Ordinary

My biggest fear is that I am ordinary. Christ, even in that so-called confession I sound banal. Who isn’t afraid of being ordinary? Exciting, interesting people, that’s who. It’s all of us boring people who sit around worrying about how boring we are.

I was supposed to be, well, extraordinary. Not even supposed to be, but I WAS. An extraordinary child, and extraordinary student. I had extraordinary hair. I have this vague memory of a song sung by the land of make-believe puppets on Mr. Rogers that made use of the word play of ordinary / extra ordinary / extraordinary. Even as a pre-schooler I loved the word play but apparently failed to absorb the message.

For awhile, all I wanted to be was ordinary. When I was about twelve, I came home and announced that I didn’t want to get A’s anymore, that I wanted to get C’s like everyone else. My parents were mortified and probably couldn’t agree on whether I’d benefit more from pyschotherapy or from boarding school. But I was serious. I was tired of the relentless teasing, of being different. Of being accused of being a goody two shoes and having teachers like me no matter what I did. At heart, I was less of a goody two shoes than half the people accusing me, but I wasn’t cool enough for anyone to care.

I managed it for awhile. Nothing horrendous enough to make a good story, but I did spend junior high with a tough crowd. Got a few C’s and a D. Became sexually rebellious. But the burnouts I idolized were pretty boring. And they were assholes, too. They found stupid gross out racist dead baby jokes amusing but they didn’t get the shaggy dog stories I’d learned from my father. They didn’t get New Yorker cartoons, which I’d been giggling at since I taught myself to read. They didn’t even get the Matt Groening comics that I got in trouble for bringing to class. So I went back to my nerdy friends and lived happily ever after.

Except that twenty years later, I’m just another grown up nerd. Otherwise known as gainfully employed. Everyone I know has the same stories. Some people even have some gruesome family drama thrown in; the worst thing that happened in my house was cartoon violence. My father liked to threaten my mother with a water gun. She might have preferred a real one, which as a pacifist he’d be unlikely to actually fire—there was nothing she hated more than water on her face. She never learned to swim and showered with a washcloth over her eyes. The kind of details that are weird enough to be extraordinarily normal.

In my twenties, I thought I had some interesting stories to tell. Before I realized that every middle class smarty pants went backpacking in Europe and felt transformed by it and had crazy sexual adventures with itinerant musicians. Hell, nowadays kids backpack through southeast asia and Africa and roll their eyes at how people once thought Europe was eye-opening. Boring.

Tattoos? Grandmas compliment mine and tell me about the ones they just got. Piercings? The ones I still have look ridiculous on my flabby body. Shaved head? It grew back. Polyamory? Not what it was cracked up to be. Being really fucking smart? If I were really as fucking smart as I thought I was, I’d have done something extraordinary by now. I’m only smart enough that no one wants to play board games with me, and that I'm constantly aggravated by people who aren’t so smart--but not smart enough to write a novel or invent something useful or win a nobel prize. I can’t even win an ignoble prize. The best I do is the occasional random drawing at the office Christmas party.

Still, maybe there’s hope. Maybe I’ll become famous for being ordinary, be an inspiration to ordinary people everywh—shit! Another story that sounds way too familiar.