How to Be Weird
This week’s post continues the theme of weird from last week.
1.
When you go to the beach as a toddler, try not to get any sand on your body. You have no memory of this, but when your parents tell you about it years later it doesn’t surprise you. You still don’t like for your hands to get too dirty, or too wet.
2.
Have a name that no one in Central Illinois can pronounce. Have parents who think Americans are weird and who let you know how they feel about weird American habits every chance they get. Speak Spanish at home. Eat pesto, gnocchi, artichokes, rabbit, risotto, fish cooked with the head intact — much to the dismay of 1960s Midwesterners.
3.
Get glasses when you’re eight years old. Add braces in junior high. Don’t wear bright blue eye shadow even though it’s the mid-1970s. Don’t wear any makeup at all even though all the cool girls start wearing it in 8th grade. Don’t wear a bra, because you have nothing to hold up yet, and endure a girl in the junior high PE locker room telling you that God wants you to wear one. Don’t believe in God. Wear tights under your hideous pale blue knit gym suit because it’s cold, flaunting the rules. That leads to the requisite sadistic PE teacher telling you she’ll make you undress in front of the whole class if you don’t take your tights off. Be called weird by your sister, who thinks you aren’t boy-crazy enough.
4.
Hang out with other weird kids, but don’t quite fit in with them either. Be untouchable-adjacent — not untouchable enough to be a true social outcast. Be nerd-adjacent — not clever or studious enough to be a true nerd. Don’t be edgy enough to be cool. Don’t be anything you can categorize. Have crushes on the wrong boys. Think your parents are cool.
5.
Never smoke a cigarette in your life. Stay up till 4am talking with friends instead of drinking. Be happy that you only have to go to PE twice a week and that it’s part of your small alternative high school culture to skip it often. Attend just a few high school basketball games for the cultural experience. At one of those games in a nearby farming town, interview the kids there for the underground newspaper your friends started, and be surprised to learn that those kids don’t know what discrimination is. Have your world turned upside-down when you learn from a boy in your class that people can be smart, educated, and also conservative. That wasn’t what you’d learned in life this far, but it turns out you were raised in a weird liberal bubble within the liberal bubble of your university town.
6.
Know you’re in the wrong place when almost all the kids at your UMass orientation say they chose it because it’s a party school. Be told to smile more by your roommate, who calls liquor stores “packies” and overuses the adjective “wicked.” Know that your people must be somewhere in that huge university, but never find them. Transfer to a smaller college where you’re a bit less weird than you were at the big one. Thirty years later, go to a college reunion with friends and don’t attend any of the official reunion events.
7.
When hanging out with your sister in her college dorm, wonder out loud where the phrase “old fogey” came from. Always remember how one of her friends looked at you like you were crazy and asked, “Do you often think about things like that?”
8.
Don’t cut your long, unruly hair even though — or probably because — your father tells you to cut it so you can get a job. At the job you get anyway, as a clerk-typist in a DC government agency, be called a hippie. Wear clogs to work. Get yelled at by your boss when you don’t hit the ball in an office volleyball game. Feel like you’re back in junior high. Still don’t wear makeup. Be told by one of the other young women in the office that you’re lucky you don’t have to wear makeup. Wonder what that means.
9.
Escape to San Francisco, the land of misfits and rebels, where you can be among other weird people. Move to Oakland when San Francisco gets less weird.
10.
Compulsively open all your emails and read all your texts, Slacks, and Teams messages because you can’t stand seeing that little red dot, or a large number in bold showing how much stuff you haven’t read. Obsessively listen to the same music over and over. When you watch the TV show Monk, relate to that OCD character a bit more than you care to. Sure, you don’t actually have OCD, and you’re not nearly as far gone as he is, but still …
11.
Loathe pep rallies with every fiber of your being. When people start clapping rhythmically in unison at a concert or other event, have a strong urge not to join in. When you take personality tests, get categorized as the least common type. Be an introvert in an extroverted culture. The first winter of covid, relish weekend after weekend of staying in and not having to accomplish anything. Wonder if that’s actually weird.
12.
Realize that being weird can simply mean not being mainstream, and be okay with that. Know what Taylor Swift looks like but have no clue what her music sounds like. Know you wouldn’t have been that up on it even if you were younger. Still listen to the Beatles.
13.
Be born weird. Feel it in your bones. Know that it’s part of who you are, not just a by-product of your life circumstances. Be fine with that. Be more than fine with that.
A lot of this resonates with me. I got glasses when I was 4. I had oily curly hair and acne, and wore a series of sweater vests and rugby shirts. I couldn’t catch a ball to save my life. But I think in the end these things gave me advantages over those people who coasted through their early lives. At least, that’s what I tell myself.
We're weird, and we're proud, and we're going to sit down now and go back to the book we were reading, but we'll say something really, really, weird and profound if we have to. But not right now. Gotta feed the cats.