Weirdness Rules

People often call me weird. I take that as a compliment and wear it as a badge of honor. It means that I am unique, one of a kind, unusual, entertaining, and my own person. I walk to the beat of a different drum. I dance to music no one else can hear. I am me -- the only person no one else can be.

Most, if not all, my writer friends lay claim to the label weird and also wear it with pride. Some are weirder than others. When you are a writer you spend a lot of time living in your head (and heart) and that is bound to have an effect.

When we get together on Facebook we can get pretty strange. We have one thread with almost 32K comments that is about just about everything. The weirder the better. It started out normally enough, but somehow it took on a life of its own and has been going for almost two years. Some people will just drop by and type in a random word. Others drop in just to say hi. Some complain about their day jobs. It is where many of us compare our weirdness or declare our love of weirdness.

It doesn't all have to be weird. We also accept the labels of geek, nerd, crazy, freak, nut job, dork -- well, you get the point. So why do we accept these?

Well, first of all, few of us were among the so-called "normal" kids in school. We suffered the labels when we were young. We thought that they excluded us. It took us years to realize that those words really exalted us. It meant that we weren't average, boring, one-size-fits-all people. It meant that we had a lot more to offer the world than just joining the ranks of 9 to 5ers.

We aren't special. We aren't better. We are just . . . different. And we have learned to appreciate that about ourselves. It took some serious adaptation to get here though. Perhaps that is why writers have a reputation for being drinkers. I think now we are more likely to have other forms of medication. Like Abilify, Red Vines, and coffee. In my case I often go for the three P's -- Prozac, Pepsi, and popcorn. I would love to add pizza to the list, but then I would also need to add Prilosec.

But I digress. We watch too much television. We read too many books (is that really even possible?). We get into a Facebook thread and get caught up in playing silly word games with each other. Some of them are as simple as word association. Others are like the one I recently got caught up in. We started by discussing the word moist and how much people liked or disliked using it. (Now there is a hot button issue for you! ) The discussion eventually devolved into trading movie and television titles with the word "moist" replacing a word in said title.

As strange as it seems (and believe me it did get strange), we were actually working. Such games with each other works the mind, breaks down barriers, and leads to greater creativity. It is also a great ice-breaker and a way for us to get to know each other.

From there we get into the geek version of trading recipes -- we recommend books, websites, and writing tools to one another. This whole thing is unisex. It matters not the gender. We are writers and all equal under the pen.

As the character of Jenny said in the first season of Sabrina the Teenage Witch said, "But I like weird. I love weird. I bask in the glow of weird!"