Funny, sad, and strange childhood stories

opsec is for losers

1. My mother tells me that I learned how to read and count on my own at the age of 4; when I first learned to do these things, she assumed I learned at preschool, but when she asked my teacher about it, she replied she assumed I was taught at home. I found this to be a credible claim, as I have never remembered either being taught to read or not knowing how to do it.

2. At the same age, I also tried summersaulting down about 20 carpet stairs to see what would happen and ended up having my forearm split into two pieces. I also broke my arm as a baby because I tried to escape from my crib and succeeded.

3. When I was 7, our grandmother sent us a playdough package which my older brother cut open with a knife. I watched the knife cutting the package up close, and my brother pulled back the knife and accidentally hit my eye with it. It was extremely painful, rivaling the pain I felt after bellyflopping into the water from 10m. Fortunately, one of the doctors did not recommend conducting a surgery that would have left me with permanently compromised vision and the eye was able to heal on its own.

4. Me (~7 yo), my older brother (~12 yo), and older sister (~9 yo) decided to take our younger sister’s (~5 yo) American girl doll, dress it as a pirate, put an eyepatch on it, and hang it. I have no idea how or why we came to doing this prank — all I remember is that I think we used the eyepatch my brother made for me after the eyecut incident.

5. Around the time I turned 9, my family moved to Spain, so we went to a new ward to go to church. When I was in primary and chatting with the other children, one of the girls called me ‘mono’. My spanish was not very good the time, and I thought that she called me a monkey because she was being racist. I started crying and it was only after one of the adults intervened that I learned that the word ‘mono’ also meant ‘cute’.

6. When I was 9, my favourite hobby during recess was grabbing a metal pole and walking around it. One day, while I was doing that, I noticed that there was a lizard on the ground and admired it for a few minutes until a boy accidentally stepped on it, which crushed my heart and made me cry for like 30 minutes. After recess was over, the other students noticed something was wrong, and I told them “<insert name> stepped on a lizard”. A boy who I was friends with got really mad and started a fistfight — uncalled for, though I respect the commitment.

7. A year later, I learned by grandfather died. The next Monday, there was coincidentaly a school presentation about grandparents which made me burst into tears, and I had to be removed from the conference room by my homeroom teacher.

8. I sometimes involuntarily go to sleep, even as an adult. The strangest places and times I have fallen asleep were during a world cup match where I slept through several screams and underneath a loudspeaker at a party.

9. Close to the time I turned 12, my parents divorced. This was a massive shock to everybody who knew them— my father is charismatic, financially successful, and became the bishop of the ward one year after moving to Spain; my mother is attractive and socially pleasant. From the outside, their relationship looked fine; I refuse to comment on why they split. At the time, I didn’t care much about their divorce since it was amicable/mutual, though I found moving between their homes every week to be cancerous.

10. In 7th grade, middle school students would like to go to the bleachers to tell “your mom is so fat…” jokes to each other. During one of these sessions, I told one of the 8th graders that his mother was so fat that she looked like a dinosaur, and everybody thought it was hilarious and it became a school meme.

11. When I was 12, I started writing erotic fanfiction (that I refuse to link) after discovering fanfiction.net. I somehow reconciled this with my Mormon religious beliefs by thinking that it’s just written and that I myself was not partaking in the use of pornography. My stories got a reasonable amount of traffic (6,000 views? 60,000 views? All I remember the number 6 and a lot of zeroes), though around the time I was 16 I deleted most of them out of embarassment.

12. I also liked to draw pictures of semi-nude anime characters, swords, and guns. I was a decent artist, but nothing to write home about.

13. In 7th grade, a mentally unstable girl of Eastern European descent was known to be really into me. I was aware, and did not reciprocate feelings, not just because she was unstable, but because I was into a different girl: an attractive, proud, and emotionally expressive Portuguese girl. She did not reciprocate feelings either and I remember her being visibly distraught when she learned that I would be her partner in chemistry lab. She went back to Portugal at the end of the school year, and she sent herself off with a really long and tight hug, which I appreciated.

14. I am circumcised. I did not know this until I turned 15. The story of how I learned: when I was 12 or 13, we had a weekend-long field trip to a set of houses, and I went to shower. One of the kids went to talk to me and accidentally saw my dick. He then went off to the main room, and I then heard some whispering. Then, one by one, the boys who slept in the same house peeked over my shower door to talk to me, which I found odd, to say the least. I told this story to my mom and sisters 3 years later, and my mother told me that it was probably because I was circumcised, which caught me off guard: I thought circumcision cut off the entire tip of the penis, not the foreskin.

15. After turning 13, I began to find it more difficult to be religious; I noticed within my head that I would be compelled to believe in the church because I saw other people do it and would reason in motivated ways to reach conclusions that were consistent with my faith. So I browsed the internet and looked for answers, experiences people had with the church, and whatnot. Eventually I read the CES letter, which was the final nail in the coffin. Soon after turning 15, I found the courage to tell my father I no longer believed and did not want to go to church.

16. When I lived in Spain, I went to a small, preppy international school where tuition was €7,200 per year, about a third of the median person’s salary. They tried to present a really professional and clean cut image; internally the school was incredibly disorganized and informal. Older students were often personally close to teachers, and my class definitely was — in 10th grade, when three teachers were going to leave, we invited them to drink at a bar despite us being underage. At the bar, we played truth or dare, got the male teachers to kiss the female teacher, and both of the male teachers admitted to having engaged in a threesome.

17. About said female teacher— she was the school counselor while I was in 9th or 10th grade. One day, some people were invited over to the school to host an odd event where people were invited to trash talk each other and do weird things in front of the whole school. Me and a girl, who were participants, got extremely uncomfortable — she left abruptly first, and then I did as well close to the end. I then found that girl having a panic attack being comforted by her friends, later we found somewhere to hide and listen to radiohead. That teacher found us, and invited me to open up to her in her counselling room. During our conversation, she told me something along the lines of “I am here for you to do whatever, whenever you need” in a tone that was a bit suggestive. I would be inclined to brush it off as trying to be comforting… If she did not make an inappropriate comment about another student (supposedly as a joke), and did not hang up my drawings in her office.

18. This female student counselor was a libertarian (stereotype accuracy strikes again!) of Basque ancestry, had a dark triad-esque personality, and did not like other women.

19. About the girl who participated in the event — we were friends and knew each other through my older sister. She was an extremely smart German/Chilean bisexual girl who liked anime, art, JRPGs, talking about politics, edgy jokes, and filthy frank; needless to say, we were personally compatible, though she was two grades and three years older than me. She was my physical type (thin, short hair, blue eyes), I had a massive crush on her, but never admitted to it; to this day I don’t know whether I was too strong to admit it or too weak to do so. I last talked to her a few years ago; she transitioned (FtM), lives in England, and is studying as a programmer.

20. This girl was also close friends with a homophobic, racist, and right wing Russian girl… Until said Russian found her twitter that was full of “gay stuff” which caused them to cut ties. The bisexual girl told me to become friends with her because she still cared (personally? romantically?) for her, and I did. She was actually a pretty cool friend, but a bit introverted, disagreeable, and neurotic (she is Russian, after all). I checked her instagram/twitter and now she’s gotten into exercise and tbe Witcher.

21. About the two male teachers who we invited to drink: one of them was a left leaning and attractive Irish man who I would discuss politics with. I remember he was not able to keep a straight face at two jokes of mine: “how do you pick up a Jewish girl? With a dustpan” and “there are 1,000 people in a stadium, and only 4 cars because Mexicans carpool”. The other was a native Spaniard who was a Marxist who loved anime, who both me and my older sister were close to.

22. We also went on a field trip to Amsterdam with this counselor and the Irish teacher. I don’t remember that much about this trip, besides one time the teachers went off to do their own thing and came back seeming really high. They said they weren’t but we could tell something was off. Besides that, I remember that we could get the natives to buy us weed and that everybody was really tall.

23. During the 2016 US presidential election, I ran for student council and when I had to make my speeches I made a Donald Trump impersionation, spoke in English, and told everybody we were going to build a wall between the high school and the elementary school. The students thought it was hilarious; unfortunately I was not selected to be part of the student council due to reasons beyond popularity.

24. (context: Spain has a cohort system in education where the same set of kids at a school go on to take the same classes as they grow up). Around 10th grade, we started calling our class “team 22” because there were 22 students in the class and one of the boys in our class had a 22cm long penis. Somehow, even a few of the teachers caught on to why we named ourselves that.

25. We also did wild things on the school internet. Some students looked up porn on their phones and watched it with classmates during the break. I browsed /pol/ and listened to moonman parodies or Mr. Bond songs.

26. Our school had an exchange student program with an Indian school where they visited our school for a week and lived in our homes, and we did the same in India. My most vivid memory of India was crying about an awkward interaction I had with one of the Indian student’s parents, which prompted one of the Indian girls to sit next to me and talk to me. When I told her my mother was from <insert American state>, she told me that she went to a retreat there where children from conflicting nations (e.g Israel/Palestine, India/Pakistan) went to live together in the same house for a time. When the conversation drifted towards politics, she mentioned that she was left wing and disliked White people (ironically, she had a European face and lighter skin than me); although we disagreed on politics that did not seem to phase either of us. I was later told that this girl was really into me and I was unfortunately too retarded to notice.

27. We also visited a home for children with cerebral palsy. I had fun with them, and got one of the Indian boys to throw up roman saultes with me.

28. The other students had issues with the Indian exchange students, particularly their hygeine related habits, and complained about them to one of the professors. The girl who lived at my house was conscientious and socially sensitive, so I did not have the same issue; neither did my older sister for that matter.

29. In India, I had a fun chat with an Indian girl’s father about some abstract topic; I can’t remember if it was politics or philosophy, but something along those lines. Later, when we went clubbing, the girl accidentally overstayed in terms of time, and when we walked to her father’s car, she told me to get in the front, and I did so unthinkingly. I was later told this was a ploy on her part to make him less angry and felt incredibly awkward.

30. One time, I took a knife to school and played with it in class, which was against the rules, but I was mentally AFK and didn’t notice at the time. I left the knife on a sofa and completely forgot about it. Eventually, a teacher came to talk to me about the knife, which she had on her table. I told her it was mine, but that I did not remember playing with the knife, which was the truth. She later told me she had video evidence of me playing with said knife, and I simply told her that I believed her, but could not recall even having brought the knife with me. She acquiesced and gave the knife back, which was nice, as it belonged to my dead grandfather.

31. I took Physics in Bachillerato, and was taught by a guy with a PhD who talked to us about how the Rothschilds controlled the world and a bunch of other crazy conspiracy theories.

32. One day, when I was playing Overwatch, I was playing Hanzo and dueling a tracer, when they blinked out of my field of vision I instantly flickshotted their head.

33. One of the girls who used to go to our school (not the portugese girl) had a child with a boy from Africa when she was 17. The students found it… Surprising, but our progressive and left leaning homeroom teacher (not the crazy Vasca) kept a straight face.

34. Said homeroom teacher had issues with her husband and left him for our history teacher. I think it was technically against the rules for teachers to date, but nobody cared enough to call them out on it.

35. I got good grades in high school, and was getting high scores on the practice SATs, so I considered applying to an Ivy league university. I decided against it; during my research I found that going to a more selective college did not empirically boost earnings when controlling for self-selection and academics. I thought about the results for a few minutes and found them plausible, so I instead applied to a less prestigious school where I was able to get away with paying very little tuition and expenses. I now think this was a mistake because of how devalued college degrees are in the modern day, and this was part of the reason why I came out so strongly against Nate Silver’s suggestion to ignore Ivies and go to a state school.

36. We hosted a high school graduation party in a hotel, and some of us guys thought of breaking into the school in the middle of the night for fun. Once we got to the locked gate, one of us stepped up to the task of guessing the combination, tried ‘0000’, and succeeded. We got in and chatted on the bleachers; some students even smoked and took pictures.

37. I was a fan of the now famous streamer xQc back in 2018-2020 and was able to interact with him twice: once, he read out a troll fanfiction (which I refuse to link) that I wrote on stream, which he and his viewers found hilarious. The other time was when I stream sniped him in Overwatch and engaged in some trash talk with him. I felt embarassed about the incident, subbed, and apologized in text. He was somehow able to notice the donation message while he was playing and said it was cool and told me not to worry.

38. In my older sister’s class, one of the male teachers was known to be gay, and at the end of the school year, he confided in a male student that he thought was gay that he was into him and wanted to leave his long-term boyfriend for him. Unfortunately, he was not, and the incident forced him out of the school. (Note: informal relationships between students and teachers raise the rate at which these groups have romantic feelings and relationships with each other).