5 Things You Thought Were Going to Be A Way Bigger Problem When You Were A Kid
As a kid, there are certain pieces of information that even in your sugar-and-recess-addled brain seemed pretty important. The sort of things you need to lock down for future use for your own survival. And yet, these juvenile concerns turn out to be exactly that — completely juvenile.
If you had accurate intuition on the things that would actually come in handy, you wouldn’t have tuned out your math teacher when they explained how interest worked. Instead, you were busy clearing space in your grey matter for these five things that would almost certainly never come up…
Quicksand
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Even in the extremely unnatural environment of New York City, I bet at least half the people I ask on the street could still tell me how to escape quicksand — don’t struggle, lay flat and work your way out, hopefully using a stick or rope to help. For whatever reason, we all filed this away in our brain with the biggest “DO NOT REMOVE” tag stuck to it that we could find. I think more adults know how to escape quicksand than know how to put out a grease fire, and that’s probably caused a couple deaths.
Black Widow Spiders
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In my childish mind, being bitten someday by a black widow spider was a sad surety. Every life, in my belief, would have a pivotal moment centered around a black widow spider bite, and it was only the person in question’s preparedness that decided if they continued on this Earth. If it was up to schoolchildren, every spider bite would result in a helicopter ride to the nearest hospital and a gallon of anti-venom. Every hole in the world had a black widow spider inside, just waiting for one of your Pokemon marbles to roll into it and offer them a chance to strike.
Tetanus
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As a child, the slightest scrape caused by a metal that was anything outside of sterilized stainless steel was suddenly a race against time. A cut to your shin on old playground equipment was treated like a wound from a serrated arrow coated with poison most foul. It felt like you were being rushed into emergency surgery on a tiny gurney, signing off on your last will and testament to divide up your Game Boy games through swimming vision. Rust was an evil substance, thirsty for blood and driven to enter my bloodstream at all costs.
Now? I’ll cut my hand on a chain-link fence and immediately slap it onto a subway pole. So far, my jaw remains mobile.
Acid Rain
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You saw the words “acid rain” in your social studies textbook and thought you were in for a day of disintegrating skeletons. Instead, you were stuck reading about how it is bad for statues, or whatever. Though honestly, I’m surprised it hasn’t become more relevant given the fact that we’ve basically been curbstomping the atmosphere for my entire life in order to avoid walking to a 7-Eleven. We’re actually overdue for a cleansing shower of the skin-sloughing variety, and if it happened, I don’t think “why” is a question that would be on anyone’s mind.
Sheepskin Condoms
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Look, I understand that some people have a latex allergy, and those people need to use sheepskin condoms. That’s straightforward enough, if a bit medieval. What it doesn’t explain is why I feel like roughly 75 percent of my sex-ed class was centered around the existence of sheepskin condoms. It could be the fault of the D.C. public school system, but I remember watching a not-grainy-enough VHS video of a woman giving birth, and then a teacher repeatedly emphasizing the existence of latex allergies and special condoms to combat it, as if it was a certainty that one of us would perish from pelvic anaphylactic shock.
They also told us not to use sandwich bags because they wouldn’t work, but that kind of felt like there was an event the principal knew about that we didn’t.