The Crazy Lady

I often refer to myself as "The Crazy Lady", and with good reason as you will soon discover. I am a walking contradiction in many ways. I Love people, I mean really, I do Love everybody. But I also hate people. Well maybe hate is a little strong, I only really Hate one person on this planet, I just dislike the rest of you, sometimes intensely. So you can probably see where this might tend to make a person a little bit loony. Especially when that person is an emotionally charged individual with rampant hormonal mood swings that could take down an elephant.

And yet this is just a small part of what makes me crazy. I guess it all really started about the time puberty hit. I was a tad bit strange as a child, but crazy came with the hormones. I was raised in a conservative middle class family (my parents just celebrated their 56th wedding anniversary last week), but I never really felt like I belonged there. Even as a kid I knew I was different from them, but I didn't know why or how, until I met George.

When I was a hitting Junior High the other girls were all into movie stars and musicians. They had posters in their rooms of this actor or that singer, some of them even joined the fan clubs and wrote letters to their favorites stars. I could never get into all of that. I have no interest in the lives of the rich and famous. I have never read the tabloids or watched the TV shows about celebrity happenings, I don't care. Those people are not relevant to my life. They are not "real" people to me, its not like I am going to run into them at the grocery store or go to dinner with them. They are entertainers. I might like their movies or their music, but who they are and how they spend their time just isn't important to me. There are very few famous people who have ever had an influence on my life in any measurable way, and then there was George.

George is one of my mentors in life. George taught me to think about things in ways I never thought about them before. George opened my mind and through his words I learned about myself and the world around me, learned to see that their was far more to life than I had ever imagined. My love of words came, at least in part, from George. I was probably 12 when I met George, around the same time I started drinking and smoking, not sure which came first, but they were probably all related. My introduction to George came from an album I stole from one of my brothers. The album was "Class Clown" and while I wouldn't say it "changed my life" I would say it had a major impact on who I am today. George, and "Weird" Al (who also played a major role in my formative years), were probably the most important male role models I had outside of my family. Which, in retrospect, probably explains a lot.

I am NOT saying that George or "Weird" Al MADE me crazy. Absolutely not. They allowed me to be crazy. From my perspective, they gave me permission to be ... myself. No one had EVER done that before. My family was always big on "what will the neighbors think", and my public school, like all public schools, was all about conforming. No one had ever told me it was okay to be different, I had been taught that being different was bad. I knew I was different, so therefore I must be bad. So, I grew up with the same conflict I think most people face, conform or be bad. Then George and Al told me that "bad" was not a bad thing. Different was okay, it might be difficult to be different, but it was NOT bad. Damn, what a novel freaking concept!

So I learned not to care so much about what other people think, and to just live my life for me. I am who I am, and who I am is a Crazy Lady. I love the gaudy, the crazy, the different. I have tried to teach my children that being different is not only okay, it is preferable. I like being me, I enjoy my company, I even agree with most of the things I think. My life may not be what anyone else would dream of having, buy I enjoy it immensely and there is very little I would change even if I could. So Love me or don't, that's your choice, either way I will be me because that's all I have ever wanted to be.