I’d forgotten all of the various duck cartoons and comic books, as well as my infatuation with Oz.
Also the strange dual loves of books by Daniel Pinkwater and Robert Newton Peck.
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People internalize the concept of self as infants, so it would literally be impossible to self-examine the process. A “raised by wolves” scenario is a thought experiment, but one of the first things humans learn (through design and circumstance) is that they are individual and they are also part of a social collective. Without that understanding survival is much more difficult, which you see in people that have disorders causing issues with understanding society from birth (though even they understand self nearly instinctively).
Morality is a much harder question to answer.
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Tangential, but a very interesting (longish) read:
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Joe Raposo did the music for both
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You know who influenced me a lot as a child?
(Because my family are expats and we ate a lot of boiled bland food.)
Stephen Yan.
Wok with Yan was so informative of my preteen years! I made my Mom buy soooo many Chinese ingredients she didn’t know how to use. Water chestnuts! Bamboo shoots! Chow mein noodles! Sesame oil!! LOL - and my parents bought a wok! In the 80s! And gamely ate every overly salty or spicy stir fry 12 year old me put in front of them. 
never under estimate the power of a good cooking show’s influence on a young mind!
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I assumed you meant Martin Yan, but Stephen Yan is apparently the Canadian analogue of Martin Yan, who is no relation.
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Oh, wow. A whole bunch of things.
So, first of all, there was the Church. Both my father and my maternal grandmother were very religious when I was a child, so I grew up very Catholic. I was never interested so much in the Bible and the sermons, but went mainly for the music. I still love the sound of Church music, long after having lost my faith. Most of the lessons I learned from the Church were good ones, but there were some bad ones that it took me a long time to shake off.
I was also brought up within the Scouting organization, which taught me all sorts of other good lessons. The Scout Law (basically: be helpful, trustworthy, kind, cheerful, considerate, clean, and wise in the use of your resources) is a touchstone in my day-to-day life, and is very nearly exactly the list of traits that I look for in a prospective romantic partner.
The third thing that conditioned me was reading. So much reading. Even though I thought that I believed in love and tolerance and stuff, it shames me to look back at who I was in the late teens: I was homophobic, probably would have been transphobic if I had been aware that was an actual thing outside of jokes, and stubbornly self-righteous. And then I started reading things from the perspective of other people, in those situations, and it eventually forced my perspective open a little further. I can still be stubbornly self-righteous at times (as I’m sure some of you may be aware), but I’m a lot more open to the idea that I might be wrong now.
Because Scouting was such an integral part of my own growth as a person, I have joined Scouting myself to try to teach the same lessons to other youth that I learned in my own childhood. I’ve also started writing novels, in the hopes that my own viewpoint might get published and encourage people to look at life from a different perspective.
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Asian Cookery is a big step for English!
Surprised you didn’t mention Graham Kerr, “The Galloping Gourmet”
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Definitely. Beyond individual books or authors, books in general conditioned me deeply. My mother was a librarian, and I spent countless hours there, exploring the stacks. My dad was an English prof, and we had bookshelves in every room. At recess, I’d skip going outside whenever I could to go and read in the school library. I was deeply conditioned to see libraries and books and knowledge as a net positive and curiosity as a trait to cultivate and celebrate.[quote=“nimelennar, post:49, topic:222”]
it shames me to look back at who I was in the late teens: I was homophobic
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Me too, deeply so. It took me until I was in my early 20s to realize that my fear was just denial of who I was.
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My daughter LOVES this song. If it weren’t for sesame street parodies, I’d be hopelessly out of the loop with current music. Brush your teeeeeeeth, keep ‘em lokkin’ clean and briiiight…
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Lapsed (Recovering?) Catholic, youth scouting, avid reader… are you me?
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I doubt it. Was never much for fjords, myself.
Maybe it’s just not a Canadian thing.
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Hmm…I’d have thought fjords would be more popular in Canada than in Florida.
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We’ve only go the one fjord and its really hard to get to!
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We have fjords. I don’t know how often they get called that in everyday discussions.
I think we also do the hygge thing, but I was just raised to call it February.
ETA Wikipedia, FWIW, says we have lots, but I think they’re referring to what usually get called inlets.
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If it’s fiddly, it’s a fjord.
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So is there a Canadian Daniel tiger?
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Apparently Daniel Tiger is Canadian/American? So… yes?
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You are one of the better Catholics I’ve known, religious or not.
I am also Catholic, in a way that goes beyond religion. The Catholic Church has had a strong influence on me.
Mostly though, I believe that most people are inherently good, so good comes from within and not from dogmatic and legalistic adherence to old traditions. I think belief and faith are deeply personal matters. I am not sure which religion is correct, if any of them are, but I appreciate honest attempts at truth seeking and have no tolerance for dishonest attempts.
Same here. I’ve been reading since several years before I was able to talk. Being literate but nonverbal had shaped how I’ve been able to get information, if not my entire worldview itself.
I’ve had so much homophobia directed at me throughout my life. You’d think that it would make me the least homophobic person in the world, but no, I was self-hating. Nobody who’s a bigot is satisfied with their life.
I also had no idea how common trans/nonbinary is. It’s not very common, but I literally thought it was only about 100 people in the entire US.
Fortunately for me, the first trans people I had known were patient with me, and didn’t make me feel like the biggest asshole in the world for not understanding their issues automatically.
You must be reading different books than I have been. I can’t even get recommendations for books that aren’t super duper white and about First World Problems ™. I’m basically ignoring NPR’s books section for exactly this reason. I’m trying to seek out books from other perspectives, and it’s not like they’re few and far between either, but they’re just… hard to find, for whatever reason.
Do you think religion had something to do with that?
I’ve learned some good lessons from religion, but also some lessons that were, well, not so much bad as wrong-headed. Crazy. What I’ve heard described as Not Even Wrong, meaning that they aren’t even relevant enough to the issues to be considered wrong. This has been hard for me to shake.
Another source of wrongheaded beliefs for me is libertarianism. I grew up surrounded by the stuff, and while it sounds nice enough, it’s toxic. I appreciate personal freedom, but hand-waving away systemic injustice, and saying that everyone has every option available to take control of their life? I can’t accept that. There is injustice in the world, no matter how many suburban college kids tell me otherwise
So basically, I’m trying to keep the good, push out the bad, and just stay true to myself.
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