Things that have confounded me in the past... updated
1. Stereotypes. When I was around eight I was reading American Girl magazine and it had a double page spread on why stereotypes were bad and how we could stop them. This puzzled me to no end, because I didn't understand why different kinds of boom boxes were wrong.
2. Saturday Night Live vs. Saturday Night Fever. I didn't understand that they were two separate concepts, and in my mind somehow I mixed them into one. I understood that whatever it was happened on Saturday night, obviously, and I thought that maybe it was one of those things where a TV show became so popular that they made it into a movie too (see: X-Files, Pokemon, any cartoon on the Disney Channel, the Brady Bunch.) I didn't understand where John Travolta fit into the picture.
3. Why women would want to put water from the toilet on themselves to smell better.
4. Pickles, and the fact that they weren't a separate vegetable, but were, in fact, pickled cucumbers. I didn't realize the difference until I was fourteen when my friend enlightened me.
5. The difference between farmers and gardeners. If a gardener's garden kept on getting bigger, at what point did he become a farmer? I asked my little sister this question and she delivered a lengthy response that I no longer remember, but didn't make any sense at all at the time. It had something to do with whether the gardener grew tomatoes or not.
6. The fact that milk wasn't unfertilized cow babies. After learning that eggs (the kind we ate) were unfertilized chicken babies, it only made sense that milk was cow babies too. When I tell people this story, they don't understand how I could think that there were babies in milk, but I think I envisioned them as swimming in the fluid kind of like sperm. (Don't think about this one too much, or it'll make you queasy.) Upon hearing this explanation, my sister asked me, "What did you think breast milk was? Human babies?"
7. Clouds have shadows. I didn't know this until about two weeks ago, when I was on a flight to Houston, and I asked my friend what "those black things" were. I thought they were some kind of growth, or plant, or something. She looked at me incredulously and told me that those were cloud shadows. I never knew clouds had shadows. "What did you think shade was, then?" she asked. I didn't know. I had never thought about it before. I realized that when a cloud passed over the sun, we had shade, but I never knew that it was because we were in its shadow. Huh.
These things, especially #2, caused me a lot of anxiety when I was little. Even now when I think about how nicely Saturday Night Live and Saturday Night Fever fit into their separate boxes, I feel extreme relief, like the world does make sense. For most of these things, I never asked anyone, not because I was embarrassed or was afraid of being made to look stupid, it just never occurred to me. I always confused mittens with gloves too. I had to remember that glove had 5 letters in it, so it was the one that had 5 separate fingers. The word "simultaneously" also was a puzzle - for a long time I could never remember whether it meant at once or at separate times.
What things confused you far longer than they should have?
2. Saturday Night Live vs. Saturday Night Fever. I didn't understand that they were two separate concepts, and in my mind somehow I mixed them into one. I understood that whatever it was happened on Saturday night, obviously, and I thought that maybe it was one of those things where a TV show became so popular that they made it into a movie too (see: X-Files, Pokemon, any cartoon on the Disney Channel, the Brady Bunch.) I didn't understand where John Travolta fit into the picture.
3. Why women would want to put water from the toilet on themselves to smell better.
4. Pickles, and the fact that they weren't a separate vegetable, but were, in fact, pickled cucumbers. I didn't realize the difference until I was fourteen when my friend enlightened me.
5. The difference between farmers and gardeners. If a gardener's garden kept on getting bigger, at what point did he become a farmer? I asked my little sister this question and she delivered a lengthy response that I no longer remember, but didn't make any sense at all at the time. It had something to do with whether the gardener grew tomatoes or not.
6. The fact that milk wasn't unfertilized cow babies. After learning that eggs (the kind we ate) were unfertilized chicken babies, it only made sense that milk was cow babies too. When I tell people this story, they don't understand how I could think that there were babies in milk, but I think I envisioned them as swimming in the fluid kind of like sperm. (Don't think about this one too much, or it'll make you queasy.) Upon hearing this explanation, my sister asked me, "What did you think breast milk was? Human babies?"
7. Clouds have shadows. I didn't know this until about two weeks ago, when I was on a flight to Houston, and I asked my friend what "those black things" were. I thought they were some kind of growth, or plant, or something. She looked at me incredulously and told me that those were cloud shadows. I never knew clouds had shadows. "What did you think shade was, then?" she asked. I didn't know. I had never thought about it before. I realized that when a cloud passed over the sun, we had shade, but I never knew that it was because we were in its shadow. Huh.
These things, especially #2, caused me a lot of anxiety when I was little. Even now when I think about how nicely Saturday Night Live and Saturday Night Fever fit into their separate boxes, I feel extreme relief, like the world does make sense. For most of these things, I never asked anyone, not because I was embarrassed or was afraid of being made to look stupid, it just never occurred to me. I always confused mittens with gloves too. I had to remember that glove had 5 letters in it, so it was the one that had 5 separate fingers. The word "simultaneously" also was a puzzle - for a long time I could never remember whether it meant at once or at separate times.
What things confused you far longer than they should have?