It’s tough having a great story that just doesn’t come up that much in conversation. We love to tell it, people love to hear it, but you often can’t just bring things up out of the blue, you know?
I mean, I know the expression “apropos of nothing” exists, but I feel like it might annoy people if you used it too often in real life. At least there’s Reddit, a place that’s always hankering for stories.
Today, these 12 people get the chance to share theirs.
12. I mean. I think it depends on your perspective.
Very vaguely related but reminded me of when i didn’t believe in Christians as a child.
My parents where totally indifferent to religion and literally never talked about it when I was growing up and also never tried to make me believe in Santa. The first time i heard about Santa i brought it up with my sister (7 years older) and she laughed at me and said that Santa wasn’t real and it was just something adults pretend is real so that children behave.
When I was 6 I started at a Christian school (just because it was the closest) and we had a morning assembly every day where the head teacher talked about God and Jesus and how if you are a good person you go to heaven and I thought “huh, never heard of these lads before. Guess they are to keep kids in line like Santa but they can use all year around rather than just around Xmas” and never brought it up with my parents/sister from fear of being laughed at.
It wasn’t until I was about 9 or 10 that I realised that there where actually adults that where genuinely Christians and it wasn’t just a massive, elaborate inside joke at the expense of children.
11. Magical indeed.
Once when I lived in Japan I was riding my bike across a rice field at about 6am. The sun was coming up and there was no one anywhere (SO rare in Japan). Just me on a dirt road between rice fields for miles and miles and the sound of my bike.
Then I heard a saxophone. As I kept riding eventually I saw a man sitting on a stool practicing his saxophone. Just on the road between rice fields. He nodded a hello to me without breaking play at all.
one of the most magical moments of my life
10. Crows are really amazing.
My dad was friends with a crow that lived at his workplace for a few years while we lived in Bosnia, and one day Poe (as my dad named him) came up to him and started showing my dad that he couldn’t fly properly, like really exaggerating how he couldn’t fly. So my dad picked him up and put him in an open box and took him home to me and my mom.
Poe lived with us for a few days and acted like he’s been with people his whole life, even though he was clearly a wild crow. He ate from our hands and would hang out with us on the patio, and he even let me hold him (which was surprising, given I was about 3 at the time). Bosnia doesn’t have a lot of air conditioning, so we always had the sliding door to the patio open, so it’s not like Poe was trapped.
After maybe three days he decided he was feeling better and flew off after catching our attention to let us know he was going. My dad never saw him again since we lived around 10 miles away from where my dad worked, and I guess he never made it back.
Still. Was a very cool experience to have a pet crow for a few days.
9. I can see why this rarely comes up.
So I would occasionally write post-it notes to myself if I was super drunk and something absurd happened. My writing is illegible on most days.
I had a note forever in my wallet that looked like it was saying: I am a (something) eat (something illegible) cucumber whore . It kept me up at night trying to figure out what it said.
About a year later it dawned on me: I saw a man eat a cucumber whole.
Some dude at a bar was eating a cucumber like an apple, and was so incensed and defensive by questions that I decided to stay away and document it for human history. So combative, yet being so unapologetically human.
It’s been probably 10 years.
8. Hugs are life.
This is more just something I wouldnt say to someone other than my therapist, but i moved back in with my dad (I grew up with my mom in another state), and my half brother walked up to me the other day and gave me a hug.
I was super touched but confused. I asked him what that was for and he said “nothing, i just wanted to hug you” and i cried for a good 10 minutes after he walked out of my room.
Growing up it wasnt like I didnt get affection, but it was always a reward. I got good grades, they were proud, but never just because. The idea that someone wanted to hug me just because just hit me in a way I wasnt expecting
7. Mom’s worst nightmare.
The first time I started “playing” runescape was when I was like 5. I was a smart kid, so I could read and write really well for my age, but typing was hard, so I was able to get by playing games on my own. One day I was somewhere mining with just this 1 other dude and he starts sending me messages, and I’m a friendly 5 year old so I (very slowly, bc typing) would message him back.
After a bit the questions started getting more and more odd. Started as just simple “how old are you” and quickly developed to “where do you live” “where do you go to school” big red flags like that. But I’m a 5 year old, and I’m responding to all this stuff in 5 year old manner. “I’m 5” “guess” *spends 10 minutes trying to type out my full name* *spends 20 minutes trying to type out my mailing address and home phone #* ultimately the guy only learned how old I was because I was never able to finish typing any other answers before he would ask me another question, and he wound up leaving.
I told my mom about it a while later, thinking nothing of it, and she FLIPPED and banned all of us from playing online games for like 8 years.
6. What on earth?
I remember in 4th grade my teacher told us all to write letters for the author of Diary of a Wimpy Kid. We were supposed to ask questions like “what inspired you to write these books” or “how should I get this bully to go away” or some shit like that.
I wrote my long a$s letter about being bullied and not knowing what to do. It was my first year in an upper class school and was always made of for being poor, so it was actually really helpful for me to write all of it out and have it be read by someone “famous.”
A couple weeks go by and I ask about it cause she never asked us to turn them in. She basically told me that never happened even when other students said they remembered it. Then because people said they remembered it, she sent me to office for “disrespecting” her.
I was being gaslit by my 4th grade teacher and punished for her forgetting about the assignment. F*ck you Mrs. Karla I’m 21 and still remember that sh%t.
5. This just me lol.
One time when my son was about 4, he ran into the bathroom right as I was stepping out of the shower.
He looked down at my junk, held his nose down and said “Haha, squidward. Honk honk”
4. She’s taking that one to her grave.
When I was 12/13 for Christmas my grandparents bought paintball game passes for everyone my age and older in my family, about 15 of us. One year we had to play with a bunch of strangers as one very large group, and we all got divided into two random teams for a game of capture the flag.
Well all these strangers we were playing with turned out to be assholes and poor sports. They were just cheating and not going out when they got shot. My family is all very fun and competitive, so it did not go unnoticed and we all talked shit about it in between rounds. We all promised each other we would specifically target the strangers for being assholes in the last round.
So it’s finally the last round, we are divided into random teams of mixed strangers and family, and I’m a petite 13 year old girl ready to kick some ass.
Half way through the round I see a guy on the other team belly crawling towards my half of the field, I had a narrow window to shoot at him and I took it. POP. Right on his back. I can see the paint splatters. And, of course, he doesn’t get up and pretends he just didn’t get shot I guess. One of those assholes.
So I shoot again. POP. POP. Square on the back. Clear as day. He is out. But he STILL doesn’t surrender.
POP POP POP. I don’t miss a single shot. He barely moves. He just starts crawling forward again.
So I just let him have it. POP POP POP POP. Wait… POP POP POP… wait… POP POP POP. I pretty much empty my barrel of paintballs on his back. Finally I have to stop and he slowly rolls over and turns around. Sulking back to his end of the field like the sore loser he was.
We finished the game and I don’t even remember who won. We were all tired and sore and bruising. The next day, my family is talking in the group chat about all of their bruises and welts. My aunt texts “i bet [uncles name] won the contest for most welts! He has like 30 on his back because some ass wouldn’t stop shooting him and he couldn’t get up fast enough because of his bad knee!”
To this day I haven’t admitted that was me. I had no idea it was my poor uncle.
3. Everything is huge when you’re three.
When my son was about 3, I had him solo and we both had to go to the bathroom at mall. I take him into a stall and he goes, then I proceed to go. In the middle of me going he states at a high volume, “Oh, Dad, you have a huge p*nis!”
Everyone in the bathroom is laughing outside our stall. As we leave and hand wash, everyone is looking over to see whose dad has a huge p*nis. Note: I am average or slightly above depending on your facts source, but to a 3-year-old that is huge.
2. Just a man and his seagull.
Over the summer, I performed impromptu surgery on a seagull at Cape Cod.
It was a nice and sunny day, and I was hanging out in my beach chair with my family, doing some reading. I looked up, and I spotted a seagull walking towards me. It just looked hungry at first, so I threw it a piece of my sandwich. As the bird got closer, I spotted a fishing line wrapped around its neck. The thing was breathing, but it definitely looked worse for wear. I pointed it out to my mother and my sister, and I asked them what they thought we should do. Their response?
“Leave it alone, don’t make a scene, etc.”
I wasn’t too keen on that idea, so I grabbed a towel and started walking down the beach while my new buddy walked alongside me. The gull was clearly scared of me, but not enough that he made any special effort to avoid getting too close. I tried talking to him to calm him down, but it seemed like he wasn’t in the mood to chat- he was just enjoying the walk we were on. We passed by a few beach-goers, and I tried explaining the situation to them, but nobody seemed to care about it as much as I did.
So there I was, just walking side by side with my seagull bro, trying to pick the right moment to grab him, when we came across this fisherman dude walking the opposite direction. He was this grizzled, old-looking guy with a fishing pole and a tackle box by his side. He gave me a look (a pasty ginger dude walking side by side with an injured seagull probably looks a little odd), and said,
“Are you gonna catch the thing or not?”
I didn’t need any further prompting, so I jumped on Seagull Bro and tucked his wings into his body. I wrapped him in the towel, and sat down with him in my lap. The fisherman bent down to get a closer look at the wire, and at that moment I noticed the hook. It was one of those massive ones that deep-sea fishermen use, at least a couple inches long, and it was jammed straight through the neck of the seagull. The wire was still attached, and had wrapped itself around the bird a few times, enough that it had dug into his skin. And it stank. The wound was clearly old and septic, and it smelled like the breath of one thousand pirates. With scurvy. It was just about the worst scent I’ve ever had the misfortune of experiencing, and I nearly threw up all over my new bird buddy.
The fisherman took one look at the hook, and pulled out a set of wire cutters from his tackle box. I held seagull bro as tightly as I could while the fisherman snipped the barbed end of the hook off. He and I slowly unwrapped the fishing line from the gull, making sure that we weren’t hurting him. When we finished removing the line, we tried to pull the hook out. It had been in the seagull’s neck for so long that it had actually FUSED with the skin. My poor little buddy was nibbling with all his might at the fisherman while he gently tugged on the end of the hook- it must’ve been excruciating for him 🙁
Finally, the fisherman managed to remove the hook from the seagull’s neck. We washed the seagull’s neck with some water from the ocean (we were at least a mile from the nearest lifeguard stand, and the fisherman thought that salt water would be good for the wound). I gently unwrapped my seagull buddy and set him down on the beach. He looked up at me with as much gratitude as a seagull is capable of exhibiting, honked once, and then ambled away. I shook hands with the fisherman, and started to walk back to my family. I never got the fisherman’s name, but I’m glad he was there to help.
1. This is so weird it has to be real.
When me and my slightly older cousins were kids, they’d try to convince me of falsehoods all the time. I was, and still kind of am, extremely gullible. I fell for “hey, gullible is on the ceiling” more than once..
One day when I was around 11, the elder of my cousins, was talking about how he was joining a lacrosse team. I had no idea what that was, so I asked him. He explained the rules and the tools of the game. I was certain that he was lying to me, that it was another prank. There was no way people ran around with small baskets on sticks, throwing and catching hard balls, that’s insanity. So I smirked, said “suuuuure” and went on my way. For the next several years, whenever someone mentioned lacrosse, I’d snicker, thinking I was privy to a joke.
When I was around 17, a friend of mine mentioned that she was going to a lacrosse game; I laughed and said, kind of annoyed – “yeah, I know the joke- you can drop it. Lacrosse isn’t real”. She was sooo confused and looked at me like I was crazy. She insisted it was in fact real- I insisted it wasn’t. We looked it up online- sure enough, completely real. I was utterly shocked, and way more than a little embarrassed, especially when I thought back to all of my weird responses to mentions of lacrosse. Ugh.
I don’t know about you, but I sure am glad I stumbled across this post today.
What’s your favorite story you wish you could tell more often? Share it with us in the comments!
