Category Archives: The Ones Where I Try To Give Advice

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Normal is the New Weird

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Today in my psychology class we watched the movie Stand By Me. I’m kind of a sucker for movies about relationships – father and son relationships, brother relationships, and friendships. So Stand By Me, as a movie about four preteen friends, is kind of right up my alley.

There’s this scene in Stand By Me where cool-kid and group-leader Chris is talking to artsy intelligent-kid and narrator Gordon. Gordon asks Chris if he is weird, and Chris says “definitely” in jest. But Gordon keeps pestering him, and finally Chris says, “Yeah, but so what? Everybody’s weird.”

The delivery of this scene, like every scene in Stand By Me is perfect. And so, even though it seems like a cliche, it comes across as profound.

But I was thinking, even though this idea is kind of cliche, we never really think about its implications. If everybody is weird, then weird is normal. And if weird is normal, then everybody is normal. So it kind of makes just as much sense to say that “everybody’s normal” as it does to say “everybody’s weird.” But no one ever says that everybody’s normal.

I think we make up weird. It’s a narrative that we decide to use to self-gratify or to help our world-view. If we can label other things as weird or our own behavior as weird, it creates a gap between those things and behaviors and the “normal” world.

I knew this girl once who described herself as weird. It was something she talked about a lot. But to me, she was no more weird than the rest of the world, but I found it difficult to relate to her simply because she believed she was weird. I think sometimes we assume that the world is normal and we are weird. But it’s actually that self-talk that isolates us from others. Not our perceived weirdness.

What makes you weird/normal?

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“What’d I Say” About Trying to Force Things

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I wrote a post a while back about listening to jazz while I do work. Recently, I fast forwarded to listening to 1950s R&B, and I think that was a marvelous decision. Ray Charles has been one of my go-to’s

Ray has this one song called “What’d I Say.” It’s almost a six minute song and Ray wrote it by improvisation at a show one night, and it quickly became a crowd favorite. It became so popular that he made his producers record it.

The problem was that at the time, singles didn’t really go over three minutes. In the dramatized cinematographic version of Ray Charles’s life, the producers threaten to cut out a verse or two. I don’t know if that’s true. But I imagine something like that is. We always want to put new things into the mold of old things.

Ray and the studio came to a compromise – they would record the whole song, but they would split it up into an A-side and a B-side. While that worked out, I suppose, the entire six minute song is really worth listening to all the way through.

And the song deserves a full listen. It almost brought on the genre of soul all by itself.

The point of all of this is to say two things.

1) We should probably stop trying to make new things like old things. New things would be more successful if we let them be new.

2) Sometimes, though, even when we mess up and think that new things need to be like old things, magic still happens.

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A Story About a Bagel from Which You Can Draw Your Own Moral

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The other day, I burnt my morning bagel.

When I moved into my apartment a couple of months ago, I brought along this pretty janky toaster. It’s old school. Back then, when I had just moved in, I burnt things regularly. There was a learning curve. I had to learn the proper settings and techniques to make my bagels, Pop-tarts and English muffins the perfect golden brown.

Back then, I didn’t mind burning things so much. It meant that I was learning. I was getting better at the whole toasting business. I was on my way to a post-burnt society.

The other day, I burnt my morning bagel.

I was devastated. This burnt bagel served no purpose! I knew the mistake I had made. I couldn’t really learn from it. It was a lesson I had already learned. My biggest regret was not taking a picture of it before I threw it away so I could post it here.

I begrudgingly put another bagel in the toaster. And I watched over it diligently, not wanting to make the same useless mistake twice.

The other day, I made the most perfect bagel ever.