Weird stuff you did as a child

When I was a kid, for some ungodly reason, I used to ball up cupcake wrappers and swallow 'em.

Was I the only kid that didn't grow up with "nineties food"? I never ate those weird handy-snack things, or Lunchables, or Chef Boyardee, or Easy Mac, or Pop Tarts or anything, because I never liked them. And I informed my parents of this fact, and so they never bought them. So I'd go over to my friends' houses, and they'd have all this stuff that looked and smelled like and probably was mostly plastic, and then they'd come over to mine, and we'd have fresh fruits and vegetables diced and put in plastic containers, and actual blocks of cheese that was never in a can at any point, and almonds and walnuts and dried fruits. And potato chips if they were lucky and I hadn't eaten them first, because shit, who doesn't like potato chips?

We weren't vegetarians or anything, and we weren't on a health kick, that was just the kind of stuff I liked to eat.

I think the only kid food I actually liked were those Fruit By The Foot things, and unfortunately that was the one food my father refused to buy because it was unhealthy.

I'd also pull the heads off Barbies and fill them with water, and we'd throw them at cars. Somewhere, a collector is probably weeping.

Green/purple/blue ketchup will always be a sin, though. Every child knows this.

Pop Tarts were about as far as I went. For some reason, my parents just never bought nineties stuff. Not even Gushers or Fruit by the Foot, or Lunchables or anything.

Every few weeks this year I've been buying Fruit by the Foot as snacks, though.

I believe I grew up on instant ramen (bags, because the cup ramen stuff tastes atrocious), fried rice, and (while I could still have it) pizza. My diet was limited back then. I hardly remember most of the stuff I ate, only that there was very little of it and next to none that was good for me (not much that was bad, either, I think, just not good stuff). I like to think I eat better now, if only marginally.

Maybe all those pizzas during the first half of my life were what fucked up the second so much... hm...

I never had lunchables or chef boyardee either. I did have Spaghettios a lot though...and I was the only one who liked them. Everyone else in my family thought it was gross.

I also got Pop Tarts all the stinkin time until we went on a major health kick and have started mostly only eating organic stuff.

For the longest time I would only eat raw hot dogs with cheese balls for every meal. The dessert part varied, but the main portion was always the same

For the longest time, unless we picked up some McDonald's or Burger King or Papa John's (<3) or something, I would only eat raw hot dogs with cheese balls for every meal. The dessert part varied, but the main portion was always the same.

On the subject of Pop Tarts, I would never heat them up when I ate them. I'd have halves or quarters of them as snacks occasionally, but it wasn't until very, very, very recently that I actually started eating them the way they were meant to be eaten on a regular basis.

In kindergarten, I asked a girl to show me her penis (I knew girls didn't actually have a penis, but I didn't know what they had instead).

I started doing this in 2nd grade when a classmate did it.

Let's see what else I haven't covered:

• I remember when I was about 3, I would scotch tape dominoes to the long sticks in the Tinkertoy box and pretend they were road signs. The dominoes were these large, white ones, so I would sometimes write the name of a neighborhood street on the back of them.

• When I was about 8, I dug a hole about 5 feet deep and crawled into it. And got stuck for a few minutes. The hole stayed in our yard for years. We once used it as a barbecue pit at my insistence. And I never even liked barbecue.

• Related to the above, I saw an ad in a magazine once that showed a scoop of ice cream with barbecue sauce and grass chunks in it, captioned "BBQ grassberry". (The idea was that it was a laundry detergent that tackled tough stains, such as barbecue sauce, ice cream, or grass.) I thought the ad looked nasty, so it swore me off barbecued anything, or even barbecue sauce, for quite a while.

• Likewise, the fact that one of the Animaniacs toys was Dot driving an ice cream truck, combined with "BBQ grassberry" above, was enough to swear me off ice cream for a short time. (I hated Animaniacs and made the mistake of telling this to my classmates, who saw fit to tease me by quoting the show at me WELL INTO HIGH SCHOOL.)

• I hated when things had similar names to each other. I wouldn't even watch the Flintstones for a time because my mom's family mostly lived in Flint, Michigan. I remember smashing a Flintstones cup in the bathtub for that very reason.

• There was once a video store about two miles from my house, that we would walk to because they also sold ice cream. Whenever we walked back, I would always pretend that I had lost my voice because the ice cream had frozen my vocal cords. I think I got the idea because I had seen a Big Boy comic (they used to give out comic books at Big Boy featuring the eponymous hamburger-holding mascot) where he lost his voice.

• On one such trip back from the ice cream store/video store, I got ahead of mom and sister, and found that the house was locked. I didn't feel like waiting, so I BROKE A WINDOW WITH A SKI POLE TO GET IN. (Fortunately, this was summer, and the window opened out to the garage.)

• In 3rd grade, I once chewed a pencil into 1/2 inch-sized pieces. My teacher got mad and told me I would get lead poisoning. Being the smart kid I was, I told her that the pencil lead isn't made of lead, it's made of graphite. That shut her up.

• When I was about 10, I went to church camp and started singing "I Saw Elvis in a UFO" by Ray Stevens. The other kids loved the song and asked me to keep singing it. One of them then asked me to pull my pants down and sing it "out of my ass" á la Jim Carrey. Cue me hunched over on the top bunk, pants down, moving my ass cheeks in rhythm with the song. Followed by the counselor on the bunk below me looking up and telling me to stop.

• Also at church camp, we got candles for some sort of random event. I thought it would be funny to hold my candle up to the toilet paper roll in the bathroom and see what happened. Needless to say, I didn't get to keep my candle.

• Third one from church camp: whenever we gathered firewood for the bonfires, I would always find a piece with a lot of slugs on it, throw it in the fire, and watch the slugs burn to death.

• I used to be extremely afraid of the logo for a local TV station. However, I loved Wheel of Fortune, and said network would always display their logo and the daily lottery numbers on a chyron right in the middle of Wheel, so I would turn my head whenever they came on. One day we were watching it at my mom's friend's house, and I walked out of the bathroom only to have her shove me right into her open jacket, because the lottery numbers had just come up. I also remember that one time, they showed the numbers during a commercial break instead, and used a different logo that didn't scare me.

I ate cupcake and muffin wrappers, too. I think I did so because of all the crumbs that stuck to them.

As for "90's kid food", I sort of ate it and sort of didn't (I was born in 1997, so we still had a lot of the classic 90's stuff when I was little). My mom would sometimes buy Fruit Roll-ups for snacks (I remember liking the rainbow ones best), and sometimes she bought me Beefaroni (my sister got Easy Mac), but that was pretty much it. My mom refused to let us eat Pop-Tarts, Fruit Gushers (though I think regular fruit snacks were okay), Dunkaroos, Lunchables, etc. I'd still go back and eat Beefaroni and Fruit Roll-ups for the hell of it, though (mainly because I likes crappy processed food sometimes).

The only Chef Boy-Ar-Dee product I liked was the ravioli, so I ate that a lot. Never was fond of the spaghetti or beefaroni or whatever. And mom would rarely buy me Handi-Snacks since I only liked the breadsticks and not the cheez. I also didn't like Fruit Roll-Ups very much, but I loved Gushers (still do).

I never liked macaroni either. I think I have a near total aversion to fake cheezy sauce.

I had also never even heard of Dunkaroos until recently.

No. I grew up with '80s food, which was way better as practically no bugger had a microwave yet, so we were spared that horror.

Findus crispy pancakes, beans and chips FTW.

I've seen this thread floating around and thought... "No, the weird stuff I did as a kid is just TOO weird to share," but today, I suddenly remembered something that's tame enough that I can share it.

I'm pretty sure I'm not the only kid who thought of everything as potential "Barbie"-everything. What I mean is, when I'm in a restaurant and am using little coffee-creamers, I remember that I used to think of those as potential wastebaskets for my Barbie dolls to put in their dollhouse or any "house" setup I put on my bedroom floor. Likewise, my guy once looked at me funny when I explained how those things that they put in pizza boxes to keep the pizza-cheese from sticking to the lid (those little three-legged white things)... well, those were Barbie-coffee-tables.

When I was 10, I got as a gift a re-working of my bedroom floor. My mom wanted to tile it and I picked out black and white checkerboard tile. I ended up using the leftovers and some scissors to make the top patio of my Barbie dollhouse into a dance floor.

Maybe I was just a really creative little girl?

I used to refer to those little boxes you get nice jewelry in as "predicament boxes".

I do not know why.

That's not weird at all. I did the same thing (although for my larger dolls, never was into barbies that much) and so did my mom.

According to my mother, I really liked the 10 Commandments as a kid and would quote them randomly. Which became a problem when I went up to everyone in the produce section of the supermarket and told them "Thou shalt not commit adultery" (I had no idea what that meant, in my defense).

I was kind of obsessed with torture when I was young. I would pretend people were capturing and hurting me. One time I tied myself to the swing set and got stuck.

Huh. That's interesting. I was weirdly obsessed with the idea of being killed by a firing squad...

Mine usually involved being chained up and left to starve in a dungeon somewhere. Sometimes getting cut/stabbed with knives too. But really just about anything.

Did you ever grow out of it? I'm not entirely sure I have, though oddly I hate watching horror movies about those very same things...

You know, I'm not sure I did. I still find it weirdly terrifying, particularly (and this sounds weird even to me) the vulnerability of having the little paper square pinned on to one's jacket, thus admitting the presence of a heart in there and the mortality that that obviously implies.

On the other hand, I find fascinating the thought of standing there, blindfolded and waiting for the bullets. I guess I'm oddly attracted to the idea of being absolved of responsibility for my own life or death.

No, that makes total sense to me. It's usually particular images or facets of the stuff that stick in my mind too.

Your reasoning makes sense, though I have no idea why I feel this way. It started really young (I couldn't have been older than 7 or 8, and that's just when I start remembering it).

Anyway, here's something else weird I did so I'm not totally derailing this thread:

I used to refuse to eat cheese unless it was melted. I think I hated the texture of cold cheese more than the actual taste, but it still confused the heck out of friends' parents and preschool teachers.

I just scarfed down cheese slices straight out of the package when I was nervous. I actually know why this one started; the first time I did it, we were about to move in a matter of hours and that was the only thing left in the fridge, a pack of cheese slices.

I used to eat individually-wrapped cheese - so much that my older sister nicknamed me "The Mouse" for a while.

No real obsession with torture that I remember, but I remember a slight obsession with pretending that I was an old person and my sister and cousin's obsession with pretending to have broken legs. We made a playhouse out of the old pig pen in my backyard when my parents decided that slaughtering our own pork was just too much work anymore. When my cousins were over, I would play the Grandma and they and my sister would pretend to be coming home from the hospital with broken legs.

NO IDEA WHY.

Then, there were the games I'd play with my best friend / neighbor girl. If we weren't vampires or going on time travel adventures with Bill & Ted, we were magical princesses who were on the run from an evil wizard who wanted our powers, and, according to my friend, our bodies (in the very non-possession, what kind of movies was my friend allowed to watch adult way). I do remember constantly playing a warrior-type princess who would take on the dragons and beasts to save my "sister" and I frequently pretended to be killed so she could magically heal me. —- It really was like playing Legend of Zelda before Legend of Zelda existed.

I called Chewy Chips Ahoy "ghost cookies".

I referred to my imaginary friends as "lightning friends". I do not remember why.

I've silly actually been feeling really guilty about this one.

My dad kept trying to install Delta Force on our computer, and every morning, I'd check if it was there and uninstall it. I liked seeing the "Uninstall Shield" logo.

I've been remembering it a lot again lately because I know how torn up I'd be if someone deleted my saves on something. Even buying him the Delta Force Anniversary Collection for Christmas last year hasn't eased my conscience in the least. And he didn't even remember until I made a nod to it.

Stand up for the first time on a table. I don't remember it but that sounds like something I wouldn't be brave enough to do today(afraid of heights).