I hadn’t had “the talk” and assembled my own understanding about marriage = “the ability to touch each other’s private parts.”

I remember thinking, at the age of probably 8 or 10ish, that a bride and a groom, after they were married, in their fancy full wedding outfits would stand on either side of the sink (specifically in my house’s upstairs crappy bathroom with mildewy tile) and expose themselves to each other, and then the bride would reach across the sink and “tag” touch the groom’s crotch and then pull her dress up, and… at that point I didn’t really understand what she would “have” under her wedding dress, but I did assume the groom would reach over and basically “tag you’re it” style touch her, at which point the act would conclude.

I didn’t have a name for this act, but I was pretty sure this is what adults all did immediately after marriage, one time only. I didn’t associate it with babies or anything, more a rite of passage.

I thought ‘tomorrow’ was a day of the week. So when my mom would say we’d go somewhere ‘tomorrow’ I’d ask her every day if it was tomorrow yet, and she’d say no, and I’d keep waiting.

For a while, I thought kissing was how women got pregnant.

It MIGHT have had something to do with getting a half sibling in spite of my father saying he hadn’t had sex with the mother. Religion makes people weird, is it really that big a deal to admit you had sex out of wedlock, when everybody already knows you got someone pregnant?

I believed that for very small creatures (like ants) time was faster.

In kindergarden, when one kid was about to hit another, the other kid would say “if you hit me, you have to pay the health insurance!”. None of us had any idea what that could mean, and I have no idea where that idea came from, but it worked, because to us, that sounded bad.

Some of my class mates thought that wrestling was real, and a few of them thought there was a place in the US where it was legally possible to kill a man during a wrestling match. They were quite offended when I told them how ridiculous that notion sounded to me.

I thought space rockets had to wait for. Ight to go into space. If they took off during the day whey would just go into the blue sky like planes do.

Growing up, we had a neighbor in the Air national guard who was a boom operator on KC-135 refuelers, meaning he controlled the boom that comes out the back of the airplane and transfers fuel to other aircraft. The boom operator lays face down on a bench and looks out a window in the back of the plane to control the boom.

When I learned that they “operate on their belly”, I somehow interpreted that to mean he performed medical operations on people’s bellies.

It didn’t even make sense to me at the time but I figured there must be some special reason that the operation had to be done while airborne and I was impressed that our neighbor was not only a doctor but an airborne surgeon who specialized in this one belly surgery that couldn’t be done on the ground.

That male orgasm was painful. I got this idea from seeing their o-face somewhere and assuming it indicated pain.

I thought our eyes worked by projecting some kind of energy beam that scanned objects, like how Superman’s X-ray vision is sometimes drawn.

One of my brothers was friends with a pair of twins named Eric and Ryan, but I thought that they were a single entity that somehow had two bodies known as American Ryan

That there were little gnomes inside the doors of the cars and that they were in charge of raising and lowering the windows, especially in the automatic cars.

That encountering quick sand in real life was a real possibility every day.

Bonus: My kid doesn’t believe that Santa is magical, he just has really advanced technology.

Tigers are female lions.

Freddy Krueger was two people. I thought it was like Dr. Frankenstein and his monster. I thought it was Dr. Krueger and Freddy was the monster he created. When I saw the movie I was like where’s his creator, the one that brought him to life?

When I was a young lad I thought milk was cow pee and was super confused by the world.