Wonderbringers Newsletter with Monica Parker
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Hello wonderseekers!
Thanks for the kind messages this past week. Surgery went well, but I am still unable to wear contacts, so editing a video is a bit too much for me. With apologies, this week, a musing on oddity.
Oddballs
Yesterday was International Day of Friendship, and I was going to do something on friendship, but I was so taken by the craze surrounding Stephen Nedoroscik, aka “The Pommel Horse Nerd,” that it got me thinking about the power of being an oddball.
Last week, I shared how I feel a bit like an oddball and had so many people, in return, share the ways they are a bit odd but embrace it, nonetheless. We grow up in many ways being told that odd is good. One of my favorite books growing up was Madeline. She was a stroppy little thing who stood out for the wrong reasons and yet she thrived. Another fave was Harriet the Spy. Again, a cheeky nerd who didn’t fit in but found a way to harness her oddness to be socially embraced.
We’re actually fed a steady diet of “weird is good,” and yet society hasn’t really caught up, has it? Weird kids are still regularly ostracised and bullied. And I guess by understanding ingrouping and outgrouping, we can see why that is. It’s human nature to reject people who seem different, and yet who is the arbiter of “normal” vs “weird”?
I wasn’t popular in school, but I was known and liked well enough. We had a TV station at our school that broadcast a show every morning, and I was a presenter, so everyone knew who I was, and I was inoffensive enough not to draw too much negative attention. I didn’t suffer bullying, but I definitely wasn’t invited to the parties either. A pleasant hinterland in which to spend my teen years.
The last summer before going to college, my mother left for a month to visit my brother, who was teaching English in China. This was before email and text messages, an era when cellphones were the size of briefcases, and the post we received from my brother in Changchun was redacted. So given that regular communication with China would be impossible, she pretty much left me to my own devices with instructions not to burn the house down. (Ah, the freedoms of the early '90s.)
I told her before she left that I wanted to throw a party, and my mom agreed that would be fine so long as I didn’t let anyone drive drunk and I informed the neighbors. (Ah, the freedoms of the early '90s.) Keep in mind that I was a“good kid.” Odd, but good. (My only detentions in school were for parking in the teacher’s lot — it was closer to the TV studio I had to be at for 7:00am every morning.) So she and I both knew this would be a small, civilized, nerdly gathering and nothing more.
So, I invited a few people.
Who invited a few people.
Who… well you know how it goes. It turned into a rager.
What seemed like about 100 people from the graduating class rocked up. Someone’s older brother brought kegs. The gorgeous French exchange student came and added an air of continental charm to the festivities. I saw (but didn’t smoke) cannabis for the first time. (“It’s good. You can tell by the red hairs,” I was earnestly informed.) Somebody had sex in my parent's bed. (Sorry, Mom, if you’re reading this — not sure I ever told you that.) The police came — and left with a warning to “be careful.” (Ah, the freedoms of the early '90s.) And despite the mayhem, with the exception of some slight damage to the locked drinks cabinet from some overzealous party guests, it went without a hitch. I was living inside my very own John Hughes film.
But what struck me was a throwaway comment a very popular girl made to me as she was heading home. She said, “If you’d ever had a party like this earlier, you’d have been popular.” I didn’t really know what to make of that. Because I was still the weird girl with wonky eyes who liked classical music, watched PBS, and used big words people only learned for the SAT exam. It made me realize the veneer of popularity was so shallow. Not that the popular kids were shallow —they no doubt had oddities and insecurities and tales of being “otherized” — but it made me realize that the notion of fitting in or being lauded or being included as part of “the norm” is so fickle. So transitory.
Would I have wanted to be popular? I don’t think so. I liked my Island of Misfit Toys friends. They were my tribe. They made me who I was — who I am. I was used to — found comfort in — being a bit different. For me, the party was almost cosplaying popular high schoolers, but it was a place I wanted to visit, not live in.
So back to our Pommell Horse Nerd. What if he had sucked when he got up on the horse? Would people be embracing his nerdiness? Likely not, but I imagine the sting he would have felt at being rejected from that failure would not hurt as much as someone who had spent their life building their entire personality around being liked and accepted. It would be buffered by his weirdness. He would lick his wounds, go back to solving Rubik’s Cubes in sub-ten minutes, and try again.
And maybe that is the lesson in embracing our oddities. We oddballs build a resiliency against the world’s expectations of us, so if we have a moment where we fit into the bigger, “popular,” social ecosystem, we can enjoy it as a visitor, but not a resident. And when our tourist visa for popularity expires, we know we have a home with our weird citizenry to return to. To regale them with tales of that wild time of belonging to the colony of the cool kids. But knowing that the motherland of misfits and oddballs is our soft place to fall. Our dominion to be authentically odd and to grow in our own individual flavor of weirdness.
With that platitude, I guess that leaves us in a good place to pick up on the concept of friendship next week. Until then…
With wonder,
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