rant is where the heart is

diaryland: sirilyan.diaryland.com: entry for 2003-03-02 (17:45)
In which our plucky young hero was such a kid.

Things I used to believe, when I was very young, and was filled with a charming innocence:

1. Before I really learned to read very well, I used to be taken along to the mall in Sydney all the time so that my father could have his pictures developed. (He was an amateur photographer, in a time when this meant you spend hundreds of dollars on lenses and heavy black Canon cameras and high-speed film, not that you carry around a spare CompactFlash card with you at all times just in case.) It took me many years to figure out that the sign we always drove in next to said ENTRANCE, not PICTURES. (It was the same sign, too, all these years.)

2. I once was looking at a Sears catalog, or maybe a Consumers Distributing catalog, and it was open to the section on typewriters. (Ask your parents.) There was a split picture of the English-language keyboard layout of the English version of one model of typewriter, and the French-language keyboard layout of the French version of this model. Ah, I thought to myself. You just replace the English letters with the French ones, and that's how you speak French. I didn't theorize about this too much, because it would have led to me realizing that the reverse must also be true, and then I would have tried to translate from French to English, and I'd remember a miserable failure like that.

3. Coca-Cola had its way with my impressionable young mind; I was a child who absolutely hated to drink milk, and would happily have subsided on pop and pizza all his life. (I am half-opposite now: I subside on water and pizza.) One day I had the bright idea of mixing Coke and milk, thus producing pilk: all the health benefits of moo juice, with delicious carbonation! Being told to stop wasting milk was my first introduction to the anti-science bias of our demon-haunted world.

4. I thought that buying toys would make me happy, cool, and popular. So I begged and begged and begged for a GoBot. I got one. It was the crazy evil girl GoBot who turned into a black car. I didn't become popular or cool. It didn't make me happy. And the transformation mechanism was really sort of boring. I played with it for two hours, max, over the period of a few days. Then I never touched it again.

(Actually, I just realized I still believe this with all my heart. I keep on buying toys to make me happy and popular and cool. And I keep onl playing with them for a few days, and then never using them again. Which just goes to show, you're only as old as you feel.)

5. When I was in my late twenties, I believed that you're only as old as you feel.

sirilyan.diaryland.com | sirilyan dotcom
anything said in lowercase sounds profound. say it to me.