Ira Glass

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This is American Life.

I'm Ira Glass.

Each week on our program, of course, we choose some theme, bring you different kinds of stories on that theme.

Today's program, Kid Logic.

We wanted an hour filled with stories in which kids employ kid thinking, especially the kid thinking that is perfectly logical but completely wrongheaded.

And we've arrived at Act 3 of our program, Act 3, the game ain't over till the fatso man sings.

When little kids talk about a crush or love, are they talking about more or less the same thing that adults mean by those words?

Well, Howie Chakowicz remembers how he thought about love in grade school.

He wanted girls to like him, but they never seemed to.

Here he is.

Looking back on it, I think part of the problem was how I thought about love as a kid.

I had a few ideas about how you get someone to love you that, in retrospect, weren't particularly helpful to me.

First, I thought that if they can see me sleeping, they would immediately fall for me.

When I went to sleep each night, I would consciously try to sleep in a cute way, just in case the girls I liked would peep on me.

I'd roll into a fetal ball like a kitten and scrunch my head into my pillow, hands under my head.

I imagined all the popular girls, intent on cruelly pranking me, got a ladder and climbed up my bedroom window.

But instead of painting fatso or whatever on my window as planned, their collective hearts would melt as they saw me sleeping like a babe, an angel, buried snugly under my blankets.

I guess it was some crossover of a kid's knowledge of what was endearing to adults applied to romance.

My second theory was that they'd fall in love with me if they can see me reading aloud.