the world

When I was 7-8 years old, I believed that the number an athlete wore was a rating on a 1-100 scale on how good that athlete was at that sport. For instance, a player that wore the number 96 would be really good, but a player that wore the number 8 would be pretty bad.

When my sixth grade class finally finished memorizing all the countries in the world, I raised my hand to ask where I could find "Orientar." My teacher was confused, until I sang the song... "We three kings from Orientar, bearing gifts we've traveled so far!" I really thought it was a place.

When I was little, I wanted a toy and my mom said she didn't have the money for it. I said, "Write a check!", never considering that the checks had to take money from her bank account.

My mom still likes to tell that story to this day. Mothers sure know how to embarrass their kids.

I used to believe vending machines would rip me off and not give me my change back. I always hated math so I thought, how could a vending machine be so smart and figure out how change was needed to be given back.

I used to belive that no one but Aussies & people from New Zealand had ever heard of New Zealand, like it was too small & insignifiant for anyone to have ever heard of it.

I used to believe you accumulated more money when making a purchase. It made perfect sense when you paid the cashier with a single bill (Ex. $20) and then received many bills in return. Since you had more bills than when you started, you were richer!

When I was younger, I thought that a globe wasn't just a small model of the world, but an ACTUAL little world. Like I thought that tiny little people lived inside of it and just did the same things that we did, just at a microscopic level.

For the longest time I thought that when you bought something, and had to pay tax on it, that that particular object was added to some sort of inventory of all of the things you owned and that from that point on, you would have to pay yearly taxes on that object. For that reason I was always very frugal with what toys I asked my parents for because I didn't want them to have to pay taxes on it forever.

When I was little I recall an incident where my mother was trying to get me to be thankful for what I had. She explained to me that there were people in the world who were so poor that they had to pick food out of the gutter. In a struggle to understand this horriffic level of poverty my four year old mind confused the details and for years I believed that people were trapped under the sewer grates and couldn't get out to get food. I wondered for a long time why people never put ladders and boxes of pizza (one of my favorie foods at the time) in front of the sewers so the people could get out and eat.

When I was a kid I thought that Germany must be a place of many germs, that being how it got its name (germ + many).

When I was a youngster, I re-call travelling in our car and seeing signs saying, 'Dual Carriageway' and I thought this was a place. I could never understand why we never got there!

I saw a Public Service Announcement on TV saying that "All Aliens need to register at their local Immigration office by December 31st." I ran to my mom and said, "Mom, there are ALIENS on Earth! They just said so on TV!" I was a little frightened, but also a little excited. Wouldn't it be cool to have some little green person, or Mr. Spock, or Uncle Martin living on your block? Then mom explained that people from other countries living here were also called "aliens." Well, I guessed that would be cool, too...though not *quite* as exciting as having a spaceman for a neighbor.

As a young child about 8 to 10 yrs. (I'm 57 now and live in north-central B.C. Canada), I used to think a Columnist & a Communist were much the same thing.My mom once mentioned a columnist & I said is she a Communist?

My cousin used to tell me he was going to sue me if I played with his toys or did anything else that he didn't like. I believed him thinking he was going to take all my money...where the money was that I thought he could take, being 6-7 years old, is still in question.

When I was a child, the only exposure I ever had to people shooting guns was the classic Star Wars movies. For years, I assumed that all guns shot colored bolts of laser light. It wasn't until I was much older that I learned that real-world guns shot bullets, and only sci-fi guns shot laser beams.

I thought that PB (pacific beach) in San Diego stood for peanut butter. I sure wondered why the banners advertising peanut butter everywhere had fish on them...