I think I have slowly grown into my strangeness, it didn't suddenly come upon me. My mind has always thought just a little bit differently than everyone else's—here are some of my best childhood stories.
Ladybugs:
To me Ladybugs were one of the world's greatest tragedies. How unfair that every single one of them were "ladies" and none "gentlemen." As a child I felt sorry for them. However, I did not become horrified for them until the day I realized that such an injustice was also the plight of the "daddy-long-legs."
Ladybugs are bright red and polka-dotted and darling . . . daddy-long-legs look like spiders—need I say more. What a strange couple.
Dandylions:
When I was a little girl my mother told me that dandelions were good for me. Being rather oblivious to the fact that people eat dandelion greens, the first thing I thought of when she said this was the bright yellow flowers I called dandelions. As well as being oblivious I was also curious. I decided I would try this healthy food one day when I was playing outside and bored. I discovered that dandelion flowers are edible (and later found that they aren't poisonous), they taste rather like nothing and feel like fluff in your mouth. I have not delighted my taste-buds with another dandelion flower since.
Corn on the cob:
In my mind it seems like longer words are better than short words—Delectable is a better word than good, elegant is much better than pretty, indifferent is better than uncaring, magnanimous is much better than kind. (The largest word in the english language has 189,819 letters in it! Why would someone make a word so long you couldn't even mumble it out in a breathe?) I had several mishaps with words because I thought this way. Whenever I asked for corn I would ask my mother for corn on the cob-web, because obviously "cobweb" must be better than "cob" because it is longer. Perhaps my most embarrassing slip up was when "The Princess Diaries" came out and I couldn't remember if it was called "Princess Diary" or "Princess Diaria" . . . Diaria is longer.
Kittens:
When I was a little girl I ran wild outside. My hair would hallo around my face and I'd be freckled with dirt and sun-burnt to a crisp, and of course I loved ever moment of it! We had kittens one spring, darling little things, I couldn't spend enough time with them. Usually it is good to spend a lot of time with animals because it helps domesticate them—in my case it was way past over-kill.
In my mind the kittens should love doing everything I loved doing. I loved going down the slide—so they came with me, I loved swinging—they got to come along . . . after a few days I couldn't run fast enough to catch them. They were the wildest, most fearful, scarcest kittens I have ever met.
Did I learn my lesson from this first set of kittens. No, that would be too easy. We got another cat, this one was an adult, tame already—the kind that loves to curl around and around your leg until it's shed a fifth of its hair around your pant leg. Tame. We had a sand-pile in the backyard, I spent many happy hours there digging holes. My brother and I discovered a game we could play where he would begin digging a hole a foot away from me and we would dig under the ground and make a tunnel between our two holes. I think all it took was for me to be playing in the sand-pile once when the cat walked by to formulate my idea . . .
The cat would want to go through the tunnel! —no, it didn't. Poor cat. I could also dig beautiful caves. The cat would want to live in the sand forever —no, it didn't.
He was a very patient cat.
Sherbert Cat:
Yes, this is the same patient cat. One day I was drawing with chalk on the sidewalk—this is a favorite pastime of many children. Although I had no particular talent at drawing I was having fun. Our beautiful, large, blue eyed, white furred cat came up and began rubbing against me, asking for some attention. —I didn't have time to spare on cats, it didn't appreciate all the time I had already dedicated to it anyways! I ignored him for a while, then began pushing him away as he persisted.
It took me a few minutes before I realized the chalk on my hands was transferring onto his fur coat. After that all I wanted to do was pat the cat—only taking breaks to replenish the loose chalk on my hands. At first he was orange and blue and yellow, but I didn't stop there. Soon he was a brown mesh of all the colors—rather ugly really. Did we stop there —yes, but only because (duh, duh, duh) my mother caught us in the act and told us to go do something else with our abundance of spare time.
I'm sure our cat had a very dry tongue by the time finished cleaning his fur from that artistic endeavor.
Pool:
The lovely sand-pile I grew up in was edged in cement. A sidewalk wound up to the sand-pile and then the cement edged it. Because of my many digging expeditions I discovered a plastic tarp about two feet down in the sand-pile. Upon inquiry I discovered that this tarp was put there to keep dirt out of the sand, and hence weeds—but I had other ideas for it. It was a hot summer day, I had a shovel, and I knew where dad kept the hose. What I really wanted that summer day was a pool, what I had was a sand-pile—and an overactive imagination.
My brother and I began digging at one corner of the pile, and soon decided to begin filling the pool while we continued to dig. We probably wasted a pool worth of water before my mother found us waist high in wet sand and mud and explained that the water would run through the old tarp, that the sand could not go on the lawn, and that the mud should stay out of the sand-pile. Although the damage was already done.
The next month we cultivated "weed gardens" in the sand-pile and it has never been the same since. I remember summers when I was sent out to weed—literally—the sand-pile because it was growing more foliage than the lawn.
My Super Power:
When I was little I liked to make up stories about myself to seem cooler—mostly to my siblings.
Some people try to be original in their super-powers, but mine weren't even remotely cool. Inventive, yes. Copy-worthy, no.
My super powers included speaking to "inanimate objects and pears." Why pears are not inanimate objects I'm not sure, and why I decided that was a cool thing I also remain unsure.
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