I doubt this is an epiphany, but I have decided that everybody is weird.

I was thinking about how weird little kids are with their random noises, movements, things they will put in their mouths, things they roll in, smear on themselves, rub up against.  I remember being in a line up at a store and the kid in front of me was making a repetitive click pop noise with his mouth.  Five minutes later I was ready to hang the kid upside down in a closet somewhere dark and scary, but his mother stood calmly in line waiting her turn.  All little kids are weird but either they break their parents into their weirdness or we as parents are only given the weirdness that we can handle.

My question is where does that weirdness go?  I think as adults we become adept at hiding our weirdnesses but it never goes away.  Those of us that are less inclined or able to subsume our idiosyncrasies are quite frequently avoided.  The other day I was in a grocery store and there was a man that had headphones on and was singing loudly and proudly.  Every once in a while his singing was punctuate with a “That’s what I’m talking about” or something similar.  He had cleared a large perimeter around himself.  I could have equally avoided him, but he was heading in the same but opposite direction I was (meaning as he was coming down an aisle, I was coming up) and when I am grocery shopping I am on a mission and I am not going to let anything deter me.  If he was a child it would have been easy to smile at him and, through my acknowledgement, encourage him in his music appreciation.  When it is an adult I find it more difficult to know what to do.  I could have ignored that there was a man singing loudly and exclaiming his musical appreciation out loud but because I have been trying to embrace my own weirdnesses it seemed to be a wee bit hypocritical.  I smiled at him.  After two or three aisles of smiling at him as we passed it got a little awkward but I wasn’t about to engage him in conversation.  Avoidance of initiating conversation with people I don’t know is one of my own weirdnesses and I wasn’t about to let that one go for weirdness camaraderie.