I Used To Believe newsletter: April 2003
When I visited the public library as a little kid, I assumed most of the books in the grown-up section were filled with pictures of people "doing it".
toon
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My friend Harriet was very gullable when she was little and believed anything her brothers told her.She was once told that if she drank bleech, ran up and down the garden 100 times and jumped out her bedroom window, she would be able to fly. Fortunately she never got to the jumping out a window part as she had to go to hospital to have her stomach pumped.
Tea leaf
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when I was little I thought I was the only person who pooed, and my parents payed all the stores and resturants to install toilets just for me.
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When I was in second grade, my teacher was teaching us the months of the year by using the rhyme "30 days hath September, April, June, and November..." However, she kept saying "...MAY, June, and November..." My birthday happens to be May 31, and I spent several days believing that I had never been born.
Tami
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When I was little, I used to think that our house was haunted, so every time I had to go to the loo in the night, I would drape a blanket over my head and shuffle toward the bathroom "ooh-ing" softly, so that any passing ghosts would think I was one of them. A cunning disguise, I think you'll agree.
K-Matic
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In my young, impressionable years, my sadistic older sister informed me that when you get to 8th grade you have sex education, and the teacher would randomly call on a boy and a girl to come to the front of the class to drop their pants for illustrative purposes. The rest of the class would gather around and stare while the teacher would point out various anatomical features. I lived in fear of being the unlucky victim of this mortifying exercise.Fortunately, when I finally reached 8th grade, the teacher picked someone else :)
Red
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I thought that in cinemas, all the dust particles that you could see lit up in the beam of light from the projector were actually thousands of little pieces of the film travelling to the screen to make the picture!
rachel
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I believed that one was born with a perfect sphere of booger-material at the top of each nostril. Each nose-picking whittled away at these spheres. I don't remember whether or not I thought these spheres served any purpose, but I recall lying on the floor at nap-time in pre-school with my finger up my nose thinking I'd have to pace myself if I wanted any left when I became an adult.
dan0
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When I asked my sister why Mountain Dew was yellow she told me it was because it was made with Mountain Goat pee. Oddly enough, this thrilled me, because I liked goats, and I thought that drinking Mountain Dew would give me special powers to climb mountains and join them.
bubbles
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When I was a a very young child, I was afraid of band-aids! I thought that they were chunks of flesh from other people who had gotten hurt.
Katy
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when i was a little girl i believed that the veils on a nun's habit were nailed to their heads and that they were all bald underneath it and that they slept in it and never took it off! that is what my brother told me. at religious instructions class i asked a nun if it hurt when they pounded the nails in. she took me aside into a cloak room and took off the veil to reveal her beautiful long hair
annie
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For some reason, when I was very little, I thought that TV shows "stayed inside the TV" until it was turned on. When we watched TV, the shows were "leaking out." When I started going to school, I would come home in the afternoon, try to watch "Sesame Street" and find that it wasn't on. I then asked Mom not to watch TV while I was at school, as it "wasted" "Sesame Street."
Nicholas Dollak
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My family is Jewish, although we werent a religous family, the idea that we where different somehow from our neighbors in our New York neighborhood fascinated me as a child. I remember asking my neighbor Mary what her family's religion was. With her 5 year old New York accent, she responded "Catlick".From then until I was about 9 or 10, I truly believed that Catholicism, had sometyhing to do with licking cats. As I was deathly allergic to cats, this both confused, and slightly frightened me.
Cory
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When I was a kid, my mom always threw the left over quarters from the past week in to the collection basket. I always thought the preist used them to go play video games at the arcade.
Someone.
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During the summer, when I was around 5 years old, I would lay on the floor and listen into the air conditioning vent. I thought that all the air conditioning vents in the world were all connected together underground. I would yell into the air conditioning duct hoping that some other kid had figured it out too and we could talk to each other.
Christopher
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Even though I was already eleven years old, I was really terrified by the movie posters for "Carrie" when it came out. I didn't know anything about the story or why this poor girl was covered in blood. I assumed it was just one more random and scary thing that could happen to people. For a long time I was afraid that blood would suddenly come gushing out all over me for no reason.
toon
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My mom told me once that eating meat gave you muscles, so of course I deduced that I could get a temporary power boost from eating a piece of bologna. I used to eat a small piece of a cold cut, then lift up the corner of my bed, thinking I was super-strong
Louis
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When I was 5 and my brother was 4, a close family friend died. My brother thought that she would come back to life in 3 days. We were raised Catholic and he thought that the Jesus story applied to everyone who died.
Heather
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Since both my parents had the same last name, I thought you had to marry someone with your last name. I didn't want to marry the only girl I knew with my same last name, so in 4th grade I bit her on the arm.
Anon and on
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When I was about 6, I was convinced that I was a talking super hero cat called Tabitha. My Mum was so concerned that she took me to see a councilor.
Blue
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