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Things I still wonder why the hell I did that as a kid...

468 replies

TonytheFish · 24/02/2014 14:09

20 years later, this still makes me wonder why I was such an odd child!

I was a bit shy granted, but still...

In 2nd year seniors, start of the new school year, new art class and teacher, everyone gets in and sits down at new desks, I was the last one in...and my spot at the table had no chair!

So, did I mention to the teacher that there was no chair! nope.

What I did, was sort of crouch down, into some fake sitting position and stay there for the entire double period! Pretending to sit! As if no one would notice...!

It is this sort of thing, that means I will never ever attend a school reunion!

OP posts:
hoarseoldfrog · 27/02/2014 04:10

Play Charlie's angels with my best friend. The game always ended with us going in separate bedrooms and pretending to shag our imaginary boyfriends.
I was crying on the school bus home (did not find school easy, wonder why?) When the other kids were teasing me for crying, I announced it was because I hadjust seen God, which weirdly didn't make the next 3 years any easier....
Spend HOURS recording little plays by speaking really slowly and then play it back with the pause button halfway down so it sounded like the chipmunks..

yolothankgod · 27/02/2014 02:06

.

MysticMugBug · 27/02/2014 01:58

Yama
I did the whole 'put pressure on your eyes and see patterns' thing (wtf)
I shared this phenomenon with my nearly as weird friend, both of aged 6, but pushed my closed eyes against my arm and pretended it was a psychedelic TV. I turned the 'TV' off and on by pinching my arm
I told my mum and she told me not to, in case it damaged my eyes.
I nibbled the corners of my neon hued rubbers, I felt sick.
I ate the body shop dewberry lip balm that my mum gave me, felt sick again.
I pretended to 'fry an egg' Hmm on the lit lighbulb of my mum's bedside lamp using vaseline handcream.
It made a satisfying scorched smell Grin
I fed my open mouthed doll with baked beans
I wanted a Baby Born doll so badly aged 4 (I wish I begged just a bit more, I might have got it Angry) I still want one now searches Ebay for a 1996 edition
My mum was wise about it's bodily functions, but my argument was that my baby brother weed on the carpet anyway.
My older friend enticed me with her Baby Born, and subsequently tested my gulibility by doing a poo in the toilet herself and pretending it was the doll.
I wanted one so I could see it pop a proper curly one out Confused and potentially use its wetting facility as a hybrid water pistol.

MysticMugBug · 27/02/2014 01:43

And I thought I was the only crazy kid....

PricillaQueenOfTheDessert · 27/02/2014 00:22

I grew up in the days of Candid Camera and Jeremy Beadle. There was a station nearby that had a telephone booth both sides. We used to phone the booth the other side and when someone answered we told them they were on Candid Camera and get them to dance, pretend to be a frog, strip off. Strangely enough, most people complied...

Sukebind · 27/02/2014 00:10

I really wanted to have a broken bone so I could have a cast. When I was about 5 I wrapped my arm really badly in my uncle's masking tape and insisted on going out to the shops like that with my Nanna. I was convinced everyone would think it was a real cast. I got the sulks in the butcher's shop because no-one had mentioned it and my Nanna had to ask the butcher to ask me about it. I was then very pleased and proud.

My friend and I got my Granddad to record our 'pop song' when I was about 6. We thought we were like Bananarama. The words were 'I want my bad boy, I want my bad boy, my bad booyyyyyyy'. I am tone deaf. Every now and then my grandparents would find the recording and play it.

I had a hedgehog collection and made my little brother learn all their names. I used to test him on them. I had over 300. I also used to set up shops in my bedroom and make my family come in and buy the 'beautiful' things I had made from Fimo or toys I no longer wanted.

At school we thought that if crayons said they were 'non-toxic' then it was OK to eat them and gnawed away merrily. I got into a lot of trouble for getting my brother to pretend he was a little animal who needed to be fed on his new Christmas present crayons.

Gimmesomemore · 26/02/2014 23:49

I ate the woollen hair off my Holly Hobbie doll, and suck the gluey scalp.

My brother (3 years older than me) had a game which he used to always beat me at, so I swallowed all the ball bearings out of it so it wouldn't work.

I stood on the side of the bath with the plastic light pull in my mouth and jumped to see what happened. (A bleeding mouth.)

twosmallbuttons · 26/02/2014 23:46

Oh lord, this thread is magnificent Grin

My contribution: when early teens I, for some reason, decided to cut myself a fringe. It went badly wrong. I ended up cutting a little triangle of hair at the front of my head completely down to the scalp. Then, as it looked so fucking weird, shaved it each day so people wouldn't notice. Then had to apply powder...so people wouldn't notice.

BlushBlushBlush

God knows what people thought of that.

SylvanMuldoon · 26/02/2014 23:41

I also went through a phase of collecting car number plates. I had several notebooks worth before I got bored. I mean, why? No other details, just the reg no.

Decided one day that nobody was allowed to walk on my left. No reason. I kept it up for ages and would dramatically freak out when anyone did. Which was a lot, obviously!

I still occasionally feel a bit weird about it now..

SylvanMuldoon · 26/02/2014 23:35

I ate dog biscuits too! Blush

I can still remember the taste of Bonios...

Also raw sausages. I used to squeeze the insides out and eat them. I feel sick at the thought...

Beeyump · 26/02/2014 23:19

Desperate to 'get high' at the age of about 11, but not entirely sure of how to go about getting, gasp, DRUGS, I raided the kitchen cupboard which contained herbs. I found a whole nutmeg in a jar with a little grater, and proceeded to solemly grate it and eat the shavings, topped off with a bit of cardamom - I did feel rather strange afterwards.

Smoked cinnamon roll ups with a friend, (there's a trend here) and burned some religious magazines targeted at young Christians which our church had given us - not entirely sure why, we didn't particularly object to them.

Often walked with a limp because I thought it gave me gravitas. Love this thread Grin

Chardonnay73 · 26/02/2014 22:15

Oh, and I told everyone at school my cousin was Julie (the Cello player from Fame) and the weekend she had been on Saturday Superstore she had stayed at my parents house as she didn't want to be bothered by the press Blush

Cue some older girls harassing me to meet her until I confessed in tears I had made it up Sad

They bullied me from that day until I left that school, it tainted my whole middle school career [sad}

AlansLeftMoob · 26/02/2014 22:04

I ate dog biscuits. The black ones were my favourites.

Jbck · 26/02/2014 21:57

I used to chew little bits of coloured paper hankies and swallow. One night I must have had an upset tummy and threw up straight after eating a few bits. My Dad saw the little coloured pieces and thought it was hamster food. I must have thought eating hamster food was less embarrassing than bits of tissue so agreed that must have been what made me sick Blush

Chardonnay73 · 26/02/2014 21:21

I used to eat blu tak as my mum banned me from having chewing gum as it was 'common'

I wrote endless love letters to Robin Cousins during the 1980 winter Olympics and hid them under my mattress until my mum found them when she next changed my bed - and then helpfully laid them all out on my duvet (oh the shame!)

I dressed my sister in peasant type clothes, including headscarf (she was 3) and dragged her round with me door to door selling 'grasses and lucky heather' gleaned from our local park..

Continuing with the peasant theme, I made my sister drink gruel soup and we pretended we were poor Blush

I made my sister - still aged 3, (!) carry me 10 times round our hideous yellow circular rug in the lounge on her back as a 'horse'. If she started to buckle I would whip her with one of my dads gardening canes !!!

She still does talk to me most of the time

balenciaga · 26/02/2014 21:05

Oh god just remembered another one

I wasn't quite a kid technically anyway. I kept a diary when I was 16 in which I made a list of all the boys i had erm slept with (to my Shame there was already about 6 Blush ) and ranked them in order of how good / shit they were in bed Blush

Well I was obviously not very carefu at hiding it as my MUM found it whilst I was at school :(((((((( and read the lot. I was summons into the kitchen and she read it aloud. Mortified does not even BEGIN to cover it.

TodaysAGoodDay · 26/02/2014 20:58

In senoir school we used to connect up a crocodile clip and wire to each end of a battery, then attach the two crocodile clips to either side of a penny coin. We'd then wait a few minutes for the penny to get red hot, unclip it, pick it up with tweezers and throw it out onto the courtyard a floor below us. All the juniors playing out there used to hear the noise as it landed and used to race to pick up the lovely free money first. Oh how we laughed.
We were little shits. Grin

BabyMummy29 · 26/02/2014 20:22

When I was about 13, I went on a summer music course which ended with a disco. The fashion at the time was for long dresses. I didn't have one but when we were in M and S my mother bought me a long nightie to wear at the disco, claiming that "no-one will know the difference"

Of course several girls came up to me and said "Oh we saw that in M and S but thought they were nighties"

I have never been so mortified in my life and slunk off shortly afterwards Sad

quixomixo · 26/02/2014 20:18

I had no sense of my own mortality. Aged about 8 I was at the swimming pool and thought I would 'walk on water' by putting arm bands on my ankles. Do not ever try this. I thought I was going to bloody drown as my feet floated at the top as my body sunk. I was near the edge so clawed my way up! No one tried to save me Shock
I also spent so much of my childhood wishing to be an animal, either a fox or a cat - ? I would crawl everywhere and one day tried to jump off a reasonably high wall as a cat would, i.e. arms first. It hurt an awful lot.

I even wrote to the RSPCA once as a child. I stuck a couple of 2p pieces in the letter. It got posted but I can't remember if they replied or if I was just writing to let them know I was pleased with their work...

As a tragically awkward and self-conscious teen I wrote to Robin Williams (having just seen Dead Poet's Society) to tell him he understood me! Criiiiinge. Blush God knows where I found an address to send it to and I expect it never got anywhere near him.

I have some very well repressed memories of crushes on teachers at school. Mild stalking, looking them up in the phone book, finding their address, cycling past their house repeatedly hoping that we'd bump into each other and I'd get invited in. Such shame.

redrubyindigo · 26/02/2014 20:12

I have the story of 'The Day I Nearly Killed My Father'

When I was about eight it was my job to clean and polish my Dad's motorbike. Every Sunday I did it diligently and with great gravity. It was my job. Never occurred to me I could have asked him for a couple of quid for doing it. I had my own cleaning kit and polished between the spokes with a duster and used leather polish on the seat. I was a motorcycle valeter extraordinaire.

So you understand that I got a little bit testy on wet days when his bike would get dirty.

He used to park his motorbike in a little alley behind the kitchen. I would wait to hear the sound of his bike at 5.40pm, open the gate, climb on the back and he would ride us round a sharp corner and into the alley.

One day it was raining and I had a great idea. I got some planks of wood and some plastic sheeting and made a 'motorbike port' so his bike would stay clean and shiny. It was a crap lean too basically. At the height I could reach...................

Dad turned up at 5.40pm and I waited excitedly at the gate but declined to get on the back as I was so excited to see his face when he saw my work! I ran beside him and he rode round the corner and went face first (open faced helmet) into a plank of wood.

I just remember seeing the bike on it's side, wheel still spinning, Dad wiping blood from his face and staggering sideways.

I ran and hid for a long time behind the hedge.

Sorry Dad. Blush

ToysRLuv · 26/02/2014 20:06

Oh, some more innocent childhood things: I used to be quite ocd about stuff and make up rules that I had to adhere to. Say, in the beginning of a road I would say to myself, if there are not (e.g.) 7 red cars parked along this street I will have to loudly sing Frere Jaques (or something similar). Often I would then have to sing, but I would sort of mutter instead..

I was obsessed with horses between the ages of 9 and 11(ish), and used to draw lots of pictures and layouts of stables and write endless lists of what the horses' names at the stable were (complete with a charts of parents and ancestors)..

Ohhelpohnoitsa · 26/02/2014 19:44

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Message withdrawn at poster's request.

ToysRLuv · 26/02/2014 19:44

At 14 I concocted an elaborate lie that I was romantically involved with a boy and had picture evidence in my wallet. I had cut out a picture of a guy from a magazine and glued it on to photographic paper. I finished the whole thing off with transparent book covering film to make it look even more authentic Grin Blush. One of my friends wanted to examine the picture and promptly peeled of the photo paper backing, exposing the magazine writing in the middle. I grabbed the photo and convinced myself she hadn't noticed. Luckily my friends were nice about it. They could have totally taken the piss..

At 13 years old I skipped school sports day by visiting the sexual health clinic, because my slightly off-the-rails friend told me that you could get a doctor's appointment slip, excusing my non-attendance, for that. I lied that I had had sex abroad without a condom. They gave me a whole arsenal of tests while I pretended to be sad and worried. When I phoned them for my results a week later, I pretended to be happy I was disease free. In fact nobody ever asked for the slip, so I could have just not bothered. Also, it was another 9 years until I actually had sex (abroad - yes, with a condom - yes)..

The same slightly off-the-rails friend and me formed a "secret society" when we were around 11 or 12 years old (before she went off-the-rails, I should say). We did things like write notes telling naughty boys (who we actually fancied, of course) to back off from "harassing" girls (because it wasn't us, I guess Grin ). We burned the edges of the notes, so that they would look more "menacing" and then pinned them on a notice board in the hallway when nobody was looking. I think everyone knew it was us, though..

This friend was also a great accomplice when trying to skive in P.E. In our school we did a lot of orienteering in the close by forest. I hated it, so tried to cut the corners as much as I could. The deal was that as soon as you had visited all the control points and had evidence of having done so (a smudge of the crayon attached or a number/letter), you could go home (P.E was always the last lesson of the day). Me and my friend would ask others for the numbers/letters, so we didn't have to go around looking for them. If crayons were involved, that was harder - we were very resourceful though: used mushrooms for yellow, leaves for green, berries/flowers for red or blue. God I hated orienteering.

Uhh.. maybe it's name change time soon!

Ohhelpohnoitsa · 26/02/2014 19:34

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Message withdrawn at poster's request.

balenciaga · 26/02/2014 19:33

Me and my cousin were trying to chat up this boy on holiday and pretended we were Australian. Spoke in (terrible) faux Aussie accents as well. Cringe

Oh and the prank calls. My best friend once rang childline and said she had a tampax stuck up her bum. Shock

She also used to ring random numbers, speak in a "foreign" accent and tell them she was having an affair with their husband. Shock

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