This week’s prompt from Long and Short Reviews is “weirdest thing I loved as a kid”. I suppose every kid is weird in their way — I knew one who loved eating Cool-Whip with a spoon right out of the container — but what comes to mind for me is this little game of my own invention. I think it started while on road trips, but I would close my eyes and then open them dramatically, and pretend I’d just woken up in my own body not knowing who I was or where, and then I would try to gather clues about my life and the people around me, looking at my books and clothes like a stranger would. This was more interesting on road trips, because I would try to use license plates and street signs to “figure out” where I was. This is not as easy as you’d think, especially when we were driving through border areas like the corner of Tennessee, Kentucky, and North Carolina. Similarly, I would try to shift my brain into “seeing” unfamiliar places as familiar, and familiar places as those I was seeing for the first time. Can you tell I was very much the introvert until my twenties?
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Stephen, you sound like you had quite the imagination as a kid! I used to do similar things like pretending I was from a different country… or planet sometimes… and I would try to figure out the local culture. Sounds like a load of fun!
A happy consequence of growing up without TV!
Reading FAR too much SF as a youngster I often slipped into xenoanthropologist mode when looking around me and tried to figure out exactly what these alien creatures I was forced to interact with were doing & what I could figure out from how they interacted with their environment……
I still do that in public places. “People be crazy”, as they say.
That game sounds fun!
On long car trips when I was a kid, I used to pretend all of the cars on the road were racing each other and would try to predict who might win.
If my sister was driving, our car would!
Must have driven your parents nuts.
This was a quiet game! It was something I’d do in my head to occupy myself in those days before gameboys, let alone smartphones.
That is quit a imagination.