Nothing in this world cannot be taken from you

August 1, 2014 2:43 PM

16 ways to feel like a kid again!
posted by The Whelk (52 comments total)

Well that wasn't very nice.
posted by the jam at 2:45 PM on August 1, 2014 [3 favorites]

What do you mean by "again"?
posted by bigendian at 2:50 PM on August 1, 2014 [2 favorites]

Most of these seem like ways to remind yourself that you are old. I think this is a cruel trick created by web-savvy children. I am onto your games, you jerks!
posted by GenjiandProust at 2:50 PM on August 1, 2014 [2 favorites]

Thank you, I think I will have a popsicle.
posted by pemberkins at 2:56 PM on August 1, 2014 [3 favorites]

So, this abyss I'm staring into, I should just jump into it or...?
posted by Artw at 3:06 PM on August 1, 2014 [9 favorites]

That was hilarious. I can see this being posted to buzzfeed.anorlondo.

The title of this thread is the truth behind just one of the many lies we are fed by entertainment media.
posted by Steely-eyed Missile Man at 3:07 PM on August 1, 2014 [4 favorites]

9. Write in cursive. This arcane scrawl came with the promise of power. It was the script in which you would gouge your hidden name into the palm of Atlas. They lied, of course.

This is so much more excellent than I was expecting.
posted by Gordafarin at 3:08 PM on August 1, 2014 [10 favorites]

They lied, of course
No - like all things of childhood, you discarded it while becoming an adult. But you did not need to do so. You chose.
posted by the man of twists and turns at 3:08 PM on August 1, 2014 [5 favorites]

Thank you, I think I will have a popsicle.

Make sure it is an otterpop/freezie, cough-syrup sweet, the plastic razorsharp.
posted by the man of twists and turns at 3:10 PM on August 1, 2014 [5 favorites]

I've worked hard to not lose my childlike wonder-filled approach to the world, and I seem to have done so better than most people of voting age or older that I have met.

This list is exactly the opposite of what I have worked hard to retain.

It's like the Cards Against Humanity of retaining childhood.

I used to appreciate your posts, Whelk, but this... Now I'm full of questioning, and always will be.
posted by hippybear at 3:16 PM on August 1, 2014 [4 favorites]

Childhood is defined by its lack of freedom.
posted by The Whelk at 3:18 PM on August 1, 2014 [10 favorites]

It's ok, hippybear. It's just that everything you have ever known (loved or hated) will melt away and be forgotten, and eventually the universe itself will be a cold mausoleum, an unrelieved void.

Gettin' a popsicle, brb.
posted by Steely-eyed Missile Man at 3:19 PM on August 1, 2014 [4 favorites]

Work is blocking the site for me. I still feel like an adult :(
posted by doctor_negative at 3:21 PM on August 1, 2014 [3 favorites]

The only thing I truly miss about being a child is the lack of those constant gnawing fears of failure and loneliness

Wait, you didn't have those when you were a kid?? Lucky bastard.
posted by Greg_Ace at 3:21 PM on August 1, 2014 [3 favorites]

The only thing I miss about childhood is being able to spend all day eating grilled cheese and reading books without feeling guilty.
posted by The Whelk at 3:22 PM on August 1, 2014 [8 favorites]

It's ok, hippybear. It's just that everything you have ever known (loved or hated) will melt away and be forgotten, and eventually the universe itself will be a cold mausoleum, an unrelieved void.

I am, at my core, an existentialist nihilist scientific extinctionalist. I have no problems with looking into the cold void of the future and realizing that nothing exists beyond death, that everything dies, and that eventually the Sun will swallow everything and later than that the heat death of the universe will reduce all of everything possible to a base background radiation as near to absolute zero as possible.

But the other day I saw a complete double rainbow that remained in the air for nearly a half hour, and the entire time I was filled with excitement and wonder at the beauty and improbability of it all.

This is not a contradiction.
posted by hippybear at 3:23 PM on August 1, 2014 [17 favorites]

I can see this being posted to buzzfeed.anorlondo.

I'm not sure I completely get this reference but I love it anyway.

The 16 Most Perilous Buttresses To Fall To Your Death From
8 Traitors You Didn't Know Were Eaten By Smough After Their Execution
These 22 Photos Of Silver Knights With Their Armor Off Are Hotter Than The Flames Of Izalith
Adorable Childhood Home Movies Of Gwynevere, Gwyndolin, and name stricken
posted by prize bull octorok at 3:26 PM on August 1, 2014 [4 favorites]

This Man Jumped into The Abyss. You Won't Believe What Happened Next.
posted by Steely-eyed Missile Man at 3:40 PM on August 1, 2014 [4 favorites]

Read in the voice of Welcome to Night Vale
posted by rebent at 3:45 PM on August 1, 2014 [2 favorites]

Childhood is defined by its lack of knowing, by the perpetual novelty of discovery, by not realizing how much you don't know, and by not being terrified of that.

If you want to feel like a kid again, find undiscovered potential within yourself and develop it.
posted by I-Write-Essays at 3:45 PM on August 1, 2014 [3 favorites]

Take some viagra, put on pair of grey flannel trousers, sit on double decker bus with hardly any suspension for 40 minutes. Desperately turn up volume on walkman and grit teeth in hopes erection cannot be noticed, and at the same time desperately hope that the cute girl sits in the empty seat beside me. Try to fall asleep at night, deflated because neither of those things happened. Finally fall asleep dreaming that maybe tomorrow they will. That's how I'd relive the nightmare of adolescence. If I had to, which I don't, so i won't. Ever again.
posted by Elmore at 4:04 PM on August 1, 2014 [3 favorites]

spend all day eating grilled cheese and reading books without feeling guilty

There's no reason to ever feel guilty for this. I regularly make a day of it.

Though, I guess I'm still an adult since, even on those lazy days, I'm responsible enough take the dogs out at the appointed time and watch the big black dog swim in the pond, while the slightly evil Australian shepherd chases frogs in the shallow end.

Or maybe that part isn't being an adult either, since I stare at the woods while the dogs play, and imagine a sudden sound of trees being trampled, branches being thrown, and suddenly grey aliens appear and shoot green beams of death at me! And then it'll be up to me, and the dogs, and my close knit circle of best friends (who are all wizards) to save Earth.
posted by honestcoyote at 4:08 PM on August 1, 2014 [4 favorites]

Favorited because coyote.
posted by hippybear at 4:12 PM on August 1, 2014

That just read to me as depressing - aside from the command to go eat a popscicle.

I mean returning to your summercamp and asking if anyone remembers you seems helluva creepy to me.
posted by Faintdreams at 4:23 PM on August 1, 2014

5. Tremble with the terrible heat of your sexuality. You were a knife blade, a swamp creature, a lightning bolt. You were a rabid dog, a burrowing maggot, a skipping CD. You were a springloaded deathtrap, a virus, a sinkhole. You were the child of God gone mad, bloated with chemical, clawing your way back to heaven. What are you now?

What. The fuck.
posted by cashman at 4:26 PM on August 1, 2014 [1 favorite]

These are especially enjoyable^* if read in the voice of Werner Herzog.

*Enjoyment is a delusion which it is time for you to outgrow.
posted by Horace Rumpole at 4:27 PM on August 1, 2014 [4 favorites]

Reading this in Rust Cohle's voice is also rewarding.
posted by yasaman at 4:34 PM on August 1, 2014 [3 favorites]

"Nothing in this world cannot be taken from you."

Yeah, why would I want to feel the acuteness of that reality again.
posted by wrabbit at 4:34 PM on August 1, 2014

#11 just got me stares at work
posted by invitapriore at 4:53 PM on August 1, 2014

This is something I need to be higher to really understand, right?
posted by argonauta at 5:08 PM on August 1, 2014

Is this something that I would need to have had a childhood rather than springing, full-grown, from the brow of Zeus to understand?
posted by GenjiandProust at 6:21 PM on August 1, 2014 [12 favorites]

This was so much better than I hoped.
posted by doctor_negative at 7:00 PM on August 1, 2014 [1 favorite]

Oh, and for the folks who find it depressing, if you haven't laughed in the face of your imminent, inevitable death yet, there's no time like the present.
posted by doctor_negative at 7:04 PM on August 1, 2014 [4 favorites]

I think some people *would* remember me at my summer camp, since a handful of the people that were there with me year after year now work there. I'm not 100% sure how to feel about that.
posted by pemberkins at 7:09 PM on August 1, 2014

Going to a friend's wake tomorrow. This provided nice counterpoint, thanks.
posted by telstar at 7:15 PM on August 1, 2014

pemberkins: you're young enough yet. When you're my age, there is basically no hope anyone at your summer camp (despite going there for 10 years, toward the end serving as a counselor and being there for 6 weeks at a stretch) will remember you.

None at all.
posted by hippybear at 7:40 PM on August 1, 2014

But they will find you by the fountain, wishing.

True to this day.
posted by arcticseal at 7:44 PM on August 1, 2014

15. Ignore the news.

Done, going on 20 years,or so. Should I feel like a child, yet?
posted by signal at 7:57 PM on August 1, 2014 [1 favorite]

I don't get it. The only thing better about childhood than adulthood was not having to pay bills.

I just had 7 blue raspberry dumdums lollipops for dinner followed by 2 pints of strawberries. WHERE IS YOUR GOD NOW CHILDHOOD
posted by elizardbits at 8:57 PM on August 1, 2014 [10 favorites]

I liked the part of childhood where depression hadn't manifested yet
posted by NoraReed at 9:05 PM on August 1, 2014 [6 favorites]

So, about age 1?
posted by Greg_Ace at 9:07 PM on August 1, 2014 [1 favorite]

I mean returning to your summercamp and asking if anyone remembers you seems helluva creepy to me.

You have to do it in the middle of the night while pretending to be a ghost.
posted by elizardbits at 9:11 PM on August 1, 2014 [4 favorites]

Remember me?

I'm the guy who pretended he was homesick at summer camp so his parents would take him home in time to catch a "Cheap Trick: At Budokan" special on TV.

I'm not proud of that. But I kind of am.
posted by mazola at 9:36 PM on August 1, 2014 [2 favorites]

I just had 7 blue raspberry dumdums lollipops for dinner followed by 2 pints of strawberries.

Well yeah, but as far as I can tell you're MetaFilter's local patron saint of childhood, so I at least am entirely unsurprised by this.
posted by NMcCoy at 10:23 PM on August 1, 2014

16
ways
to
channel
Robert Creely
and still
come off
like
Hallmark.
posted by Pudhoho at 6:04 AM on August 2, 2014

Thank you, I think I will have a popsicle.

I am into bubble gum to feel like a child again. Specifically Super Bubble.

And not just one piece, no no. You must have TWENTY. In HALF AN HOUR.
posted by JanetLand at 7:26 AM on August 2, 2014 [3 favorites]

I'm at work on a Saturday, but damnit I'm buying Kraft slices on the way home.

I was talking to a friend about rainbows the other day, about how I can be sitting in my living room and look out the window and know from the way the sky looks and the time of day and the recentness of rain that I should go outside and check to see if there's one. I'm usually wrong, but often right, and, as a result, I see way more rainbows than most people, because I look for them more than most people do.

There may be a metaphor there.
posted by MrMoonPie at 8:23 AM on August 2, 2014

And not just one piece, no no. You must have TWENTY. In HALF AN HOUR.

All twenty at the SAME TIME!!! Then blow a bubble so enormous that when it collapsed it got stuck in your hair.
It was all fun and games until mom had to break out the scissors.
posted by Pudhoho at 9:19 AM on August 2, 2014

Tremble with the terrible heat of your sexuality.

Creepy AND true. And no - I won't be pissing in a kiddie pool. The volume of urine I seem to produce these days would displace most of the water in normal sized kiddie pool - and that would get me into trouble.
posted by helmutdog at 9:22 AM on August 2, 2014

Welcome to TMI Saturday.
posted by hippybear at 9:25 AM on August 2, 2014 [2 favorites]

That was fantastic
posted by maggiemaggie at 4:14 PM on August 2, 2014

I mean really I can't say enough how much I loved this. I want to memorize it.
posted by maggiemaggie at 4:26 PM on August 2, 2014