What’s the Weirdest Thing That’s Ever Happened to You?
And other questions I want to ask instead of “what do you do?”
I have a vague memory of sitting at the kitchen table in my childhood home and saying to my mom, “I’m weird.”
“You’re not weird,” my mom said in response. (I almost wrote “honey” there at the end, but I’m pretty sure my mother never called me a pet name.)
“I don’t think weird is bad, actually,” I said to her. “I like being weird.”
I didn’t understand at 17 that being weird was probably the worst thing a teenager could be according to my mom’s inner child, apart from fat or poor.
At 17, I was starting to understand that there was hope for weirdness somewhere outside my hometown, outside the confines of suburbia, outside the quiet and not-so-quiet expectations of my parents and all the other adults I knew then.
My dad was kinda weird — still is — and this was something I appreciated and even admired as a kid. It was his weirdness that gave me access to some of my own weird bents: his Time-Life series on mysterious creatures, for instance; his VHS collection of Star Trek. To be fair, my mom was weird sometimes by proxy. She also liked Star Trek, because my dad did, and it was her taste for VC Andrews that introduced me to the…
