What is weird

I have been watching Black's Books recently.  It is a British comedy about a drunken, crazy bookstore owner and his friends.  They get up to all kinds of wacky hijinks that generally start off with 'so I drank way, way too much wine...'  I found it funny because in some ways the lives of these characters are so absolutely nuts as sitcom character's lives tend to be and they make my life look fairly boring in a lot of respects.  I don't often take a job at a burger joint just so I will have a warm, dry place to spend the night because I locked myself out of my home, for example.  Nor do I end up at friend's houses trying to figure out what horrible thing I did during a drunken stupor at the party the previous evening.  I just don't have that level of bizarre and interesting going on.

Then I got to wondering if maybe I was looking at it all backwards.  Clearly the lives of these characters are very different from my own but I think they are actually closer to the norm in a lot of ways than I am.  (Well, the burger joint story probably isn't.)  I have issues with getting into confrontations with authority figures who can't deal with the fact that I go about barefoot everywhere.  Not a lot of people have that issue.  I get into fights on the internet about the proper way to build an excel simulator for a Retribution Paladin in World of Warcraft.  This is not a thing most people can relate to.  I spend a lot of time arguing about the ethics of various Hanabi strategies and whether or not they make winning the game too easy.  Ethical arguments about cooperative game conventions are *fascinating* by the way.  Also if you play games you should play Hanabi.  It is phenomenal.  (And these are just the weird things I am telling you about... imagine what the rest of my life is like!)

Despite the fact that the characters in Black's Books drink way too much and do completely ludicrous things I think their lives are actually a lot closer to the norm than mine.  Figuring out exactly what stupid thing you did during an alcoholic haze just isn't that weird after all, not next to refusing to wear shoes.  It makes me feel a little bit weird to realize that even though sitcom characters in a ludicrous comedy are really weird I am even weirder than them.  Granted I like being weird and I have no particular interest in trying to be normal and a distinct distaste for trying to *appear* normal but somehow being weirder than those buffoons is a bit unnerving.