Just so you feel better about yourself...

I went to the store yesterday and for the first time in about 20 years I bought a package of Trix cereal for my kids. It made me think back to how easily I was duped by everybody back then. My parents, kids on the bus, TV, this guy Mike that used to come down to the park and play basketball with us until he got arrested for molesting kids at another park, and so on. It made me very thankful that I didn't wind up killing myself out of sheer ignorance before the age of 15. Here are just a few things I believed:

1.) Prizes in cereal boxes- The inspiration for this post. Cereal companies were always giving away stuff. The prize of prizes, at least according to me, was a Sony Walkman. I think it was a tiny handheld TV, but I'm not sure. I thought you could win it by buying Trix, and by that I mean I thought a little tiny TV might actually be IN the cereal box. Nevermind that a little tiny TV would have been the size of a shoe and not fit in a cereal box, I bought pounds and pounds of Trix, and then dumped it all into a big bowl and waited for small electronics to plop out. They never did. Just coupons and occasionally some sort of cereal loving larvae. So then I did what any responsible kid would do. I dumped all the cereal down the vent and told my mom some fat neighborhood kid stole it. There's probably 20 lbs of Trix laying dormant in the ventilation of my parents old house. Really upped the re-sale value.

2.) Slime is Awesome- Everytime I saw commercials for any kind of slime I had to have it. Maybe it was Green Slime from You Can't Do That On Television, or maybe it was Ectoplasm from Ghostbusters, or maybe it was just generic slime in a big bucket. (Side note: I got a big bucket of generic slime for my 9th birthday. It was in a big yellow container that just said "Slime" on it. I'm concerned to think that there was some sleazy slime peddler selling his wares off the back of a truck downtown or something.) Anyhow, slime of any kind, was not awesome. It was all sticky and it would fall on the floor and part of it would get stuck there, and the rest would get all covered in carpet fibers and cat fur, and in about 2 days it just looked diseased. Down into the vent it went.

3.) If you get the wrestling ring, you can have realistic wrestling matches between toy WWF wrestlers- Again, very untrue. I always thought that getting the wrestling ring would mean that the little rubber wrestlers (Superfly Snuka, Hulk Hogan, Andre the Giant, Macho Man Savage, and strangely, Capt. Lou Albano) would somehow take on their own lifeforce and have small scale Battle Royales and I could just sit back and watch. What I found was that the ring was just an impediment to fun because your hands would bounce off the ropes and scrape against the turnbuckles. The only good thing was that you could slingshot the wrestlers way up in the air if you put the ropes in their crotches and pulled them way back (except Capt. Lou, he was made of a harder, heavier rubber.) Where'd the wrestling ring wind up?? Well, in the garbage, because it didn't fit down the vent.

So anyway, I hope to impart all this extremely valuable knowledge on my kids in the hopes that my vents remain filled with nothing but air, and the occasional gerbil.