Confrontation aids digestion…

Trying to fathom a 4-2 defeat over my fourth curry in little over a week, whilst arguing about student housing with my mum was probably not the best time to insist my sisters friends were weird. So ran the conversation over dinner with my family. It did have the result though of making me consider two things.

Firstly, how lucky I was to find a group of mates with whom I want to keep living, safe in the knowledge that any house we live in cannot possibly look worse than some of the ones we have witnessed this week. Whilst arguments are an increasingly common symptom of living with the same people for two years, they only serve to make you realise what you have got. For me, that is like minded (mostly) people who enjoy the same things as me and are concerned about the same sorts of issues, although, in the case of politics, my privately educated backside disagrees on some issues with one certain housemate who is a firm advocate of Labourite principles, and can convincingly argue her way into and out of a paper bag. Armed with a huge array of statistics, her ‘facts’ only serve to show to me how little I actually know about a lot.

Secondly, I became aware, as I nibbled on yet another naan bread, that weirdness is something entirely subjective. My definition of weird differs greatly from my sisters definition for example. I unconvincingly tried to maintain that to be weird was to be outside of societies norms, but I was painfully aware that such an argument held little or no credibility. Consequently, the rather ill-considered slur on my sisters friends aside, I became aware of my own peculiarities. And those of others. Specifically my housemates. All of them are ‘weird’ in some way or other, if judged by the poorly considered definition outlined above. And that’s great. It is great news that nobody is normal. It is a marvellous thing that every human being is unique, and it prevents the view which I had expressed to me recently which suggested that everyone is the same, going through the same basic patterns of life until the day they die. If, by this logic, we are all the same, I could, in theory, create work of similar quality to Van Gogh, or Tchaikovsky. Instead, reality seems that no-one is the same. There is a basic framework to the human being (eat, sleep, breath, breed) but outside of that, life is one big mystery, ready to be lived and enjoyed. For me this happens when I am with the people I care about the most. This is no longer just my family (despite the frustrations), but my friends too. I will probably stop here before I begin to sound too much like a lost cause.

The nett result of dinner was that I suddenly really appreciated all the ‘weird’ people I know. I still couldn’t work out how my team had lost 4-2 though.