body functions

I used to believe…

Having read 'Matilda' when I was younger, I used to believe I could move things just by looking at them hard enough. One time I was in a church choir and at one practice all the parents came to watch. I put my umbrella on the edge of the stage and sat glaring at it as hard as I could, not singing, until my face went bright red, and the singing teacher (who was wearing a microphone) stopped everything to ask me: "Are you alright? Do you need to go to the toilet?"
I have never been so humiliated...

I used to believe…

In my stomach, at the age of about six, food went into different rooms - broccoli into one room, mashed potato into another. This was the best excuse I had come up with to justify having plenty of room for ice cream but none for the vegetables on my plate. Rather ingenious, I think.

I used to believe…

When I was little i had a really bad habit of looking through the crack underneath the door when someone was going to the bathroom.. not being nasty or anything.. i was just little and wanted to "talk" to them.. Once when I was about 3 I did this to my papa and was shocked to see that his feet were pointed the wrong way to pee!! I informed him of this, but as the day went on .. I came to the conclusion, that when you get old it's really hard for you to sit down and get back ((i mean it was for my grandparents..i witnessed it all the time!!)) so when it came time to use the bathroom.. you just stood up to go pee that way it wouldn't take a long to get back up..


my poor mom had to explain otherwise to me when we got home that nite and she discovered me in the bathroom attempting to pee the way "papa and granny do's it"!!

I used to believe that if you had a good dream, it would come true later on in your life but the bad part is that right after it came true, your worst nightmare would come to you with a hammer blow!

I used to believe…

For quite long time (4-17) I believed that I must cross my fingers, legs, or arms in order to stay alive while sleeping. I imagined that if I just lay straight as a stiff, I will become one.

I used to believe that if you brushed your teeth enough, they would shine so brightly it would cause a supernova and then you could turn into a mermaid. (I was obsessed with mermaids at the time and really wanted to be one.) I spent hours at a time brushing my teeth and got really disappointed when nothing happened.

I used to believe…

my older sister told me that at night you would get sucked into the tv, and walk through the different channels. In the morning you would wake up and remember, and that was how we remembered dreams!

I used to believe…

When I first started learning about colonial times, and how the women dressed what with corsets garters and those humungous hoopskirts, I always wondered how on earth they went to the bathroom. As a little girl I wore dresses a lot, and it was always a hassle to go to the bathroom wearing one. It must have been super hard to do it when your dress stood out three feet on each side. I finally decided that colonial women learned how to hold all of their excrements all day, and at night when they took of all their clothes they would finally get to go to the bathroom.

I was a stupid kid.

I used to believe…

When I was younger, I had a bedwetting problem and my mother used to put one of those puddle-pads on my bed at night. I grew out of this by the time I was about six, and once when I was probably around eight or nine I was at my grandparents' house. My grandma was putting what looked like a puddle-pad on my bed, and, infuriated that she would assume I would wet the bed, I cried out:
"Hey! I don't need those any more, what are you doing?!"

She couldn't stop laughing and finally explained that it was just a cotton pad to make the mattress more comfortable.

I used to believe that earaches were when an earwig got in your ear! I had a litteral phobia of earwigs, and anything that resembled them in the slightest, such as centipedes, for years.

I used to believe…

When I was in elementary school, the school nurse would do lice checks about once a school year and I always thought that instead of saying "head lice" everyone was saying "headlights". So I always thought to myself, "how silly these people are, you don't have to do a special check to see that I don't have headlights on my head."

I used to believe that if I jumped off of my swingset holding an open umbrella, I would fly like Mary Poppins. Good thing I made my little brother try it out first.

I used to believe…

When I was a kid, there was a rumour that if you could fit four fingers of one hand on your forehead (without touching hair or eyebrows, I suppose,) you were going to die of cancer.

Imagine a bunch of six year olds sitting around, solemnly determining whether they'd be perishing presently of such a deadly ailment.. pretty funny.

I used to believe…

This isn't actually one of mine, but I thought it was great. When my mother was a girl, she had (and still does) the ability to shoot a tiny stream of spit between her teeth. Apparently my grandfather was not amused since he told her that the "acid" in her saliva would melt holes in the upholstry of their car.

I used to believe…

When my brother was little he thought that african american women that nursed their babies had chocolate milk in their breasts !

I used to believe that during the night while we slept, we were on the part of the world that was "upside down." Of course our nighttime was China's daytime, so that's when they were upright. Sometimes I would get a floating sensation as I drifted off to sleep, and I assumed that I was feeling the world rotating into an upside down state for me.