought it was insane beyond belief that G.I. Joe used to be a big doll, like a Barbie man, before becoming small and awesome.

I thought only grandfathers had whiskers (and that whiskers only came in white).

I thought farting was sinful.

I thought words were just names for things.

I thought all dogs were boys and all cats were girls. I still get confused sometimes.

I thought that to play basketball on TV you had to be black. (I also wanted a tight black afro instead of my loose red one)

I didn't understand the concept of how a television could scale up the picture for bigger tvs. I thought that there was more to the picture than my parents 9" black and white was showing me.

MrFood wrote:Damn, I just remembered a good one... this is kinda sad actually, but absolutely true nonetheless...

I thought humans lived forever.

I remember quite distinctly the time my mum let me know that this was not the case... I cried my fucking eyes out when I was told that I too would die. Up till then I thought it only happened if you got sick or in an accident, and was entirely avoidable.

I also remember being quite alarmed for some reason when I was told what breathing was, and how vital it was.

I felt like this, too. I remember standing on the corner of a street in New York City, crying my eyes out at the thought of "people have to die". I was five, I think.

God is another one of those beliefs. At least a Christian Creator.

I used to think that sex was just laying on top of a girl naked. Just laying. I picked it up from the movies I saw as a little kid, because they only showed two people laying, one on top of the other. I had no clue the penis was supposed to be active in the fun.

I once had an argument with a friend when I was 8 or 9 years old about "Cunt" not being a curse word. I thought it wasn't, because I never heard it before. I was wrong.

I used to believe that I knew what was best for me.

Marsupialized wrote:I used to think life was fair and if you were good to people good things would happen for you

Hah! How long did it take for that particular bubble to burst for you? (and please relate the event that did it)


I was a very little kid when the Watergate scandal was in the news. I remember my parents and grandparents discussing it over after-dinner coffee, while my brother and I were playing in the next room. I didn't really understand much of their conversation, but I could tell that it was very serious and that it had something to do with national politics. I kept hearing the name "Watergate" as a child, and that word captured my imagination.

I imagined this giant gate like a dam, that held back a huge amount of water, and if there was ever a war and the country was invaded, the Army would open it up and the water would rush out and drown our enemies.

When I was in 1st grade, our social studies teacher asked if we knew anything about Watergate and none of my classmates really knew the details. One kid said it had something to do with the president, and another said it was something bad. I raised my hand and related my story about the huge gate with water behind it, and the teacher actually got a little bit of a chuckle out of it. It was rather embarrassing.

Oh yeah, and I called my brother a "bastard" once when I was like 4 years old. My brother ran to my mom and told her what I'd said, and she gasped aloud and asked me where I'd heard it. I honestly didn't know where I'd heard it. Nobody in our family ever cursed like that, at least not around us kids. The worst I ever remember hearing from my parents back then was the occasional "damn" or "hell". So for some reason, I thought I'd made the word up. I told my mother it was just a made-up word and she said "No, it isn't. Now I want you to tell me where you heard that word." I was unable to give her a suitable answer, so I got punished for it. What a fucking bitch.

My parents used to have seasonal passes to Disney, so we used to go out there a lot. On the ride "It's A Small World" there are tunnels in the wall where they keep the boats after closing. I used to think those tunnels led to separate rides that I wasn't allowed on.