People, in general, are weird.  And I've reached the point where I'm not surprised by any amount of weirdness.  Sure, it can be said that everybody's weird in some way or another, but I like to think there are at least a few people on earth who can be considered normal.  The rest are weird. 

Some people are known by others to be weird.  "Watch out for him; he does this weird thing."  I often won't notice that weird thing if I was meeting the person for the first time.  Sure, I notice it, but it's not even a big enough deal to make a point of it.  I met a guy a few weeks ago who kept doing his impression of Optimus Prime from Transformers.  I thought it was a bit odd for a guy in his mid-20s to be repeatedly (and poorly) imitating a voice from a movie largely geared towards children and teenagers (though it was awesome!), but I didn't dwell on it too long.  "Oh well, he's weird."  I was later told somebody should've warned me about him.  I said, "Don't worry, I'm not surprised by weird people." 

I think at least part of the reason I'm not surprised by weird people anymore is because two major parts of my life are overrun by weird people.  First, I'm an engineer.  By definition, there's no such thing as a normal engineer.  We're all weird.  We're socially awkward.  We smell.  We can't match our poorly-fitting clothes.  We walk funny.  We talk funny.  If you think you know an engineer who isn't weird, that person is either (a) a fake engineer who will later in life turn out to be a manager, or (b) a real engineer who's good at hiding his/her weirdness.  Watch this person closely, their true colors will show eventually. 

Second, I'm a Christian.  This is at least slightly mean, but it's completely and entirely true:  The Christian church attracts and encourages weird people.  On a deeper level, that's part of the appeal:  There's hardly a place on the planet a weird person can go and be totally and completely accepted, without the need to put on a facade or act a certain way.  Because of this radical acceptance, weird people are encouraged to be even weirder, and new weird people show up every day. 

Weirdness might be a mean word for all this, so let's call it oddness.  If we assume Joe Smith is the ideal person, capable of social interaction, exhibiting no accent, having good manners, and working a 9-5 job, oddness would be his opposite.  So whether you have a stutter, a limp, a birth mark, an annoying habit, one leg that's shorter than the other, an unevenness in the way your hair grows, asthma, shifty eyes, trouble holding a conversation, or an irrational fear, you're odd.  But in the end, if everyone is odd in some way or another, the only really odd people are the normal ones. #psychology