What I Used to Believe

A couple weeks ago I came across this site that asks people to name some of the beliefs they held as children (and presumably have since abandoned). I only spent a couple minutes looking at it, but it’s prompted me to think about some of the false beliefs I had as a kid. Here’s a few:

1. All dogs are male and all cats are female.
2. The first time I went to the skating rink, I heard the music coming out of the giant speaker set suspended from the ceiling, and I instantly concluded they had a woman trapped in there doing the singing.
3. Preachers could literally hear God telling them what to say as they gave their sermons.
4. When you turn 10 years old, the devil comes into your room at night and grabs you.
5. Luke Skywalker was cool. It gets worse: I thought he was cooler than Han Solo.
6. I thought people had to go to the doctor’s office to have sex.
7. On occasion, I could predict the immediate future.
8. I caused CBS to move its Spider-Man show from Wednesday to Tuesday nights by wishing on a star (we were always at church on Wednesday nights so I couldn’t see it—why didn’t I try that with Battlestar Galactica?).
9. I had the potential to become one of the world’s greatest vocalists because I could sing in a normal range and (what I later learned was) falsetto.
10. This one isn’t a belief, but it was a suspicion. When I was about six years old, I was riding in the car next to my sister, Karen, in the back seat. I looked over at her, and had the following thought, “Is it possible that my sister is actually an automaton that’s been designed to interact with me by simulating a human personality, but when I leave her presence she shuts down like a machine?” I didn’t express it like that, but that was exactly what I was thinking. I’ve mostly laid that suspicion to rest, now.
11. My hometown of Huntsville, Alabama was a hotbed of Satanic activity. They especially favored Green Mountain, where we eventually moved.
12. On your first day of high school, when you walk through the door, everyone in the hallways turns and looks at you menacingly, muttering “Freshmaaaaaaan!”
13. My dad could literally detach his thumb and reattach it at will.
14. My friend Buffy’s dad would, per her request, stab me with his giant sword that he kept over their fireplace and that filled me with mortal terror. While enraged at her for defying my will, I had told her that I’d ask my dad to stab her with his pocketknife. She called my bluff and raised me. Big-time. I went screaming into my bedroom until Mom came in and consoled me. I HAVEN’T FORGOTTEN, BUFFY!
15. If you are falling from a great height, and you have a piece of wood, you can just jump off the piece of wood before you hit the ground and you’ll be fine.
16. If we got everybody on one side of the earth to jump and fall back to the ground simultaneously, we might just be able to knock the earth out of its orbit. Thank God we never tried it.
17. Our cat, Cloudy, was probably the smartest cat in the world. My proof? When I would feed her, I could hold two packets of Tender-Vittles before her, one full and one half-full, and she’d always pick the full one, even when they looked the same.
18. I thought the alphabet song went, “H I J K M&M O P.” Mmmmm….M&M’s!
19. It was possible that the Earth and the Sun were, respectively, just an electron and nucleus of an atom in an unfathomably huge piece of matter.

Of course, this list is confined to things I believed as a kid. There’s all kinds of stupid stuff I’ve believed since coming of age. I could mention them, too, but really it’s just too embarrassing.