What is weird?

It's a question I've been chewing over in my brain for a while now, and so far I've been unable to find a satisfactory answer. In fact some people might think it’s weird that I've spent so much time mulling over this issue, rather than pondering more meaningful things in life such as Tom Cruise's love life and Britney's swollen stomach. But more of that later.

So we all know weird when we see it, right? Weird is… well… ummmm...it's. Hmmm. Well, it's just weird, right? When you see it, you know it. It's the guy on the bus with the glass eye who jumps up at every stop and launches into a verse of "Jive Talking". It's the woman who quit her well paying job to open up a squirrel farm in Dubai. It's the neighbor who mows his lawn dressed as Stan Laurel, while catapulting pickled onions at low-flying Robins. It's...it's all of these things, and more.

Or is it?

Ok, so we're narrowing the field down a little bit. Something that's supernatural, strikingly odd or relates to fate can be considered "weird". But that still doesn't sit right with me, and here's why - apples.

I like to eat my apple by slowly biting a path-like trail down the center of the spherical fruit, and then swooping back around again to finish off each half. But this time...and this is the killer...i'll bite up and down in a zig-zag fashion until all the shiny green (or red, depending on the time of year) skin has been devoured. I then switch strategy again, and start tearing off the sweet flesh in a somewhat erratic horizontal sweep, with my front incisors pumping up and down like a sugar addicted woodpecker with a nervous condition.

I know you're probably not THAT interested in my fruit eating techniques (and if you were, would that make you weird?), but stick with me...I'm going somewhere with this.

A good friend of mine once watched me polish off a Granny Smith, and his first reaction was "You're SO weird". At first I didn't know what he was talking about, but then it hit me. We all do things different ways. We all have our little quirks, and our habits that we think are perfectly normal but others...well others would be quick to have you committed to the nearest asylum.

So the answer to our question, "What is Weird", is this. We are. Everyone is. People are a weird species. It must be in our genes. Come to think of it, genes themselves are weird. After all, it's hardly normal for something to start producing copies of itself out of thin air – but that's exactly what genes do. So if the very building blocks of life are weird, then humans don't stand a chance.

Weirdness is a purely subjective thing, and in this blog I'll be subjecting you to things that I think are odd, bizarre, peculiar, wacky, zany, outlandish, eccentric, weird and wonderful, astonishing, perplexing, unexpected, remarkable, alien, mysterious, different, novel, eerie, creepy and unusual. And I won't mention Tom Cruise once.

Now how weird is that?