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That my parents knew what they were doing, made good choices, and were reasonable people.
No, no, … and no.
That I’d grow up to eat candy, collect baseball cards, play video games, and read comic books.
No (type II diabetes runs in my family), no (wtf is a baseball card anyway), no (video games were replaced with homework permanently), and — well, actually — yes.
I love a good comic book, graphic novel, and/or animated series.
I’m in my 50s and playing plenty of videogames… There’s a path forward
Does the work you do, if you still work for a living, follow you home? And, if you have children, are any of them still in need of your assistance for feeding, bathing, and/or toileting?
I’m really looking forward to being in my mid-50s. My youngest will be approaching 10. By then, I should be able to reintroduce video games to my life at that point.
My work never ends and always demands more. I’ve just learned to shut it off and ignore it nights and weekends unless I have an ever critical deadline. Yes my child is an early tween and pretty self sufficient…that and a tough opponent in Super SmashBros. I’m in a pretty happy place
Yeah, I’m starting to ween my son off of video games. Everything that isn’t video games is “boring” for the mere fact it’s not a video game.
That all large salty bodies of water were called “the mediterranean sea.”
I had real trouble understanding why “The Great Lakes,” weren’t called The American Seas until I found out that Seas were large salt water bodies that aren’t large enough to qualify as Oceans. Some more arbitrary bullshit as far as I was concerned.
And I mean The Superior Sea, The Huron Sea, The Michigan Sea, The Erie Sea, and The Ontario Sea.
That if we didn’t have enough money we could just go to the ATM and get more.
Also, when I was very young, I apparently spent too long in the toilet once and one of my parents (don’t recall which) asked me if I’d fallen down the hole.
It took me shitting myself at school months later for them to find out that I’d been terrified of falling into the toilet (and avoiding using it as much and for as long as I could, or, in that particular occasion, longer) since that day.
(I was small but not that small, obviously, but kids can be surprisingly dumb for how surprisingly smart they are.)Oh yeah I had a few.
- That the moon you see during daytime is actually Mars (I then repeated that to my big sister and she believed it for an embarrassingly long amount of time)
- That the “up” arrows on traffic lights were for planes
Me in the middle of my flight when my plane pauses in midair to wait for a traffic light
Well Mars and The Moon are relatively similar in size compared to The Earth. Mars being about twice the size of The Moon, therefore making Mars roughly 1/2 the size of The Earth, and The Moon roughly 1/3 the size of The Earth.
If Mars happened to be in an orbit roughly 500,000 mi or 800,000 km away from The Earth, it would appear that we would have two “Moons” the size of The Moon to the visible eye, giving the possibility of some absolutely crazy solar eclipse events. I don’t think it would even drastically change the tides or the overall gravitational well of The Earth and its various current natural satellites all that much, thanks to the inverse squared law with gravity.
Maybe that was what was going on with several different worlds in SciFi that had multiple massive moons…
That our blood was blue, but turned red when exposed to air and light. All because a teacher told us so.
I heard this one from a teacher as well when I was very young! And it may well have been the same teacher telling us that blood was made of white blood cells and red blood cells, and I knew from my deep work in relevant fields (paints and crayons) that this combination did not result in blue.
We were told that the arteries carry oxygen rich blood, that was red because of a high iron oxide content, away from the heart and lungs to the extremities of the body. At that point capillaries get involved, and it’s really best not to worry too much here. Then the veins carry the oxygen depleted blood back to the heart and lungs to be reoxygenated, and that that blood appears blue through your skin. I think copper may have had something to do with the blue coloration, but that blood is also red in color, even if you managed to pull it directly into a vacuum tube. It just appears blue because of your skin or something.
Oxygenated blood is bright red, whereas deoxygenated blood is a darker red. And it looks blue because blue light doesn’t penetrate the skin as deeply as red light. The ones closer to the surface appear blue while deeper ones are purpleish due to the red light reflecting deeper.
The big stereo speakers in my living room contained tiny orchestras
I use to think the poles holding up traffic lights were hollow, and there was a person sitting inside throwing switches to change the lights while looking at a watch to keep the timing fair.
Well you got the hollow part right, at least on some of them.
I thought there was a little room under ground with people watching cameras underneath each intersection to control the lights
I do not know where I got this from, but I thought all dogs were male and all cats were female. I thought this while I had a dog named Betsy and a cat named Sebastian.
If that’s not bad enough on its own, I think I was in first or second grade when I learned the surprising truth. I wasn’t a dumb kid, either. I learned to read when I was about 3.5 yrs old and started 1st grade as a 5 yr old.
I’m now in my 70s and I still can’t figure out where I got that from!
That the Gulf War was in the Gulf of Mexico. It was the only one I knew!
That’s adorable, and I now wanna know if you’re referring to 1993 or 2001
By 01 I knew better!
See! Not all Americans are totally ignorant about geography! Just most of us!
/j
I was a child! I promise! As an adult I know there are many gulfs! Probably! Somewhere! XD
Oh I get it. I really didn’t get why The Great Lakes weren’t called Seas. I happened to have a globe in the hallway because my parents house has more bookshelves than walls.
They really oughta be called seas, those fuckers are huuuuge. Childhood me woulda agreed with you. Maybe. We did live next to the Atlantic Ocean, but I think if the argument was “Can’t see the other side” me would have accepted this as what an ocean or sea should be.
That was my argument back then. Someone eventually explained to me that lakes are freshwater and seas are saltwater, so that made that make sense.
You can accomplish anything if you put your mind to it and try hard enough.
I mostly believe that
It’s good to have a positive outlook, but it’s also important to be realistic, and know when to move your energies elsewhere, I think.
I could set my mind to becoming a good orchestral composer, but all I’d be doing is wasting years of my life and a lot of money and effort, because I know I’m not at all creative in that way. My creative strengths lie elsewhere.
I could stick with it, and become at best a very derivative boring composer, but I wouldn’t reach my dream or being a good one.
And I’d miss out on other dreams I could have been following that were more realistic and would bring me more happiness in the end, you know?
But yeah, you also have to weigh that against pushing yourself past your limits, because maybe you’ll be great at something you wouldn’t have expected!
I think in the end as with most things in life, it’s about finding a balance between idealism and realism that works best for you :-)
“Balance” is a bad oversimplification of comparative advantage
My mom told me that Dad went to work to make money, and I actually expected to see money making machines when I visited him at the office.
I imagined work as a building with a big neon sign out front that said “work”.
Plot twist: OPs father actually works at the United States Mint (but in an office job)
Unfortunately, he worked in a school district setting the routes busses take.
Oh dear. I hope for his sake that he understood polynomial expressions, otherwise he was constantly being berated for “his stupid decisions,” by parents that also didn’t have any data to back them up.
I used to believe that if you just work hard you’ll get ahead in life
Ass cheeks were shit tanks.
Daaaaamn gurl swing them big ole shit tanks!
Traffic lights were hand operated.
The small town where I grew up had one pedestrian traffic light for crossing the main road. There was a small brick shed next to that traffic light with no windows and a little door. When I was little I was convinced that was an operation’s center where someone worked to turn the lights red or green.
In reality it was a power substation for the neighborhood, but I was seriously convinced that behind that door was a man looking at a TV screen and operating the traffic light at the right moment.
When we went to a larger town nearby, where there were traffic lights without a convenient mysterious building nearby, I told myself that the traffic light people were most likely working under ground, peeping through the drains.I… was good at making up answers for myself instead of just asking my parents.
City Planner: Hey, I’m just reviewing the plans for the traffic light control shed and that there’s no way for the guy inside to see what the traffic’s doing outside.
Architect, who forgot that windows exist: Err… that’s for … well… it’s to ensure the safety of the operator during road rage incidents … They’ll be using CCTV to watch everything. Of course I know about windows haha…
That I wasn’t adopted.
