If no one ever tells you about something, you're likely not going to find out about it until after you probably should know better. It happens. You'll get what I mean when you read this... Please feel free to add your own!
- When I used to hear marathon times when I was younger, I'd always thing, "Wow... 4 hours.. that's way longer than I could ever run." But, I knew that logic dictated that if you ran faster, it would take less time. Time being the bottleneck there, I imagined that if you just ran the marathon really really fast... like as fast as you could, it would be a lot easier to finish, because it would take so much less time. Why was everyone just jogging? How come no one has ever tried this??
- One time my mom noticed my hands at dinner when I was like eight. She said, "Wow, you have really slender fingers! You should be a pianist!" If you say pianist too quickly to an eight year old boy who had never heard the word, they think it has something to do with their little boy parts. I was so embarrassed... What could my mom be thinking of at the dinner table that slender fingers could be an advantage for? "A what!?!" Oh... pi-an-ist.
- There are no male cows. There are no female bulls. I thought that cows and bulls were seperate animals until my senior year of high schoool. Male and female cows. Male and female bulls. Makes perfect sense to a city kid.
- My first grade teacher, Sister Ann, told us that you couldn't digest gum and fingernails, so you shouldn't swallow either. Wow... couldn't digest it at all? Jeez. I imagined that if you didn't know better, eventually, they'd have to surgically remove this big gum and fingernail ball from your stomach, and that the gum and fingernail ball was the most disgusting object I could ever conceive of.
- When I was like 10 or 11 and dating and liking girls started to become a topic of conversation, I was really confused about something. In Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, people used to call making out "going with." No, not like the 50's version of dating or seeing each other as in "they're going with each other"... I mean, literally the act of making out was "going with". A boy and a girl would take a walk around the block and we'd be all dying to know if they "went with each other." The problem was that I didn't really know what exactly we were referring to. I mean, I knew about a kiss and I had some loose conception of what sex was... but anything that fell anywhere in between... no clue. Where the hell were all these people going? Where they having sex? The funniest thing was that, in the seventh grade, the first time I ever really went with someone (which turned out to just be some open mouth and a bit of tongue) I told my friend about it and he goes, "And you guys were naked!?" Apparently I wasn't the only one that didn't know what the deal was either.