Weirdness Is Relative

So, I realize that it's been a while since my initial blog posting sent me skyrocketing into the ranks of Almost Entirely Unknown Blogger, and I know that my negligence to post a follow-up pondering session could threaten my title exponentially (the 'almost' is in danger of being removed). However, I refuse to become one of those bloggers with actual subscribers and no real muse, so I decided to wait until inspiration struck. Tonight, it did.

I was out on a date with my boyfriend, and we had gone to one of our usual haunts; the bookstore. Oftentimes, when at the bookstore, we entertain ourselves with many intriguing finds. Not all of the books, cds, movies, and other various products are anything we would ever even consider buying, but many of them can be valued for their quirkiness and the inspiration (or lackthereof) behind them. Tonight, however, it wasn't just the products that struck us as odd, and we had a pretty good time observing the people around us as well.

The first stranger to pique my interest was a teenage boy about our own age. Dressed in your usual t-shirt and jeans ensemble, nothing about him would have caught my eye at all if it weren't for his behavior. The moment we came into view, he glanced jerkily at us, then returned his gaze to the book he was hunched over. We continued to walk past, moving at a relatively leisurely pace as we had all evening to kill and weren't really there for any predetermined purpose other than to be together. However, his eyes darted back to us at least once more, as well as to the people on the other side of the aisle that he was in. Odd though it may have seemed, one look at his reading choice explained his questionable behavior perfectly. The black and yellow volume that he had been studying was opened, its paperback cover drooping, but not enough for me to miss the title. Hacking For Dummies. Sounds like some kid with a need for excitement and a Zero Cool complex decided that the best way to research his newfound hobby was to go to the local bookstore, where they have instructional manuals on absolutely everything! While he was not wrong in his estimation of the variety of texts you can find there, he obviously thought he was doing something much more incriminating than he really was, as he was apparently expecting someone to come by and arrest him on the spot. Certainly says a lot for his intentions, or his experience.

The other individual whose quirkiness particularly seemed to stand out to us had much less motivation for his actions; at least, as far as we could derive from what we saw. We came across him standing in front of the manga section when my boyfriend wanted to get the next installment in one of the series that he is collecting. He seemed perfectly normal at first, some random guy talking slightly louder than normal for a bookstore, although it was understandable since the people he appeared to be talking to were a few feet away. It wasn't until the others started to wander farther off down the aisle that I realized that they weren't with him, and he didn't appear to be wearing a headset; at least, not one that I could see. Upon our approach, he had moved well out of the way of the manga that we were looking at, but although there was all the room in the world, when my boyfriend reached out to draw one of the little paperbacks off of the shelf, the man literally jumped to his left, a completely unnecessary and dramatic dodge.

Of course, these occurances got the two of us talking about the weirdness of some of the people that were out and about this evening. However, after a few minutes of thinking, I came to the realization that anyone who had been following us around for the day would have come to the same conclusion about us. Two teenagers who could spend hours wandering around the bookstore, looking at things that in all rights shouldn't (and sometimes didn't) interest us. A couple who would stand there for five minutes trying to decide how to tell which mushrooms in a field guide were poisonous, only to put it back and move on the moment we decyphered it. People who would go sit on the floor in the middle of a random vacant aisle to look at stuff rather than sit on the empty halves of the benches strewn about the place. I won't even go into the oddities that they would have heard had they eavesdropped on our conversations. Either way, it is a prime example of how beauty (and weirdness as well) is in the eyes of the beholder, and makes you sincerely wonder whether anyone in this world truly is weird, or more to the point, whether anyone in this world truly is normal.