My Childhood Powers of Reasoning

1. I used to wish on a lot of stars.




Star light, Star bright,
First star I see tonight,
I wish I may, I wish I might,
Have this wish I’ve wished tonight.




However, my wishes never came true. So, I came to the perfectly logical conclusion that my wishes must not be specific enough and were getting granted for someone else. So, I started making really specific wishes. These wishes were usually made on a Sunday night on my way home from church (because what better chance do you think you could have to have a wish granted than when you were returning home from spending time at church). These wishes were always for a million dollars to be waiting for me on my bed at home (and then I recited the address – this is one area that I believed the first wishes had gone wrong) that night (and then I said the date – this is another area that the first wishes could have gone wrong) when I got home from church (looking back, maybe we were just going to the wrong church – maybe the stars didn’t accept my church as a legitimate place of worship).

2. I rationalized that the way that Santa Claus could visit all the children in the world on one night was because of the time zones. I mean, if he circled the globe in the right direction, he could gain an hour for each time zone he passed through.

3. I was always really annoyed (actually, I still get annoyed) when the president would preempt my regularly scheduled programming. I had heard about these Neilson people that knew how many people were watching each show at night (though I hadn’t figured out how they knew what I was watching). So each time the president would come on to make a speech, I would repeatedly turn my TV off and on for the entire speech. I believed that somehow these Neilson people would notice that hundreds, maybe even thousands, of TV sets were turning on and finding the president making a speech and immediately turning off. I thought, at some point, these Neilson people will have to realize that no one wants to watch/listen to the president talk about whatever he was talking about. Then, surely, they will tell the TV stations that they are losing viewers left and right and my TV show would come back on. My plan hinged on the fact that the Neilson people knew when TV sets were turning on and off, what they were watching, and the fact that they couldn’t trace it to the individual set (otherwise, I would have just looked like an idiot turning my TV on and off throughout the president’s speech).