Weird things you did as a kid?

[scotpens]

When I was 14 or so, my younger brother and I baked a birthday cake for Adolf Hitler. It was a very pretty white cake with a red icing swastika and "HAPPY BIRTHDAY ADOLF" in candy cake-decorating letters. I guess we just wanted to do something in bad taste. Our mother wasn't amused.

At around the same time, a friend and I were bus freaks. We had an encyclopedic knowledge of city transit buses, school buses, long-haul interstate buses, you name it. My friend, a talented mimic, could do the greatest imitation of a diesel school bus with his voice -- complete with gear changes!

 

[Butters]

At around the same time, a friend and I were bus freaks. We had an encyclopedic knowledge of city transit buses, school buses, long-haul interstate buses, you name it. My friend, a talented mimic, could do the greatest imitation of a diesel school bus with his voice -- complete with gear changes!

I was a bus freak too!

 

[ITL]

When I was really little and too shy to talk to someone in the room, I used to cover my eyes with my hands in an attempt to stop this reality from being a thing. I didn't think I was invisible or anything. just that if I couldn't see it, it wasn't there.

Solipsism FTW!

 

[Mr. Laser Beam]

I used to take plastic toys and stick them on light bulbs so they'd melt.

Also I would sometimes make pancakes but put food coloring in the batter, so they'd come out blue or red or whatever.

 

[Herbert]

I started fires

Seriously though, as a small child I loved pickles. At a cookout at the neighbors, I ate a whole jar of them and then didn't eat another pickle for decades. Even today I can only tolerate small thin pickle slices on a burger.

The other thing I used to do was make what my dad referred to as "contraptions". I'd take pieces of whatever broken or unused stuff I could find and try to make something out of it.

 

[JirinPanthosa]

I used to ride sleeping bags down. I would probably break my back now if I tried.

I think, if you adjust the side of the chairs and the stairs for my current size and weight, I could manage it still.

 

[Amaris]

1) I used to finish my teacher's workbook assignments. By that I mean her workbook. If she was out for the day, I'd sit at her desk and finish her work.

2) When I would read, I would always lay on my stomach and "rock" forward and backward.

3) I would create new words and use them in every day conversation at school. When the teachers would ask me to use "real" words, I would insist on using what I considered to be "real" words, which were the words I created. It was a most selipodous situation.

4) I would imagine what people were thinking, especially adults. Someone would say something to me, and I would imagine what they were really thinking in their heads. It was kind of "reading between the lines," but under the assumption that they were actually thinking them and I could "hear" what they were saying deep inside.

5) I believed, at least for a year, that I was an angel, and I tried to figure out who was going to hell and who wasn't. I would then try to "rescue" the people I thought were going to hell.

6) I used to read books backwards for fun.


Addendum) I was going to mention that I rocked back and forth all of the time (still do), but I think that's not so much weird as an actual behavioral pattern. I'm not sure.

 

[Mr. Laser Beam]

I was going to mention that I rocked back and forth all of the time (still do), but I think that's not so much weird as an actual behavioral pattern. I'm not sure.

Ah, no worries, I do that all the time.

After a few gin and tonics.

 

[Butters]

I used to wander round the house holding a mirror pointing up, and I pretended I was walking on the ceiling.

 

[captainkirk]

My siblings and I believed that the kids next door were plotting something against us. So we started spying on them, keeping records of their friends, storing their litter that they would sometimes throw over our wall, and set traps in the garden in case they climbed over in the middle of the night. I think we read too many mystery stories. We basically suspected that everyone in the neighborhood was hiding something.

 

[cosmic mouse]

I was a tomboy as a child and played mostly with boys up until my teenage years.

same here.

However, in middle school (36 years ago), I met my best friend who is a girl and we are still best friends.
At the time we first met we were both riding horses and we would set up all these (in hindsight very tall and very challenging) jumps in the field and woods behind her house and then run around an jump over them, pretending we were horses. This lasted almost a year until my friend fell over one and broke her arm.

 

[CorporalCaptain]

As a boy of 4 or so, I liked to lie down on the floor and stare into ceiling fans. It was like looking into the neural neutralizer in "Dagger of the Mind." The extra weird thing was that I did it in stores while mom shopped.

When I was 2, I spotted water towers.

 

[Kor]

When batteries in a flashlight or something were dying, I would take them out and do this ritual where I touched the different ends of the batteries together while reciting a little rhyme I made up. I swore it made the batteries last longer.

Kor

 

[Sibyl]

To this day I love popcorn ceilings. I used to lay in my bed and stare up at my bedroom ceiling looking for shapes, whether they were people, animals, demons, aliens, spaceships...whatever. My ceiling probably sparked my imagination more than any single other thing in my life.

 

[J.T.B.]

At around the same time, a friend and I were bus freaks. We had an encyclopedic knowledge of city transit buses, school buses, long-haul interstate buses, you name it.

That reminds me of when my city first got transit buses, January of 1985 IIRC. My friend and I would just pay the fare (50 cents) and ride the whole route, till we got back to where we started, which took a couple of hours. What we didn't factor in was when the length of the ride put us past the time to catch the last bus back. Which resulted in a pay phone call to my friend's mom, waiting around in the cold and dark, and a very frosty ride home in the back of her station wagon. She was into the silent treatment.

 

[Mr. Laser Beam]

That reminds me of when my city first got transit buses, January of 1985 IIRC. My friend and I would just pay the fare (50 cents) and ride the whole route, till we got back to where we started, which took a couple of hours.

That reminds me of the first time I learned how to ride the NYC subway. I basically did nothing for the rest of that day but ride around. I'd get off at a station, walk around it for awhile, then get back on the train and ride for awhile, then get out at another station, etc. etc.

Ever since then I have been obsessed with mass transit of all kinds. I am a transit GEEK. I like just riding around on buses, streetcars, subways, light rail, whatever, even with no particular destination in mind. And I collect the payment cards that different cities use to pay for rides. I have a whole notebook full of them!

 

[J.T.B.]

I didn't do anything really "weird" by my standards, but my standards may go some distance further than might be normal today. We did do some kind of crazy and dangerous things, though. We lived in a new subdivision where there were a lot of empty fields and a lot of kids and we were always outside playing around when we weren't in school and the weather was good.

Our neighborhood had a lot of hills and to enter our street from the east you would be on a fairly steep downhill, then had to turn onto the street and climb back uphill to my house. I didn't like the work of pedaling up that hill, so I would ride my bike as fast as I could on the downhill, then sweep through the 90-degree right with as little braking as possible, so my momentum would carry me much of the way up the next hill. If a car had been coming out at the wrong place when I zoomed around that turn I would have been lucky to live. How it never happened I don't know. Oh yeah, in the winter the city would spread cinders on the streets, and then take forever to clean them up. It was like a layer of very fine gravel. I remember a few times in the spring feeling my bike drifting left at top speed and hearing the cinders as the tires slid through them sideways. Never went down, though. And no helmets either.

My grandparents lived on a farm and I had a lot of cousins so there was a whole other set of things to do when we got together there. For example, we could ride horses any time, but we decided we needed to ride a pig. I can tell you, first of all, the pigs won't put up with it. Second, if you ride a pig in the pig pen you will get bucked off into pig pen muck.

One day my grandpa had me load two cows and two calves in the '62 Chevy pickup and drive them up to the top of a canyon, where he had taken some more cows in the other truck. About a 30 minute drive, the last half unpaved, narrow and winding. I was up for it, because I had been driving that truck for a while. My younger brother and two cousins went with me and everything went fine. I was 13 years old. When my son was 13, well... I just can't imagine it.

 

[Butters]

The most stupid thing I ever did as a child, and I can’t have been older than eight, was to trust some older children and follow them across the top of a slag heap. Those things were basically deep and deadly slurry pits covered with a fragile solid crust.

 

[Silvercrest]

In the 1970s I was obsessed with the idea of being "bionic". I went around trying to convince everyone (and myself) that I actually was. Without any real understanding of what that meant ... I think I envisioned Col. Austin & Co. as having their limbs augmented with mechanisms and implants — did not grasp that those limbs were totally missing. I'd had stitches in a couple of places and rationalized that implants could've been put in then.

Perhaps if I'd gotten an eyeful of what Austin really looked like without his limbs, it would've brought me down to normal.

Or scarred me for life (so to speak).

You pick.

 

[Gingerbread Demon]

In the 1970s I was obsessed with the idea of being "bionic". I went around trying to convince everyone (and myself) that I actually was. Without any real understanding of what that meant ... I think I envisioned Col. Austin & Co. as having their limbs augmented with mechanisms and implants — did not grasp that those limbs were totally missing. I'd had stitches in a couple of places and rationalized that implants could've been put in then.

Perhaps if I'd gotten an eyeful of what Austin really looked like without his limbs, it would've brought me down to normal.

Or scarred me for life (so to speak).

You pick.

Haha in primary school we used to run around and run doing the bionic sound effects and stuff. Annoyed the rest of the kids but we were a small group of four and we had fun. Jumping off playthings in the playground and falling and rolling around with the sound effects and all. Was fun till one of us broke their arm jumping off a playground structure.