We're all freak shows

I’m going to a church women’s retreat this weekend.

That sounds bad. I mean, I don’t like church women’s retreats on principle. A bunch of women, listening to a speaker tell them how they can improve their devotions or keep their husbands happy or apply makeup properly or make crafts from household items.

Yuck. Definitely not my thing.

But this is not that kind of retreat. It’s just a bunch of cool women I go to church with hanging out for a day and a half. Very little schedule, and no guest speaker. Just eating and talking . . . and I can handle that.

Past retreats have had NO schedule, but this retreat has a little bit of a schedule, and the plan is to write a 71-word essay to share on a time you “did or didn’t feel odd.” I think this is a fun topic, because I’ve been thinking about it lately.

The thing is, I feel odd most of the time. At work, especially, but in plenty of other social situations. I feel like the weird one, the one that doesn’t fit in. And that’s not unusual, I don’t think. Lots of people feel odd. And I like the reasons I’m odd, for the most part, but it gets tiresome, too. And that’s why feeling not-odd is such a rarity and a pleasure. So I think I should probably write about feeling not-odd, just because it doesn’t happen all that often.

Here’s what I started:

Friends are the people who make you feel “not-odd.” Or at least not-so-odd. Because if there’s two of you who feel the same way, well, then you’re not alone. Maybe that’s how we find our good friends . . . they’re the people who, when we’re with them, don’t make us feel too odd.

I don’t feel odd when I’m talking to Joy about God and church and people we know. She gets it. I don’t feel odd when Mike and I invent a network-marketing cereal company and get all excited about it for ten minutes, or argue about whether a Killer Asteroid or a military coup is more likely in the next 100 years. I don’t feel odd when Tim and I discuss the relative merits of Cat Stevens songs (or any song, for that matter), or if I know an obscure fact when we play trivia. I don’t feel odd when I read something in a blog that could’ve been written by me (like this line from one of Sara’s recent posts: “It's incomprehensible to me now that I could have been upset that a boy I had never met nor talked to didn't meet my gaze and fall in love instantly.” See, I could’ve written that.)

Crap, I’m already at 225 words. I’m going to have to cut that down. Seventy-one words isn’t enough to say anything . . . except maybe to advertise for a network-marketing cereal company.