BEDA #15: Tooth Fairies, Racist Holidays And Other Lies My Parents Told Me

Going to the dentist was never one of my favorite pastimes, but my last visit was especially unpleasant. I was sitting in the chair, my mouth opened uncomfortably wide and my eyes squinting in the light of what looked like a miner’s torch on top of his head, as I tried to read my dentist’s facial expression. Even though it was hard to make out much of his face behind his glasses and mouth mask, I didn’t think he looked particularly worried, so I relaxed a little, until:

                ‘It looks like your upper left wisdom tooth doesn’t have enough space. As it stands now, it’s likely that it will push your other teeth out of place.’ He said.

                ‘What does that mean?’ I asked anxiously, speaking as clearly as I could in spite of having medical tools and what felt like ten sticks of cotton wool in my mouth. I feared the worst, and with good reason, because:

                ‘I’m afraid I’m going to have to remove it sometime in the future.’[i]

I, having worn braces for over four years only to get my teeth in the somewhat straight state they are in today, was rather upset by this news. I was also very scared at the prospect of possibly having dental surgery, so, naturally, I whined to my mother about it. She, however, had a word of comfort:

                ‘Look at it from the bright side!’ she said, with an unconvincing smile.

                ‘I fail to see a bright side to this situation.’ I replied, sadly.

                ‘Well, there’s always the tooth fairy.’ She sniggered.

I could only laugh about this comment, so I guess it cheered me up slightly. It did, however, also make me think about the tooth fairy as a concept. I suppose it’s not surprising that an important aging process like losing your baby teeth is surrounded by a myth, but sometimes I can’t help but think the adults were just trying to find out how many nonsensical stories they could make their kids believe before they would start asking questions, all the while laughing at their our stupidity.  This made me think about other lies parents tell their children, and especially the lies my parents told me. Less than true stories I was told as a kid certainly weren’t limited to the existence of a tooth fairy.

For example, whenever there was a rainbow in the sky, my parents used to say that the chickens were celebrating carnival. I know that sounds ridiculous. I can’t even imagine how I could ever have believed that, but apparently I did, because in second grade, after my teacher asked the class when rainbows appeared, I raised my hand in Hermione-like fashion and replied enthusiastically:

                ‘When the chickens have carnival!’

My mom, who heard the story through my confused teacher, still likes to recount the tale and laughs herself silly at my foolishness. I wasn’t a little Einstein as a kid, it appears. I must have thought colored light beamed from chickens having a great time, which is kind of sad, because, really, most chickens don’t have a very great life at all. Oh, dear, I didn’t mean for that dark turn to happen. Moving on!

Another curious and rather cruel thing my parents used to say, was that my sister and I weren’t their biological children, but that they had found us under the bridge near our house. Again, this is a weird thing to say and it makes me doubt my parents’ sense of humor. I imagine they got the inspiration from the stories of Moses and Romulus and Remus, but I am at a loss as to why they applied a similar story to us. But then again, this came from the same people who, whenever we asked where they were going, replied in acted seriousness: ‘We’re leaving the country on a little white horse.’

The things I’ve mentioned so far really seem to have had no purpose whatsoever, but my parents also fed us some lies to teach us lessons. For instance, to keep us from chewing on our own hair, they told us that this could lead big hairballs to form in our bellies, which we would then have to throw up the way cats do. This gory, yet kind of awesome warning was very effective, although I don’t really get why chewing on your hair is such a terrible habit.
Likewise, to keep us from pulling weird faces and sticking out our tongue at random people on the street, we were told that if we did either of those things, and the clock started to chime, our faces would fix and stay weird forever. I don’t know if it was as a result of this story, but to this day, I have never stuck out my tongue at anyone.

Maybe the most wide-spread of lies parents tell their children, is the one of Santa Claus. After all of this, you might be surprised to know that my parents told me Santa was fake from the start[ii]. Santa Claus isn’t very popular in the Netherlands, and even though we celebrated Christmas and decorated the house with some Santa Claus figurines, it wasn’t about getting gifts from that fictional character. We celebrated another holiday instead on December fifth. This very typical Dutch holiday is called ‘Sinterklaas’, and the story around it, is that at the end of every year, Saint Nicholas comes to visit from Spain. He arrives with his helpers in November on a large boat, so he can give all the Dutch kids gifts on the evening of his birthday, December 5^th. Saint Nicholas’ arrival is a grand spectacle including a parade that thousands of people go to watch, and it airs live on national television.  It involves special Sinterklaas songs, actors dressed up as Sinterklaas and his helpers, and the throwing around of cookies. Then, from the day of his arrival up until the actual celebration, Saint Nicholas visits towns[iii], leaves gifts and candy in children’s shoes, and every evening there’s a news show all about him, which is no less serious than the regular eight o’clock news. Basically, the entire country works together to trick the children.

[A sidetrack, but I wanted to note something problematic about Saint Nicholas’ helpers, otherwise known as ‘black Petes’. The thing is that they are black, whereas Saint Nicholas, who is basically their boss, is white. You can interpret this as sending the message to little children that white people are in charge of black people. Also, the story of Sinterklaas tells us that, to deliver presents to children, black Petes would climb through the chimneys to get into their houses, which is given as an explanation for their dark skin color. These things are both extremely racist and factually incorrect. On top of all this, there is actually a Sinterklaas song that literally translates to “Even though I’m black as soot, my intentions are good”, which is just so wrong that I don’t even know what to say about it.]

Anyway, to return to the story, Sinterklaas is one of the best kept secrets in my country. Yet, believe it or not, I figured out that Saint Nicholas wasn’t real before I figured out that chickens weren’t responsible for rainbows. I was seven years old when I realized that the handwriting on the presents I got for Sinterklaas was that same as my mother’s and my parents tell me that I “cold-bloodedly confronted them about it and didn’t seem surprised in the least”. Maybe I was a little Einstein after all.

Why was I writing about all of this again? Oh, right, I’m getting my wisdom teeth removed.  Well, that sucks. As to conclude this post, I still have no idea why parents tell their kids weird lies. I suspect they just like to sit back and laugh about it.

So, that’s all for today. I have to go leave the country on a little white horse.

---

[i] By the way, have you ever noticed how dentists and doctors always say things like “it looks like”, “it seems that” and “I’m going to have to”? Even in Dutch, they tend to use similar euphemisms. What’s that about? It’s not like it make things any less scary and/or painful…

[ii] I’m sorry. I really hate to you if you didn’t already know. I hope you were sitting down.

[iii] Here’s a clip of me playing the saxophone at the Sinterklaas parade in my town last year: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oaUBHdcgfdg

Internet Nostalgia

I think I was about eight years old when my parents first bought a computer. It was a heavy, light gray colored machine and came in a gigantic cardboard box that my dad rolled into the living room on a hand trolley. It wasn’t connected to the internet yet, but my siblings and I fought every day about who got to play a videogame first. It sounds quite unbelievable to me now, but we actually had to keep a logbook of our time using that computer and we were only allowed to do so an hour and a half a day, which is incredibly short when you’re playing the Sims or building a theme park on Rollercoaster Tycoon.

As we got older and my parents got internet, my older siblings lost interest in games like Rayman and wanted to chat on MSN with their friends. I recall that they agreed with their friends on a certain time to go online (always  8.30 p.m.), but I wasn’t really involved in this. To give you an idea, I had an e-mail address that included the names of all of my former pets and my bed time was at 8.15 p.m. Seeing that my siblings all wanted to use the computer at the exact same time, because that’s when all their friends would be there, they had heated discussions in the hope of getting their way. Most evenings, I would lay in bed and I would hear my sisters screeching and my brother grunting in response, until my dad grew tired of their argument and declared that if they couldn’t agree peacefully, nobody would get to chat at all.
I myself spent my time on internet playing games like Bubble Shooter and Ping Pong and building one of those kid’s websites. I owned a Dutch one on what was called “Kindertent”, on which each kid had a profile and space to put images and messages in bright colors and ugly fonts to their “viewers”. Mine consisted mainly of screenshots of the Harry Potter movies that had come out by that time and quotations by my favorite characters. Today, while remembering this, I was feeling nostalgic and decided to go and look at the web design of an eleven-year old me, but instead of Potter pictures and awkward notes I was lead to an error page that read that my website had been removed due to lack of use. This made me feel strangely sad.

Beside my “Kindertent” profile, I was really into an online game called Horse Tycoon. This was basically a website where you could breed and train fake horses, post on the forums and constantly work to update your stable. The plus side of this game was that I can still see the difference between way more horse breeds than necessary for somebody who as nothing to do with horses in real life.
During that same time period, I also had a MySpace page and hung around in the chat box of a children’s news website. It sounds really dorky and it kind of was, but I found it quite awesome and enjoyed talking about the local news. Also, the website was supervised, so every time someone said “shit”, that word would be substituted by a vegetable. This quickly resulted in hilarious messages like “Broccoli is healthy” and everyone would know what it really said. Well, it’s a lot funnier when you’re thirteen.

In the few years before Twitter and Facebook became popular, a lot of my school friends and I had profiles on a Dutch predecessor of those websites, but without the apps. It was a site called “Hyves”, where you could post unflattering photos, update statuses, “poke” and message people and acquire as many friends as you possibly could without resorting to sending friend requests to your teachers. That last function of it was quite important, because your friend count was visible in parenthesis any time your name was used. Because of that, it became a bit of a competition as to who had the most friends. If you had less than, say, twenty friends, you were considered to be kind of a loser.

Then Twitter and Facebook took over and brought gigantic improvements. Around this time, I also started to get interested in YouTube. My hour and a half time limit had long been lifted, which was convenient, because I devoted hours of my time to watching YouTube videos . At first, I wasn’t really aware of the community aspect of the website. I just used it to watch deleted scenes from the Harry Potter movies, viral videos starring babies named Charlie and illegally uploaded clips from crappy theater recordings of Wicked. The first real vlogger I came across was a YouTube musician by the username of JennaAnne1026. She had a steady group of followers and posted videos regularly. I started subscribing to different vlogging channels, until through a related video suggestion, I found Hank Green’s awesome song “Accio Deathly Hallows”. It had been uploaded two or three years before, but I liked it enough to explore what this Vlogbrothers channel was all about. I found out about Nerdfighters and Nerdfighteria and John’s books and DFTBA. I learned that the internet could bring people together do decrease world suck. I understood that this was something completely awesome. Over the next few months I made the pilgrimage of watching every single Vlogbrothers video and got into the Nerdfighter community. I pretty much stalked their channel ever since and found other awesome channels in the process.

My use of the internet hasn’t changed much since, so I guess that’s the end of my internet story. Best wishes and don’t forget to be awesome.

Kid dreams

Hi everyone!
It's been a while since I last posted, but hopefully the first week of writtens is over, so here I am! (and I'm sorry that post is so late, I'll catch on the last one as soon as I get more time)

The first dream I can recall is actually wanting to become an archaeologist, and more specifically an egyptologist. After that I wanted to study Greek gods and civilization, and then, become a sociologist to understand people in groups and the way society works, because it seemed plain weird to me.
At some point, I wanted to be a opera soprano, (I had been singing since age 6 and already been a soloist in some concerts) but when my parents asked me if I wanted to go to a music school at the age 13, I said no, because I didn't want to leave my friends and science.
I then wanted to work on the canopy, because of the fascinating interactions between the trees and animals: the animals want to eat plants, that create poisons to protect themselves, and the animals then develop counter-poisons, and so on...
After that, my passion became the brain and artificial intelligence. It's been one of my longest dreams, trying to see if AI could actually work with a combination of computation and neurotransmitters. I learned a bit of programming at that time.

That's why I decided to chose scientific studies, actually; and since then, my interests shifted a bit: paleontologist, vulcanologist, and, of course, engineer in geology!

That's all I can remember for now...

Dolphin Trainers, Marine Biology and Other Pass Times

Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, I'm BAAAAAAAAAAACK!

<Insert Jack Nicholson here's Johnny jokes here>

I am happy to announce to everyone that I finished my 3rd Year of University and am ready to not do any serious thinking for the next few weeks. As fellow University students you all know EXACTLY how I feel right?

I have a few blog posts to catch up on, but as for right now I'll just do the most recent topic: What I wanted to be when I grew up.

When I was really little I had one passion: Sea life. The second best day of my childhood-life was when I went to Sea World (the first best day of my childhood-life was Disney World for one specific reason but that's a completely different story). At Sea World there were dolphin shows, whale shows, Shamu, Shark Tunnels to walk through, fake helicopters to ride and ALL THE FISH YOU COULD EVER DREAM OF. It was my own personal heaven. My Mother bought me a stuffed animal penguin and the Sea World Factbook (which I still have to this day) and I spent the rest of my Florida vacation curled up with my penguin looking at the pictures of the dolphins dreaming of the day when I could go swimming with them. In my little mind, the most perfect career that could ever exist was to be a dolphin trainer. I wanted to spend the rest of my life teaching dolphins tricks and swimming with them. It was like a fairy tale.

Now my parents weren't to keen to have their Eldest Child go into Show Business, so one day as I sat there staring dreamily at the photographs and talking endlessly about the tricks I would teach my pet dolphins my parents tried to sway me. As you can guess, this didn't go over that well. Until my Dad said in exasperation. "Why don't you just be a marine biologist?"

"What's a marine biologist?"

"You're a scientist who studies ocean life."

In other words my little mind imploded with possibilities.

Now these were the days before the internet was super big (kinda hard to remember that). So I had to go to the library. My career as a Marine Biologist was off to a strong start. I knew everything about everything. I begged my parents to take me to the Zoo to see the fish. My parents had to tape every single episode on the ocean that ever aired on the Discovery Channel. I was obsessed.

So what happened?

Well it was the Discovery Channel that did me in in the end. I learned the hard way (and a super graphic one at that) that there was a darker side to Marine Biology. I wasn't all driving in boats, swimming with the dolphins and writing a few notes down on a note pad. No, the Discovery Channel taught me.... I'd be cutting dolphins open. As a sensitive little girl, that was way too much for me to comprehend. The marine biology dreams died instantaneously.

I took to something a little bit safer... history. From grades 5-10 I was convinced I was going to be a Historian. That was until I made the mistake of taking a film course and picking up my first camera.

When I look back at all the jobs I wanted as a kid I was pretty all over the map. At one point I was convinced my calling was to be a Pretzel Salesgirl at Carnivals and Fairs, I also wanted to be a Power Ranger and Batman (who doesn't want to be Batman).

It's kind of funny looking back and seeing how much I've changed. But you know. There has been one thing that has stayed constant....

I still love fish.