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Something on my Mind: Weirdness and Personal Responsibility
Okay, tonight I ramble on something bo-ooooor-ING. Just something on my mind:
I was thinking about how we call someone or something "weird" - "You're weird!", we might say, either lovingly or dismissively, either-or, but both amount to the same thing, viz. inferring that someone is outside the "norm", is plainly not normal, and/or that they display unnatural or unique and therefore inexplicable qualities. More often than not, it's slang-y speak to say you admire someone's eccentricities (the positive version), or are disgusted or unnerved by them(the negative).
But charmed or pissed off, it's a complete misnomer: weird is relative.
We all "know" this, we "get" relativity and in public we'd claim to the very heavens that we were thoroughly invested in keeping an open mind due to it. Yet so many little things keep minds locked and bolted tight. So many seemingly insignificant customary ways of speaking and therefore thinking that refuse to allow us a greater view of reality, and not even beyond our own head, but also the full view within our own head.
"You're weird", due to weirdness being relative, is a one-sided way of saying: "You've done something beyond my own experience and understanding of things." Even when said out of love or simple enjoyment of the "weirdness", it's a turn of phrase that allows someone's normal, if perhaps far from ubiquitous, way of being become something impossible, which is unnatural. Anything that exists is natural, as it does exist, therefore it fits within the framework of nature and what the universe finds acceptable. WE may not understand it, but the way we speak is forever to shift blame away from ourselves and onto others. THEY are the ones that "are" a certain way, even though, due to relativity, we must forever "be" a certain way as well, and so our translation of another's behavior is ever telling of ourselves.
So just please, remember that the more intelligent you are, the more understanding, empathetic, and sympathetic toward others and their behaviors you'll be. It's perfectly awesome to be held rapt by another, but try to realize that we're ALL very, very understandable, normal, and everyday. Maybe not to each other, but since we all ARE these things, perhaps we should be, perhaps we should all get over ourselves and agree that humankind in all our variety is effortless to understand and accept. No more racism, no more bigotry, no more inequality (not even the inequality that benefits the non-majority), no more quibbling over whether any one sub-culture of religion, culture, sexuality, gender, economic class, or aethetic is different and has rights. The details are irrelevant. If you're too stubborn and willfully unenlightened that you must refuse someone else a place in your life as "understandable and normal", then please, consider that someone else's "weirdness" is your personal responsibility.
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