Years later you figure out what it means.........

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Me, too.

Hey, I just thought of a new one this morning, and it's appropriate to the season.

I used to hate "A Christmas Carol", because I thought it was about a guy who was being threatened with punishment for being unhappy. I thought he was being warned that he'd be hated all his life, forgotten in death, and made to suffer for all eternity because he was a bad person for being miserable, especially at Christmas. I thought the ghosts were coming to scare him into happiness. This made no sense to me. I also knew that my mother was frustrated with me for being unhappy, because she didn't know what to do and said I was inflicting it on others. This was probably a result of a combination of my having been bullied, my loneliness from not having a lot of friends, stresses at home, and whatnot. So, I thought "A Christmas Carol" was intended to be a cautionary tale about people like me, and it made me all the more miserable. I was angry with myself for my feelings, and I think it contributed to some self-destructiveness.

As an adult in my 30s, sitting with my girlfriend and watching a production of it on TV that starred Patrick Stewart, I finally began to understand the story. Maybe it's because my life was so much better, I was with someone I could love and trust, and it starred an actor I liked and had good feelings about. For the first time, I saw that it was actually about a guy who was really mixed up because he thought money was the only thing in life that could be counted on. He was miserly, and he didn't love anybody. This was the result of his particular reactions to experiences he'd had, and there was still potential within him to see these things differently and become more as he'd once been as a child. He needed to have his eyes opened to the fact that others still cared about him and that this actually mattered. By having help from the ghosts, he was able to reevaluate things and open up to love from others, so that he could love them again instead of thinking love was foolish and a waste of time. When he changed that way, that made him generous and happy. But it was his miserliness and eschewing of love, not his misery and loneliness, that he could've suffered for, even after death. Misery and loneliness were a resulting affliction in life, not his crime in the first place.

Understanding the story better was a big relief for me. I think it's been really good for me to know what it's really about.

Wait, that's what A Christmas Carol means?

I always thought it was what you said in the first paragraph.

When I first had to write essays in middle school, I thought that "double-spacing" meant typing two spaces between each word, and turned in several papers like that before being corrected.

Update: I recently told this story to a friend. He was surprised and reminded me of just how obvious the character had really been, right down to being the only one with a date at the party the nerds threw - a male date (I'd forgotten about that). I had to think about that a while, so I couldn't respond right away. I'm not good in the moment, really, when taken off guard like that. But I did realize, after a day or two went by, that he was right. So, I had to rethink what the problem had been. I distinctly remembered there being a moment of embarrassment over the situation with my sister. Well, now I know what it was. It wasn't that I hadn't realized the character was gay. It was that I thought I'd gotten an additional, inside joke that wasn't really there. The people making the film probably had no idea about the lambda symbol, so no inside joke was intended. However, it never occurred to me, until my sister thought I'd missed the obvious joke, that I'd seen something that wasn't really supposed to be there. I guess I'd just assumed that, because I knew about the lambda symbol, everybody did. I think I couldn't imagine that I'd know about something other people didn't know about.

Now I have to find an opportunity to explain this to my friend, who must be very confused.

I have a t-shirt that says on it "$5 foot long" and has an arrow pointing down.

I remember when I was a child and saw the word homosexual for the first time in a magazine. I thought it meant you liked to have sex at home.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learned_helplessness

When I was growing up in general I saw people working crummy pointless jobs that weren't important, didn't pay well, and there was no way they could actually have liked their job and were only doing them to survive.

How was I supposed to get a good attitude towards work when I just saw it as slaving away the rest of my life doing something I hate to just barely make enough money to survive, if I even manage to make that much?

This has happened to me with both song lyrics and jokes.

I really wish I could remember exact instances, but it seems I'm too tired at the moment to do so.

hanyo wrote:

The first time I heard the term "oral sex" I thought it meant talking dirty. That was in 9th grade.
But that was a different era.

Seems it's been kind of the opposite for me. I always end up having to explain jokes to people. People take moments to laugh or just never get it when I say "One day this guy walked into a bar and said Ow," and just stop there. Guess it's not all that great, but some just don't seem to understand.

First thing which comes to mind for me is something from back in elementary school, during a rehearsal for the annual Christmas program. One of the girls from a lower grade had to speak a few lines which ended in "makes me feel all warm and gay". This ALWAYS draw laughs from a few of my classmates, and it wasn't until several years later that I finally figured out what they thought was so funny.