Eight Year Old Me

If you had told me when I was eight years old that one day, when I was allllll grown up, I would eat seaweed four, maybe five times a week I would have laughed in your face, hard but only one syllable; HAH. I would have said, "You're craaaaaaazy! Did you take your crazy pill today?" And then I would have said, "Mind your own beeswax," but that's because I was a snotty little witch, as my mother used to say.

The first time I tasted seaweed was on the school bus on the way home from a long day of grade two. One of the older kids got it from her teacher during a lesson on god knows what. I tasted it because I was triple dog dared, which are virtually impossible to turn down. My friend Amanda Swagger would find this out several years later when we dared her to eat a snausage doggy treat. Afterwards we told her it was made out of horse penis and she threw up but that's neither here nor there. The point is I ate the seaweed and I said definitively that it tasted like fish food. Now I eat fish food in soup, fish food on rice, dried fish food, fried fish food...one might say too much fish food.

To the kids on the bus eating seaweed was comparable to eating dirt, or saran wrap, or brussel sprouts. That's not edible! Are you trying to kill me?? I had reason to doubt though, the kids on the bus also told me that Eskimos (back when it was okay to say that) chewed on whale blubber for bubblegum. They told me that if my hair got darker when it was wet then it wasn't really blonde. They told me that Percy Goodswimmer brought a knife on the bus, unsurprisingly I had recurring nightmares about being knifed as a child. Actually in the dream I was a unicorn so my babysitter told me that unicorn blood was magical and they could heal themselves and then stab the bad people with their horn. Unfortunately when my little brother had nightmares about Pocahontas all I could tell him was that it was based on a true story. Sorry kiddo, history's rough.

Now I know that I was never on Percy's hit list. I know that getting your hair wet isn't the best way to tell its colour. I know Pocahontas isn't even the half of the story (The Last of the Mohicans is where things get really crazy). I know I was way too stressed about learning handwriting, which turned out to be a totally useless skill, and I know I still don't like licorice. I know marriage ceremonies on the playground are not legally binding. I know that monkey switching is actually just butting in line and I know, whatout a shadow of a doubt, that seaweed tastes like fishfood.