Misconceptions of Youth

Sorry, I still don't have a photo of my new haircut; by the time I got around to taking a photo, I had worked all day, ridden home with the windows open, gone to the tanning salon, and eaten dinner. I no longer have photographable hair, but I do have this photo that I thought about while hearing the weather report this morning around 5:30 am. They were predicting a low of 29 tonight, and this is what flashed into my less than awake mind.


No, it's not a postcard or cheesy backdrop from Olin Mills; this is the actual view from my balcony when it snows. I don't know if I was hoping to wake up to this tomorrow so I wouldn't have to go to work or hoping that it doesn't happen because I deplore cold weather so much. In our home, "snow" is the 4-letter s-word. Either way, it's a moot point because they've changed the forecasted low to 41.

Last week a friend of mine posted a blog on her myspace account where she listed 10 random things about herself, then tagged 10 people to list things about themselves and tag 10 more people. So I put up my list, but I don't think that it was good enough to repost here. There were a couple of things that I couldn't seem to let go of, things about what I used to believe as a child. I'm not talking about the Easter Bunny or Santa or the Tooth Fairy; I'm referring to those beliefs that I came to using my own logic.

The one that I find most interesting is that I believed that airplanes caused jet streams and that if all those planes would just quit flying in the same places everyday, then we wouldn't have to deal with the bad weather caused by those pesky jet streams. I knew that jets were big planes, and I had seen the planes make jet streams in the sky, you know, those white lines of smoke or steam that sometimes trail planes. So when I heard Rich Thomas talk about the jet streams bringing the storms or the cold fronts, I naturally assumed that he was referring to the white lines behind the planes. It did occur to me that airplanes shouldn't really have that much affect on the weather, but there was no other reasonable explanation.

One of my dad's favorite things I got wrong is that I thought that a small amount of something was called a tab. That was around the time that I was still trying to find my verbal style, so I was repeating phrases I'd heard, and I'd heard, somewhere, some one ask another person if they wanted something. That's a really confusing way to say that I'd heard my dad, for instance, ask my mom if she wanted some water and she'd replied "Just a tad." I guess Tab soda must have been pretty popular at that time as well, so I believed that mom was saying that she wanted "just a tab", meaning just a little bit of water. So for a while, whenever any one asked me if I wanted something, I'd say "Just a tab."

I also believed the things that many kids do. I believed that my dad was the strongest man in the world, my mom was the prettiest woman ever, my Uncle Bob was 8 feet tall, and all my Pa-Paw's stories were true. I believed that brothers were put on this earth for the sole purpose of tormenting their sisters, that younger brothers (and most other people) should do as I said, that my brothers were the best in the world (I still believe that), and that my brothers were more spoiled than me. The fact that all those beliefs were contradictory mattered very little because I rarely believed more than one at any given moment. I may not have even thought to believe it then, but I believe now that I had one of the richest childhoods in history and that I couldn't have been more loved.

Leave me a comment with some of the funny stuff you (or your children or grandchildren or whoever) believed as a kid because I think this sort of thing is just too much fun.