What is “Weird?”
In a postmodern, highly advanced (and decadent) Western society, asking the question: “What is weird?” is somewhat akin to a Roman governor of Palestine in 33 AD asking, “What is Truth?” To say that any definition of “weird” is highly subjective is a gross understatement. But yes, I am “weird.”
Allow me to tell you about someone else I knew who was “weird” by the subjective, ever-changing standards of our time: Lawrence, my grandmother’s 6th husband.
From the 1940s through the 1980s, Lawrence owned one of the largest dairy farms in Arizona. He had been a dairy farmer his entire life going back to his days in the early 1900s when he was just a farmhand.
When Lawrence married my grandmother, he had his own bedroom. They did not sleep together; he was already an old man by the time he married my grandmother. When visitors saw Lawrence’s bedroom, many were shocked and perplexed. There were NO photos of friends or family members. No photos of humans whatsoever. However, his walls were adorned with professional painted portraits of cows. Yes, cows, dairy cows of all different types. There they were! Cows, looking solemn, dignified, and adored in their professional portraits. Oil paintings of farm animals. Dairy cows, staring back at you from their places of veneration adorning the walls of Lawrence’s bedroom.
When my grandmother was asked about this “weirdness” (as she often was in those days) her answer was surprisingly frank and to the logical point at hand.
“Lawrence has spent his entire life on dairy farms among dairy cows. They have always been a HUGE part of his life going back to the 1910s when he was a farmhand driving tractors and buckboards. Cows and dairy farms and farm animals ARE HIS LIFE. Why would he have pictures/portraits of anything (or anyone) else in his bedroom?”
Yes, exactly.
So perhaps dear reader, my “weirdness” relating to diapers and diapering becomes more understandable.
Yes, I am odd, weird. I am an enigma, wrapped in a riddle, resting in a metaphor.
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