Paddyahern, I went to a Catholic school as a small child and there were Aherns in several classes, including my own.
Anyway, one of the stories I have is that I used to say when my younger siblings were annoying me... "you know...death can be fatal".
One of the funniest stories was when I was in grade 5. We used to go up to the convent to watch science programmes on the nuns' TV set.
Anyway on this one day, our teacher suddenly came out with "Who made that horrrrrrible smell?". I cracked up laughing about how she said it and didn't even notice any smell. The girls said it must have been one of the boys.
We all got into trouble for laughing and she threatened never to bring us to the convent to watch any more TV if we didn't behave.
Also, up until I was about ten, I thought only boys were capable of farting.
I remember the first time we were learning about religion in the Catholic primary school I went to. I was about 8 at the time.
The class were having a discussion about what they knew about catholicism and the teacher then started talking about the holy trinity. I was already confused, I was thinking everyone was talking about a film or a cartoon I hadn't seen so when the teacher started talking about the trinity I put my hand up and said "Who's Jesus?".
If I had left it there it would have been fine, but I didn't. The teacher explained who Jesus was, how he walked on water, rose from the dead etc. then this dialogue occured.
Me: So who's God?
Teacher: God is Jesus' father.
Me: So who's the holy spirit.
Teacher: The holy spirit is God.
Me: Is Jesus God?
Teacher: Yes, you're getting it now.
Me: Haha, I get it, your joking.
Teacher: I'm not joking, do you believe in God?
Me: No, you're all crazy, haha.
After that came a serious 3 hour indoctrination from one of the priests of the local church, in which I was obsessed with this guy's nose hair. Eventually I realised I had to pretend to believe to get out of the situation and go out and play.
I near got thrown out of the school because of that, and some kids actually tried to bully me for not believing in a fictional diety, although, by the time they reached 9 they had realised I was the only one in the school telling the truth.
Yeah that's pretty funny, eh?
I got another religion one. At six, I was staying at another girl's house, and she was teaching me what prayers were.
It went something like this.
Emma: Dear Jesus...
Me: Jesus? Who's Jesus?
Emma: Jesus is God.
Me: God who?
Emma: God made everything. The flowers and the trees.
Me: But the flowers grow by themselves.
Emma: But God made them that way.
Me: Oh.
And another time my mum was telling me about Catholic religion when I was seven. No-one in my family - to the best of my knowledge - has ever been Catholic and now no-one in my immediate family even has a religion. Mum told me that Catholic's believed that Mary was the mother of God, and my thoughts ran something like this. (at age seven.)
"Hang on. If Mary's God's mother, and God is Jesus' father, and Mary is Jesus' mother, then isn't that weird?" (Don't think at that stage I knew what Oedipal meant.)
Also, up until I was about ten, I thought only boys were capable of farting.
Until I was ten, I thought that only men ever drank beer. Then I saw my grandma drinking beer and I was astonished.
I remember one odd thought that I had as a child. It regarded objects & motion. I didn't see cars driving down the road as moving in a real way as long as they weren't changing in a physical shape or appearance
When I was about 6 or 7 years old, I asked my sister what caused thunder. She told me that thunder is caused by clouds banging together!! The scary thing is, I actually believed her for several years!! It was only when we studied weather in science that I realised her explanation didn't make sense.
Replace the word "clouds" with "mollecules" and your sister wasn't that far off the mark!
At uni (all right - this isn't, technically, a "childhood" anacdote, but we're talking about "tests", right?) I was studying King Arthur at Tasmanian uni (now called Unitas because they want to be trendy and upbeat, or something.) And the question was how does this or that Arthurian movie relate to Australian history.
Anyway I remember this was almost the same day as the Republican election (which failed.
) and so I somehow managed to string together this crap about how Monty Python & Holy Grail is a challenge against the monarchy and how this was relevant because Aus was challenging the monarchy at the time.
(The lecturer seemed to like it.)
I also had no idea what to write in some psych exam essay so I spouted some kind of stuff I'd learnt in Ancient Civs that year about how Aristotle thought that women and slaves were incapable of higher reasoning. Can't remember the essay topic or how this was relevant, but the first year Psych lecturer seemed to like that as well and SOMEHOW I ended up with an A.
Still don't know how. Funny the things you can get away with in uni.
I'm nine years old, and I've been dropped off at a private day-care. I sit in the kitchen, because it smells like diapers everywhere else and I can't bear to be there. I've stolen a book from my mom's bookcase, and I'm reading it. It's an autobiography of a girl who broke her neck and became quadriplegic. I'm rather proud of myself for reading an "adult" book in English (this was two years after I learned English), but I think the woman in the book is very silly. She's seventeen years old--almost double my age--and she doesn't understand what a fracture of the cervical vertebrae means, or that people don't automatically die if they break their necks, or that paralysis from a broken spinal cord is usually permanent. I read the book until the main character has gotten out of the rehabilitation center; but after that, it's all about her learning to accept her paralysis and find a husband, and that's boring; so I put it down.
Biologically speaking I wasn't a child when this occured, but in the written product that came from this I used the sentence "the child is dead", in the meaning that I finally had lost all natural bonds with my self as a kid. A part in this process was me arriving by train to Vienna (capital of Austria), going to a stand where they sold danish pasteries, in Sweden these are called Wienerbröd, implying that it is a Bread from Vienna (don't remember if I knew that they were called danish pasteries back then), I bought one or two, I quickly concluded that something was wrong with the pasteries. Shortly I was leaving Vienna as I had previously left Antwerp in Belgium and was to leave West Berlin very soon... These events all took place over a period of three days, early july 1986, and I had just turned 21.
Five years old. My family lived in a small mining town on the west coast of Tasmania (Population around 2000.)
I somehow got it into my head that I would take my one year old sister to the playground. So I did. We played around for a while and then I wanted to go home. So I said, "Let's go home." and my sister said, "DOH" (=No)
So I went home without her. Meanwhile my mum was frantically searching for my little sister when I got back. She said, "Where's your sister?"
My reply was - matter-of-factly - "At the playground."
My dad found little sister sitting by the slide and chewing the black gravel stones underneath.
When I was 5, Mum got my 2 younger brothers and me some flowers and water so we could make flower arrangements while she fed the baby. We were going alright for a while and then my 2 year old brother ate some of the flowers. In the meantime, I had caught a large Andrew's Cross spider in a jar and was really excited and ran in to tell mum.
When she came out to look, the spider was not in the jar and I was looking frantically all over the place for it. It was then that we noticed my 2 year old had a couple of spider legs hanging out of his mouth.
I was wailing "he ate my spiderrrrrrr!" and it took ages to console me. He only admitted to doing it a couple of years ago when he was in his late 30's.
I reckon walking is a method of transport. (Job agents can be quite stupid)
When I was seven or so, I came home from school, and said to my mum, "I learnt a really rude word today. BOG!"
My mum said, "Yes, that isn't a very nice word, is it?"
Then I said, "And I know what it means too. It's when your car gets stuck in the mud and you can't get out!"
The same brother I talked about earlier who ate my spider also had some very interesting insults for people. One day he told my mum he would throw her "down the dunny can" because she did something that annoyed him.
The mind picture of a little 3 year old picking up a grown lady and throwing her in a can had me in hysterics!
My father got in trouble as a little altar boy because he corrected the priest's Latin.
hehe. Before, after, or during the service?
Truthfully, I never had much interest in dolls as a kid either. Or flowers. Still don't.
