I stink at average things. Things that average people seem to master quickly like conversational english, holding a pencil, or the proper way to operate an automobile don’t seem to absorb into my brain very quickly, if at all. Things that come naturally to the rest of the world, things that people call “common sense” don’t make sense to me. I function in a realm outside of common.

I blame the educational system.

I went to a Magnet School, which was a place for all of the little extra-commoners of the world to feed off of each other’s weirdness.  No one batted an eye when we had poetry readings in the lunchroom and existentialist English lectures of picking flowers and climbing trees. The cool kids in my school were the ones who collected the most Goosebumps books, had the lead solo in the showchoir concert, and who had the most gay friends.  I thought everyone’s school experience was just like mine.

Stupid magnet school. They should have taught  class called “Being normal” or “How to relate to dull people”. Einstein’s theory of relativity is no help to me when I am teaching people how to upload videos of their daughter’s Little Miss Helen Keller Festival beauty pageant. Not unless I can figure out a way to travel at the speed of light for a little while until all of the dullards of the world are selectively reduced due to overexposure of the Maury Povich Show. So far no luck.

Magnet school told me I was always supposed be special. I went to a special school for special kids with special talents, and I was destined for a special place in history. Nobody told me I was going to move to Northwest Alabama, get a average job behind a computer and spend all day relating to people who have never heard of musicals, think Thoreau is something you do with a baseball, and claim the coolest people they have met are the ones who can drink the most cans of Miller Lite and still write a coherent text message involving the words “roll” and “tide”. Artsy people are all atheists or gay or pot smokers or some horrible combination of the three, people who read anything other than Sports Illustrated or the Twilight Series (pronounced twah-lat) are probably communist, and the thought of stepping off of American soil makes them want to cry for their Maw-maw. I have no idea what to do with these people, but they seem to be the consensus on normal and average.

So how to I reconcile the life I thought I was supposed to have with the one I currently have? How to I maintain my specialness, while living and working as a stranger in a stranger land? Blog.

I am not really interesting enough to blog, and that is the part that scares me. I am using this as a prevention against becoming boring. As long as I have to live in Florence, Alabama, I will be forced to keep swimming against the colossal roll tide of average expectations for my life. People don’t get me. I don’t get them. And before I lose the  desire to even try to be special,  I have to broadcast what I am doing to other people, so tht I will have to stay on my  toes to keep growing, keep learning, and to resist becoming just another so-and-so. I am a special so-and-so, and if it takes me reporting this to other people as a reminder to myself, then so be it. Or should I say so-and-so be it.