In the Solemn Defence of All Things Weird

Just imagine this for a moment. You're standing at a bus stop as the bus you're waiting for approaches. You board the bus, pay your bus fare and walk in to find your seat. Then suddenly you notice a guy casually doing a handstand against the side of the bus with the most deadpan look on his face. What are your most immediate thoughts of the person?

Some of the more open people would probably just think 'Cool' and move on with their lives without anything more than an impressed eyebrow raise. The slightly less open people may probably think 'Okay...', look confused for a moment but still continue on their path to find their seat without any negative impression of said person.

Now we look at people who are even less open and that is where things start getting ugly. Thoughts like 'freak', 'retard', 'crazy person' and maybe even 'mental hospital escapee' start popping up. Muttering "siao" not-so-under their breath or even blatantly just shouting it the person. Making terrible jokes about the person, thinking they're out of hearing range when really they are. And then suddenly, just because he's doing a handstand in a public bus, he becomes a bad person. It may not be entirely obvious but he has just labelled and socially outcasted just because he stood out.

I'd pose a question to everyone. What exactly is wrong with being weird, being different? I'll qualify my question a little bit. People who are weird in the sense that they hit on random people, invade people's personal space and stuff like that, those examples I concede are cases where it's wrong to be that weird but by no means can we pigeonhole ALL weird people with the above cases of weird people. Just because weird people are a little more difficult to understand doesn't automatically make all weird people closet perverts and axe murderers.

Now why exactly am I defending weird people? Well for starters I'd be lying terrible if I said that I wasn't the least bit weird but the biggest reason why I defend weird people is because they are often times the most interesting group of people I know. Weird people tend to have more character depth than conforming individuals who just end up being carbon copies of the next guy. I mean, the last adjective you would use to describe a weird person is boring. Take the time to talk to a 'weird' person and leave your mind wide open and you'd know this too.

I'll take an example of a conversation I had about doomsday. My friend said that if humanity was about to go extinct (for argument's sake we said that this was a confirmed issue), she'd want to quickly kill herself before everyone else died so that when she went to Hell (and face it, most of us probably will too) she'd be able to better picks on things like land and accommodation. Furthermore, she'd be able to hoard goods at cheap prices since supply would great outnumber demand and possibly make a killing by selling her hoarded goods back to the rest of mankind once doomsday hits. Now do I agree with anything she said? To be honest not really. Did I find it the least bit logical? If I accepted the wild premise that Heaven and Hell are just extensions of the real world, then her logic is technically sound. Then again, I never did accept her premise so by extension, I didn't accept her logic either. Did I find that doomsday discussion interesting? Heck yeah.

And that is why I like mingling with 'weird' people. I suppose all I wanted to say is that we should just have a more open mind to different people and take life a little less critically when we don't need to be critical. We're all human and we all have limits to our comfort zones but open up your comfort zones a little bit and you might just let in a brilliant new way to see the world you thought you knew.